When I was 19, a boy touched my arm at a party and changed the entire trajectory of how I thought my life was going to go. Up until that night, up until that party, I’d thought I knew exactly what my future held — I’d been dating the same guy for four years and, even though we were very, very young and we weren’t sure when the next time we’d live on the same side of the country, let alone in the same city, would be, I was confident we were on track to check off all the typical milestones of marriage, children and…. whatever else you are supposed to do in a partnership when you have been dating as long as we had.
None of that happened.
Instead, a boy touched my arm at a party and I instantaneously felt a connection so strong that I yanked it back in alarm as we made direct eye contact for the first time.
Less than a week later, I broke up with my boyfriend.
Despite that initial connection, I never dated the boy who touched my arm. Being so young and feeling something that intense while now fresh off a break up put an unfathomable pressure into what this could mean for the future and that terrified me. So, instead, we became close friends who, all throughout college and beyond, were — for lack of a better phrase — drawn to each other. This didn’t mean that we didn’t have other relationships or date other people, but it was widely known that if both of us were single and in the same place, it was extremely likely we would be ending the evening together.
This behavior has become common enough over the years that we’ve now become one of the longest running jokes in the group chat our friends have managed to keep alive since 2013.
Before every wedding we’ve all attended in the past decade, the messages will pop off with our friends speculating how the two of us will manage to take advantage of the brief time we’ll have together, considering him and I haven’t lived in the same place since college. And, after every wedding we’ve all attended in the past decade, the messages continue to pop OFF with the entire group somehow delightedly shocked that “it’s happened again!!!!,” evidently not realizing I would only squeeze myself into sharing a twin-sized bed with a full-grown man at the age of 30 if there was an emotional connection as well as a physical one.
The jokes were very funny when we were younger, but as we progressed into our late twenties and now early thirties, and I still had yet to feel something quite as intense from someone else in the same way — impressive, really, considering my extensive New York dating history — it felt like it was finally time for us to have the relationship-defining conversation I’d been putting off since I was technically still a teen. After weeks of planning, we coordinated our schedules to match up for a singular day — he’d be in New York for work and, though I wasn’t going to be in town during his time here, I changed my flight back from LA to come home early so we could spend one night together before he left for another job.
Which is how, eleven full years after the first night we met, on an unseasonably warm weekend this past October, I found myself laying on my couch with him in Brooklyn, listening to him tell me that we couldn’t be in a relationship because he was going to go save the rainforest.
Without any context, this sounds like an unhinged way of saying “I’m just not that into you.” But, if you know him, this actually is not only extremely on brand, it’s incredibly accurate. For almost as long as we’ve been friends, he’s been traveling down to the Amazon, documenting the lives of a specific tribe. Over the years, he’s seen first-hand the horrific effects of deforestation and how it impacts not only their surrounding community, but the carbon emissions of the entire world. With the global attitude around climate change being bleak at best and irreversibly damaging at worst, he’s decided to focus all his time, energy and resources into going to Brazil to help the tribe save the rainforest. As someone who has become terrified to the point of helplessness about climate change in the past couple of years, I love that he’s so passionate about dedicating his life to correcting these awful environmental effects and the fact he’s truly working toward making an impactful difference is one of the reasons I like him so very much.
Lowkey, though, I will not lie — essentially being dumped for the Amazon by the person I’ve felt the most connected to for over a decade is simultaneously the funniest and most devastating thing to ever happen to me. When I told my brother about it, he described it as being “something that could only happen to you,” but also kind of similar to the time his college roommate was broken up with because she made her partner too happy and he “couldn’t create art when he was happy.” (This is, unfortunately, very hilarious to me seeing as I haven’t wanted to write anything for this website until I realized climate change has now affected me in a way more deeply personal than ever before.)
For what it’s worth, it did make me feel better that this decade-long experience was unraveling not because of another woman, but because of a literal climate issue. Truly, I am so excited for him and proud of the work that he is doing and, while I would love for his life path to potentially lead him between splitting his time saving the Amazon and, like, I don’t know, hanging out with me in Brooklyn, I made it clear I was not going to be able to put my life on pause for that to maybe someday happen.
So, after he left that weekend, I started to put a more valiant effort into a relationship with someone I had very, very, very, very, very casually been seeing — a man who I knew would never leave me for the rainforest for many reasons, the main being that he almost exclusively drinks out of single-use plastics and does not own a recycling bin. (As you could imagine, our conversations about climate change were starting at a much more elementary level than I was typically used to). Unfortunately, a couple weeks into this renewed effort, I was riding the subway when I got an Instagram DM from him letting me know he had decided he was going to try things out again with his ex-girlfriend, a woman I had previously only heard mentioned during an anecdote about how she once threw spaghetti in his bed during a particularly bad argument.
I was stunned reading the message — emotionally, I was less attached seeing as we’d been hanging out casually for months, not years, but the proximity of being told I was someone’s second choice for the second time in less than a month was still wildly hurtful. Also, I liked him! And had really thought he liked me, too! Case full of plastic water bottles in his fridge aside, I’d felt like the two of us were getting to a good place, so the shock of discovering that not only were we not in a good place, we weren’t even in any place brought immediate tears to my eyes. My train had been slowly approaching the next station as I read the DM about his ex and trying to gather my thoughts before I responded, I gazed out the passing window…
…. just to see my ex waiting on the platform, getting ready to step into the subway car I was now crying on.
Since I moved here in 2015, there have been exactly three men in this city who have come even kind of close to making me feel the same emotionally turbulent spark I felt at that party when I was 19.
Cruelly, all of us live off of the A/C line in Brooklyn.
Somehow, incredibly, running into any of them after we’d broken up — save for the time, once, in the pre-pandemic days of 2020, when I took a 90-minute interpretive dance class in Brooklyn Heights that was also attended by the man I dated for most of 2016 (we did not speak) — had not happened yet. But, now, as my train car slowed down and I cracked every bone in my neck whipping my head around to confirm, yes, that was definitely him, the man who once told me, casually, that he thought I liked him more than he liked me, the horrific timing felt like a nightmare coming to life.
Truthfully, I no longer have any strong feelings toward this man… we hadn’t seen each other since the end of 2019, when we both decided we loved each other, but not enough to keep trying to save our exhausting relationship. For how dramatic those years of our life were, it ended amicably enough and, on any other day, in any other situation, I probably would have welcomed what was likely to be a lightly awkward encounter.
Still, I think we can all agree that running into an ex for the first time in three years literal seconds after being told hanging out with you was no longer more preferable to be with as with someone who viewed pasta as a vehicle for violence were not entirely ideal circumstances.
I watched, holding my breath, waiting for him to decide between stepping on to my car or the one behind me and let out an audible sigh of relief when he obliviously chose the one I was not on. He had not seen me, but for me, seeing him while in such a vulnerable state had brought back a memory of our last morning together and a conversation I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time.
For almost two years, we had tried on-and-off to make things work and, even though it should have been obvious we just weren’t meant to be together, our last-ditch attempted effort had been establishing a mandatory silence period. Literally, we gave ourselves self-imposed restraining orders — no texting, no calling, no “just catching up for a beer” (a move that always, always involved more than one beer and always, always ended with someone sleeping in a bed that was not their own), no responding to each other’s stories on Instagram, no contact, no anything — for two months. I believe our thoughts at the time were that if we really wanted to be together, not speaking for a couple months would make our tumultuous relationship stronger. Looking back through a lens of wisdom and context, this seems bizarre, but at the time, we really thought it would work.
And, I guess if you think about it, it did work. At the end of the two months, we realized that being together wasn’t right for us…. but, because I used to be a lil messy girlie who loved nothing more than insisting on getting “closure,” we met at a bar and ended up back at his apartment when our restraining period was over.
Laying in bed together for what we both knew was going to be the last time (it was), I asked him why he thought we hadn’t worked out. What he said surprised me because, while there were many, many reasons our relationship was a massive failure, the first thing he listed was a quality I’ve always prided myself in possessing.
“You’re very independent,” he told me. “I never knew that you actually needed me.”
If we’re being vulnerable here — and I do believe I can be because I was a web-savy child who had a Xanga far before it was age-appropriate, so I’ve been writing about my deeply emotional feelings on the Internet for strangers for close to 20 years now — hearing that hurt more than I thought it would. I’d sometimes wondered, in my weaker moments in the years after that party that caused me to break up with my boyfriend, if I was alienating the men I was dating with my approach to relationships. I had been 15 when I got into that long-term, very intense relationship — 14 when we met — and, again, while I loved him, I distinctly remember not loving the feeling of being so utterly dependent on someone else for my own happiness. I think I was too young to process how much we relied on each other and how much pressure that really was for two people our age who’d never seriously been with anyone else. Neither of us had ever had the opportunity to figure out who we were without the other person. And, at the end, after all it took was a spark from someone else’s hand on my arm to dissolve that dependence, I remember thinking that I wanted to make sure I approached all future relationships as a fulfilled person, a person who always would be able to find their own happiness and function independently.
In the past decade, I’ve accomplished that. Like anyone, I have good days and I have bad days, but overall, I’m wildly proud of the life I’ve built for myself here. I have a job I like that keeps me chaotically and creatively engaged. I’ve found interests that bring me so much joy, they border on obsession and, through them, I’ve joined a community that’s made me feel more confident than I ever could have imagined. I have friends who support me, a family who I am close to, and an apartment I adore that is all mine. Would it have been nice to have a boyfriend the time I found a cockroach in my bathroom so he could have been the one to kill it by spraying an obscene amount of Mrs. Meyer’s floral-scented cleaning spray on its writhing body until it drowned an expensive death? Maybe. But, also, maybe not. Even then, when I had to loudly coach myself “OKAY, JEN, YOU CAN DO THIS!!!” multiple times before I picked up the bug’s now rose-smelling body to jog it down the stairs and fling it far, far away from my home with a full-bodied shiver, I was disgusted… but also very proud that I was able to do something that horrified me so much on my own.
Three years ago, when my relationship was ending and I was told it was at least partially because I wasn’t dependent enough, it hurt to think that something I’d tried so hard to cultivate in myself was actually a deterrent. And, truthfully, there was a small moment reading that initial DM when those feelings flooded back. No matter how casual the relationship, being told you’re being left for someone else automatically brings up thoughts of comparison and I couldn’t help but feeling like I was not enough, even though I’d personally never ruined anyone’s white bedding with sauce stains. (My pasta-related red-flag occurred when I had to take myself to the ER when I was in LA due to being in excruciating stomach pain from eating an ungodly amount of rigatoni the night before which, on the individual level, is maybe worse, but relationship-wise, I don’t think has similar cause for concern.)
Still, I’m in a better place now than I used to be. I was able to shake off those feelings of self-doubt before my train reached the next stop and, stepping out of the subway car, I felt sad, sure, but hadn’t lost my confidence. I know now, definitively, that a guy leaving me for his ex or for a woman who needs him more or to, like, literally save the world is not indicative of who I am as a person or my worth. My relationship with these men — important or impartial, casual or crucial — doesn’t define me. They can’t define me.
Only I can.