it_isn't_about_you tender square even though it’s been seven years since we were together, every once in a while, i still creep my ex’s instagram. he’s kept his profile public all these years, which is how i’m able to look without an account. about a year after we separated, he regramed a post from the sketchbook project, a community-based library in brooklyn that had featured the cover of a journal he’d done called, “a honeymoon for one: or how my wife left me for a musician four weeks before my thirtieth birthday.” it was the first i’d ever heard about it. the sudden visibility of our private life brought back all the feelings of shame i’d been trying to work my way through. in the comments on his feed, i noticed that one of our former coworkers, who hadn’t realized we were no longer together, had written, “are you for real?! i want to punch her in the face!” * it’s true. i did leave him a month before we were set to go on our honeymoon and a month before his birthday. we had been married for nearly four years and had been saving all that time for a big trip to europe he’d always wanted to go on. we planned to go to new york and then fly over to iceland for the first week, before touring around england for the second week. i didn’t find out until later that he had organized a surprise two-day stop in paris, so we could place a lock on the pont des arts with our names on it. the nearer the trip came on the calendar the more i felt like i was about to sail off the edge of the world—what was to become of us after? all of our marriage had been about this moment—what would we aspire to when all this was said and done? * he used to say to me that he wished he’d played the field more before we’d gotten married. he used to tell our friends at parties that we wouldn’t have gotten hitched had we come from the same country. all of this was news to me. * brandon told me that the plane tickets were non-refundable and i believed him. so i said i’d pay back my half of everything since he was out that money, though it would take me time to come up with. for a while, i hemmed and hawed about actually continuing with the trip, as a final goodbye to us as a couple. but when i suggested this to michael, he—rightfully—flipped out. he said his analyst called me a little girl, “someone clearly not mature enough to be a woman.” he gave me an ultimatum and said either i went on that trip or we were together, there was no in-between. i chose michael. i called the airlines and sure enough, i was able to cancel my tickets and get a full refund without much of a penalty. brandon wasn’t pleased when i told him; i think he had lied about it as a way to convince me to take the trip, hoping that maybe we’d get back together again. money was still tight since i would not be contributing to the honeymoon budget like we'd intended, and i offered him what i could so he could have the overseas trip he’d always wanted, even though it was without me. as i was moving out of our apartment, i came across the packaging and receipts for a brand new macbook he bought before the trip without telling me, hidden in the back of his closet. * for years i wondered what he wrote about me in that sketchbook. while we were cordial up until the divorce was finalized, we have not spoken since that day at the courthouse when the judge dissolved our marriage. * i gave him my wedding bands to take with him for the honeymoon; he planned to bury them with his while hiking a trail in iceland, so the ground would hold them in a frozen suspension of what was and what would never be again. when he returned from the trip, he told me he didn’t end up going through with it. i have no idea what he’s done with the rings. * back in march, i noticed that brandon had a url in his instragram bio. i clicked on it and it took me to a spotify link for the brooklyn art library’s podcast. one of their recent episodes was titled “a honeymoon for one.” they had interviewed him about his sketchbook. it was so strange to hear his voice again after years of being without it. a lot of our life together came rushing back to me with the sound of his cadence and his phrasing. it was surreal. * during our final weeks together, before he left for the trip, he said to me, “i think this breakup has made me realize that i do want to have kids now.” he’s had a new partner for a few years, a red-headed woman with central european features named marianna. she’s in many of his instagram pictures, and they travel the world together along with her ten-year-old son. in every picture they look happy. in the podcast, he says that when he and marianna went to new york for the first time, he brought her to the brooklyn art library so she could read his journal, hold it in her hands, get a better understanding of what he went through before they met. * brandon has scrubbed all the earlier evidence of us from his instagram page: the pic of us from halloween where i was dressed as captain planet and he was steve zissou; photos of us with his dog zooey out on walks; multiple shots of me crashed out on the couch when we were supposed to be hanging out catching up on shows. erased. * his friend mary was the one who suggested that he get a journal from the sketchbook project for the solo honeymoon when they were hanging out in new york before his flight to iceland. brandon had gotten a journal before for his mother, who was a visual artist, so he was already familiar with how the process worked. he was initially hesitant, he revealed in the podcast, but started journaling as soon as he got on the plane. * the contents of the sketchbook surprised me; the podcast has a link to a scanned copy of every page. so much of it contains observations on beautiful girls in brandon’s orbit as he travels, girls he wants to fall head-over-heels for; he even takes some tindr dates in iceland. it is not at all what i expected. there’s a pro and cons list in there about me, the details of which are also eye-opening. for someone i spent nearly seven years with, the observations feel superficial to me, like maybe he didn’t really know me well at all. pro: “she has beautiful big brown eyes.” con: “i don’t like her hair when she cuts her bangs way too short.” pro: “she had the perfect breasts, they fit perfectly in my hands. a+” con: “she didn’t like to 69. who doesn’t like that???” (see to_shut_him_up, about a different boy, to find out why). * once, while we were separated, he met me at my office to bring a copy of our joint tax return from the previous year. we talked in the lobby for a half hour, catching up, and our conversation was friendly. he said he had been dating a girl but things weren’t going as great as he’d hoped because he “caught feelings.” and i remembered thinking to myself, why are people classifying having feelings as being something they need to get rid of like the flu? * the night that we got engaged i thought we were breaking up. i had been crying in my bed working up the nerve to tell him that i needed to leave windsor. the only reason i’d been staying was for him. i knew he wasn’t ready for marriage even though we’d talked about it; he said he wanted to wait until he was 27 and we were a couple years away from that still. when i told him about how much i’d been struggling, how much i’d been drinking and smoking pot and how much i wanted to stop, he said: “i guess this means we’re getting married then.” he didn’t even ask me. it was a complete 180 from where i thought the night was going. and because i still loved him, i went along with it. about a half hour after this reality sunk in for him, he had a panic attack in my bed. 210918 ... unhinged (i've never been married but pretty much every man i've ever broken up with who i actually had even a little bit of closure with i had the same thought 'he never really knew me'. the shallow level most people are willing to go to in romantic relationships these days is why i don't bother dating anymore. i've written about that whole 'catching feelings' thing somewhere here on red but my brain still isn't functioning well after the last week of work) 210918 ... unhinged the only man i ever came close to marrying decided to lay down the law with me when we got to the point of me moving back to milwaukee for us to stay together, get serious. he gave me a list of all kinds of things i wouldn't be allowed to do or was expected to do for him. all of which centered around my body. and he could not understand why his ultimatums upset me. we argued for months before i finally broke up with him. he didn't seem to understand why him telling me what to do with my body pissed me off so bad. 'it isn't about you. the only man on this planet that i allow to tell me what to do is my father. and i moved out of his house years ago.' 210918 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Multifaceted: that's the word that comes to mind. You can't say something has two sides just because there are two people involved. Different times reveal different sides and you capture that thoughtfully. That said, the ex sounds worse in the aftermath. I'd be pissed if someone posted potentially embarrassing details about a past relationship, details that could be traceable back to me. (Too easily embarrassed, too easily angered. Combine that? Embangered. Even if not bang-related.) 210918 ... e_o_i Okay, maybe the title is to show that the sketchbook didn't contain any identifiable details. Misreading between the lines. Solo Honeymoon is a great title, though, so I'm a bit upset it's marred by what registers to me as pettiness. ...I focus on weird things sometimes, but the bald fact remains that some people are better off apart, some relationships better broken. Doesn't necessarily make it easier. unhinged, ugh. I can't see how someone can ultimatum looks and body stuff. I mean, even the beloved blop can express preferences in a way that irritates at times. And it wasn't a huge deal, just him saying he likes it when I shave my legs in the summer, and why not do it more often? (Because I'm not going swimming regularly; because if I can get rid of one meaningless task, hopefully to increase the things I actually get done, I will.) But it wasn't that he thinks it's gross or messy if I don't, just that it looks feminine in a way he likes, and I get that: personally, I'm attracted to more feminine women too, but these days hair doesn't seem like a big deal. Maybe it's a reaction against how I made fun of a choir-member's hairy knees, and how I was conditioned to see it as the thing to do to be "more organized" (even though it's kind of the opposite because it takes up time). 210918 ... e_o_i Augh, I teach people about avoiding unclear phrasing. So what's with me apparently telling y'all that I was conditioned to see the act of making fun of hairy knees as an aspect of being more organized?? Sounds like dream logic: if you don't make fun of hairy knees? Not organized. 210918 ... unhinged one of the big points of contention was also how much i would be shaving my legs...he claimed i was somehow dishonest because i shave more in the summer and couldn't understand that there's not much point in the winter. i also prefer feminine women but have definitely had periods in my own life where i myself am more masculine. the requests about shaving and wearing high heeled shoes seemed superficial to me, and made me feel like the only thing that mattered to him was my body. i am hypersensitive to that with men for several reasons, from my history of sexual assault to the fact that at one point in my life i lost a lot of weight and noticed the difference in the way men reacted to me when i wasn't fat anymore. to me, the other person's body is actually the last thing i care about in a relationship. that's why these days i identify as queer instead of any kind of -sexual. i really could be satisfied with an emotionally intimate relationship without orgasms but maybe some cuddling and making out. the other thing that was a deal breaker for me was he said i wouldn't be able to smoke weed in his apartment. i never hid the fact that i smoked, back then I also smoked cigarettes too, and i use weed to self medicate my depression and serious chronic pain. not something i can really do without if i actually have to use my right arm. and the conspicuous possessive use of 'HIS' didn't seem to bode well for our future together to me either. he was a traditional conservative man. he wanted me to be a traditional woman, wanted kids. i think i fell in love with him because he was the exact opposite of the man i was with before him but i just knew after the months of fighting that basically amounted to his inability to accept me as i am that even if i did marry him, we wouldn't stay that way. i knew i would grow to resent him eventually. so for the second time in my life i broke up with him. (to this day, he is the last person i broke it off with; i usually stick around until the other person breaks it off.) i haven't talked to him in probably close to decade now but social media showed me at the beginning of the pandemic that he has a child now. that made me feel a little bittersweet because i knew he would be a good father and definitely didn't want to keep him from that. 210919 ... tender square i don’t know that i’ve gotten ultimatums about my body the way you have, unhinged and e_o_i, and i’m sorry that you’ve had to deal with that because it’s a really shitty thing to do to someone. i will say i know a lot of men from my past think that i tricked them with my sexual availability because i was more into sleeping with them when we first met, rather than later in our relationship. the thing i didn’t really understand about my desires from that time is that when you don’t fully trust someone, it shuts your whole sexual drive down. it took me a long time to realize that’s not a flaw or something that needs to be fixed; that’s a signal that you don’t think that person is worthy to share your fucking soul with. one of brandon’s comments in the journal under the cons column reads that i “*always* had a very low sex drive,” along with an illustration of me sleeping in bed while he was awake with a boner. lovely. while i typically don’t respond well to ultimatums—my first reaction to those is always anger—i actually needed michael to do that in this situation about the honeymoon trip. i was really stuck in this mindset of trying to please everyone; how could i keep good relations with brandon while also starting this new relationship with michael? it was an impossible task and i didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. the fact that michael cared enough to stand for something that was important to him showed me just how different he was from brandon; i needed michael’s strength in that moment because i hadn’t developed enough of it in myself. it’s one of michael’s best qualities as a man; he fights for what he values. i know this is entirely oxymoronic, but i tried to move through that affair ethically; after michael and i got together, i was not physical with brandon, even before i told him i was leaving. after i told brandon, we slept in separate rooms and there was nothing physical between us. i didn’t see going on the honeymoon as a “last chance” for us to have breakup sex; i didn’t want any of that. i thought we could take the trip as friends, but michael showed me how wrong i was, opening my eyes to the fact that brandon had ulterior motives. i sat with michael’s ultimatum for a few days, reflecting on where i was with everything (everyone was fucking with me at that time, more below); i knew i couldn’t say yes to michael just because he wanted me to—the answer had to come from me (and it did). everyone in my life thought i was crazy for leaving brandon, it was completely out of character for me. and in the lead-up and even after, my family projected a lot of shit on me. i recently came across an email from that time that i’d sent to michael about it, and there was so much i’d forgotten about; before michael and i got together, i had told my mom about what i thought was going on and she revealed to me that she almost had an affair on my father five years prior, but ultimately decided not to go through with it, warning me that i should steer the same path; my sister candi decided not to get back together with the father of her unborn child during that time because she said to me, “if you and brandon can’t make it work as a couple, how can i with dennis?”; my sister terri was concerned about my divorce because i was leaving brandon the same way she had left her common-law partner, bryan. the only person who didn’t judge me was my younger sister, brea. after brandon and i separated, we continued to converse for a while and i eventually had to put a stop to that too. i sent him an email saying i needed to protect the sanctity of my new relationship with michael, and that i recognized that was a hurtful thing to tell him considering i didn’t uphold those same values when we were married. my girlfriend theresa (who i’m no longer friends with) gave me an earful after that, telling me it wasn’t fair for me to hurt brandon like that, to cut off all contact, who the hell did i think i was? and decision was something that came from me directly, it was not one imposed upon me by anyone else; i realized that i needed to completely break from brandon so i could move from the past and into the future. and i knew he needed that too. 210919 ... tender square e_o_i: just realized i misread your post about shaved legs; rescinding my “shitty” comment :) 210919 ... unhinged any man who asks why a woman doesn't shave her legs more often clearly doesn't think about the difference in surface area between a male face and TWO female legs. there are more women here in seattle who don't shave at all. and the male obsession with hairless women is weird; young girls and porn stars are hairless. what exactly are you conveying to me when you tell me you want my body totally devoid of hair except for long flowing hair from the top of my head? i think for many men it's just a conditioned unexamined preference and also a side effect of the modern dating style full of expectation checklists. which is tiresome to me in general. but as someone who has been teased for being hairy for most of her life, it rankles at the very least. i have so many hairs all over my body that society expects me to remove that in my middle age i really find most of it offensive. especially the pubic hair thing that has really gotten out of control with the advent of internet porn. i removed all of my pubic hair once because a boyfriend asked me to and i HATED it. i was cold in places i didn't know i could be cold and my period was gross in new ways. so i have never done that again since and any man who would dump me over that isn't worth keeping around. sometimes when it comes to other things like overlapping relationships like you are talking about tender_square , ultimatums really are needed though. sometimes it's hard to end things and one of the two (or three) people involved has to set a boundary. or like when the man i almost married said he didn't want me talking to any of my exes. i could deal with that because it was a matter of respect and i try really hard to be respectful of other humans. but my body, how i deal with my hair, makeup, clothes...nope. not tolerating that. if the other person's preferences matter that much to them that they would leave me over the length of any of my body hair, bye boy bye. the frequency of sex thing has never really been an issue for me because I'm the rare occasions where i am dating someone and having sex regularly, i want it as much as possible (probably because of my extended periods of celibacy). i in fact had the opposite problem with someone. he was projecting his previous relationship onto us and trying to hold me to his previous 'schedule' of once a week that his ex had imposed on THEIR relationship while also repeatedly asking me for anal sex even though i very clearly and firmly said no every time he asked. i finally got mad enough to ask him why he kept asking me for anal even after i had explained to him that i didn't like it and didn't get any pleasure out of it and his response was 'if you really cared about me, you would do something you didn't like for me.' i had tried to tell him about my sexual assaults but he refused to talk about it. in the long run it was probably better for me that we only dated for a few months. at this point i feel so fucked up about my body when it comes to men that i feel like giving up sex altogether. the pandemic has helped with that; but i have turned down several opportunities to get laid cause i am old enough to know the casual hookups do more harm than good. which i guess fits right in with the lack of trust/saftey thing. i have yet to have a truly long term relationship and know by now sex isn't the way to get one of those. *siiiigh* 210919 ... nr "one of brandon’s comments in the journal under the cons column reads that i “*always* had a very low sex drive,” along with an illustration of me sleeping in bed while he was awake with a boner." did any of his followers call him out on the utter inappropriateness (and i feel like i'm being nice with this word) of this? reading this made me so angry. 210920 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I'd be mad too. And yeah, I dunno why some people like the look of entirely shaved pubes. Trimming stuff to make it easier/neater is one thing, but shaving it all would be soooo itchy. Ugh. Do not want, wouldn't find it sexy on another person. As for top-of-head hair: David's is naturally wavy at the ends. He straightens it. Mine is straight, only slightly wavy when it's long. Night before first day of school, I braided it to give it more waviness the next day. More vibe. The grass is always greener - or straighter, or wavier. Cannot braid leg hair, not long enough, but can have funny conversations: "You'd shave your legs for complete strangers at the pool but not for me?" Pout, but not too serious. "Yes! That's how these things work." Grin. But smooth legs feel nice against sheets. I wish I could just shed leg and armpit hair in summer and grow it again in winter. Evolution, where are you when we need you? 210920 ... e_o_i In my silliness and hairiness I forgot what I meant to say to tender_square, how dealing with all those family expectations and preconceptions on top of the breakup itself sounds tough, tough, tough. I guess the family part didn't fit frame of the initial piece you sketched - you have to draw a boundary somewhere - but it still had the same multifaceted feel, picking up on their points of view and considering them thoughtfully. (So props for form and content, and props too for navigating such a mess.) 210920 ... e_o_i reinserts definite articles *fit the frame 210920 ... tender square i’m floored that this post has generated as many comments as it has! thank you all for sharing your experiences and stories here, it means a lot. after i saw some of the responses come in, i questioned if i made the scenes sound worse than what they actually were, if i had embellished them for dramatic effect. i don’t think that’s accurate; whenever i write, i try to describe the situation as though it was happening to someone else—which is true to a degree, because i’m not the same person i was when it happened. it’s weird, sometimes i tell more truth on the page than i do to myself, and when i see it reflected back to me (and in the responses of others), it changes my relationship to that memory, it makes me realize i’m more hurt than what i allowed. i remember talking to my therapist earlier this year when i stumbled upon the actual contents of brandon’s sketchbook and telling her that i was relieved that it wasn’t about me, it felt like closure; now i’m realizing with this piece that there’s a deeper sadness here about the ways in which we were incompatible, even though we loved each other a lot. it’s helping me offer a greater degree of forgiveness to myself for imploding things with him the way i did. after brandon reflected on our breakup, he told me he could see that us divorcing was an inevitability that would’ve occurred at some point. what’s also interesting is that our relationship ended the same way his previous relationship did with the woman before me, with both of us cheating on him. i’m not saying i think he deserved to suffer through that, but rather it makes me curious about the universe and whether he needed to go through that experience again because he may not have learned enough from it the first time; he and i pretty much started dating a month or two after his prior relationship ended, something i didn’t know until he and i separated. e_o_i: thank you for saying this work was multifaceted and for calling it thoughtful. it helps me with processing what happened. and thank you for saying my approach with my family stuff was thoughtful, too. i try. i try so damn hard. nr: no, none of his followers called out the content of the book, but that’s because the contents weren’t available when he had that first instagram post about it six years ago. until brandon had recorded the podcast, the only way i could’ve viewed the journal was to physically go to brooklyn art library’s space, which i wasn't willing to do. so, the podcast was a blessing, because it gave me insight into something i didn’t have access to before. 210921 ... tender square the problem with hopeless romantics, like brandon, are that they look at all women with the same uniform gaze; if every woman is special than none of them are special. and maybe i don’t like this quality because it’s possible i could be describing myself here, but i really don’t think so. 211005 what's it to you? who go blather from