Then We Came To The End
When: Christmas, 2004.
(Disclaimer: This is not a funny story. The most appropriate word might be ‘cringey’.)
Breaking up with a person you are dating who you like (but do not love) is perhaps the most underrated of the everyday tragedies. It’s an event that happens in a vacuum of adversity. No one has done anything wrong, there are no looming storms on the horizon, no incompatible long-term plans or the specter of a long distance relationship or anything else that explicitly spells out doom. And yet these frail relationships die as others thrive because it's inexorable; the only thing worse than breaking up is staying together.
One other thing: the ache of the missed connection is most keenly felt when only one of the parties realizes it’s over.
During graduate school, I began dating a girl I’ll call Ellen. We met online back when online dating wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now.
On paper, Ellen was an amazing catch. She was pretty (but not pretty enough for me to deal with the inescapable fear that I was punching too far above my weight). She was a sapiosexual’s dream girl – she spoke multiple languages, had a master’s degree in organic chemistry and was finishing up her final year of law school when we met. Best of all, she was very tall (thus, no need to stoop down for a kiss goodnight) and a former cross-country runner who was able to push the pace on a jog.
Despite these admirable qualities, this was not my soulmate. Almost unknowingly, I began to drift in those horrible ways that come so naturally to disenfranchised lovers - not calling so often, sizing up other romantic opportunities, etc. Ellen, however, was laser-focused on me; as I began the first struggles of trying to break free - like a cat unhappy at being picked up - she merely held on tighter. As Ellen intensified our relationship, I allowed it to happen, possibly because I didn’t fully realize the extent of my apathy or possibly because I was too much of a wuss to end a relationship that was amiable, albeit somewhat bland.
The idling momentum of our tepid romance carried us into the fall. Four months into our relationship, with the holidays looming, Ellen invited me to spend four(!) nights in southern Florida at her mother’s house. I had never met her parents. To be sure, this represented an undeniable step up in our relationship. Still largely oblivious to the fact that I was not (nor had any chance of) falling in love with this woman, I agreed to the visit.
Ellen had left on Christmas break a few days earlier, leaving me to drive down on my own. I don’t recall why I didn’t travel with her, but there’s a decent chance I had, consciously or not, done this to guarantee I’d have my own vehicle in case things got ugly. Again, it seems obvious in retrospect that I should have seen the light when means of escape factored into my relationship planning.
Meeting a girl’s parents for the first time is a big moment. Spending the holidays with them is even more serious. I do not recommend combining these occasions.
Ellen’s mother’s home was a planned retirement community in south Florida called Rotunda (fun fact: Rotunda was designed by Ed McMahon (of Publisher’s Clearinghouse fame) and other celebrities). Its roads are literally shaped into the form of wagon wheels with spokes. The entire area was a 50-mile-wide swath of condos and drug stores. There was nothing to do but spend quality time with the family.
Ellen’s mother's house was a nondescript ranch-style bungalow on a quiet street. Creaking audibly as I removed my weary body from the folds of my shitty Toyota, I grabbed my overnight bag and gathered myself on the cracked asphalt of the driveway in preparation for the big meet. It was dusk and I could hear insects gently beginning their familiar nocturnal cacophony. Steeling myself for social interaction, I headed for the door, double-checking the mailbox against the scrap of paper I’d written the address on.
I rang the bell and heard a flurry of slightly-too-excited voices from within. Footsteps beat across the living room, moving just a little too fast to avoid concealing the anxiety behind them. Ellen threw open the door. Satisfaction spread across her face and she kissed me hello.
“Come meet my mom!” she cried, after kissing me hello. I trailed after her, noticing that her grip pressure was high enough so that I escape would require some doing.
Before we meet Ellen’s mother, I must remind everyone that there are prescribed rules for courtship, especially when it comes to revealing the less savory parts of our lives. We treat new lovers as we would a stranger, showing only our best side and tucking in any weaknesses into the shadows. As we become more comfortable, our masks begin to slip; we gradually show our cards, doling out our problems, liabilities and insecurities one by one. We do this slowly, titrating our demons and evaluating the response from the other party at each step, ready to pull back at a moment’s notice if we sense we’ve shown too much, too fast. We deceive by mutual covenant, with the overriding understanding that it’s all part of a process as intuitive as the need for companionship.
In a perfect relationship, we find the bottom, the point where everything’s on the table and no more secrets/surprises remain. In most other cases, we simply hit our limit and decide to bail, suitably sick of the other person's shit.
As an anthropological construct, this approach works fairly well – it takes a while, but at least there are no surprises. However, this Darwinian Love System can break down spectacularly when one person thinks they’re done with surprises while the other is still playing the game. In our relationship, Ellen had been slowly doling out the cable and, although I thought I’d heard everything by now, there was still one or two more bitter pills I had yet to swallow. And so I walked into her lair blissfully unaware that tonight was to be my final spoonful of medicine.
I met the mother. I walked across the small Florida-style foyer into the central kitchen where Ellen’s mother (let’s call her Jeanette) was preparing dinner.
Jeanette was enormous. Shockingly so. Three-hundred-plus pounds. FUPA for days. It was the first thing I noticed – let’s be honest, there was simply too much of the poor woman for me to overlook – and I was taken aback. Summoning my inner chi, I fought through the surprise and fell to charming this massive human being, all the while wondering why Ellen had never mentioned her mother's morbid obesity and whether I had ever offhandedly said anything disparaging about fat people.
Unfortunately for me, mom’s size was probably my smallest problem.
Things were going well. The shock had receded and I was now embroiled in routine conversation. As we talked, I made my calculations. The giant mother was an issue, no doubt about that, and I weighed (no pun intended) the potential negatives (i.e., long-term invalidity) against the positives of our relationship. Honestly, I was on the fence at this point, so 'meh' were my feelings for Ellen. It's an ugly truth, one that I mention only to show you how close I was to the edge of calling it.
Jeanette seemed to like me. She smiled broadly at me in a way that suggested I would be a well-received houseguest as she perched on a stool. She apologized about not getting up as she offered me handshake, explaining that she had a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis.
Wait, say that again. Ellen had never mentioned anything about serious medical conditions in her family.
I shook Jeanette’s hand. Between her arthritis and my desire to do no harm, it was the limpest, dead-fish handshake I’ve ever participated in. As our hands broke apart, Jeanette’s deadened, inflamed fingers trailed across my palm and I visibly shivered. Worried for social graces, I shot a sidelong glance towards Ellen to see if she’d noticed.
She had. Behind a frozen smile, My girlfriend nervously watched over the kitchen, her eyes darting between me and her mother. It was obvious that she was closely monitoring my reaction to her final bit of news. It was also obvious that she had deliberately waited, perhaps out of fear of my reaction (I must have said something about fat people), but more likely because she knew I would be committed to spending time here and was gambling that I would get used to/like her mom enough to offset her lack of candor.
The girl understood how the game was played, but she'd drastically overestimated how much I wanted to play. Speaking of - how was I handling this most recent development? Well… not so well, actually. A quick review of things left me with these facts:
(1) Were I to remain in this relationship, Ellen’s mother represented enormous future medical costs.
(2) Rheumatoid arthritis has a strong genetic component – there was an excellent chance Ellen would suffer the same fate.
(3) I do not like, much less love, Ellen enough to deal with (1) or (2).
And like that, our relationship was over. I had just mentally broken up with my girlfriend, on Christmas Eve, in her mother’s kitchen, ten minutes into a FOUR-DAY-LONG stay in their family home.
Ellen and her mother were still speaking, unaware that I had just mentally terminated our relationship. I made polite noises as I puzzled over the etiquette of what needed to happen next. It seemed as though there were two options: One – go full asshole. Explain that discovering that Ellen’s mother was crippled was the deal-breaker and walk out right now. Option two – stay put, play the role of dutiful boyfriend. String it out, then dump her in a couple of months after wasting both our time.
I've given this situation to many people as a hypothetical and no one has a clean solution. There's simply no way to get to the inevitable final result (Dumpsville. Population: you) through a course of action that is completely morally defensible. Lying was bad, but honesty might have been worse. Underneath all of this was the shame of knowing that I was probably a shallow asshole and – this was worse – that knowledge wasn’t enough to keep me in this fresh corpse of a relationship.
Since we’re being honest about what a shitbag I can be, I might as well admit that I wasn’t strong enough to attempt a break-up right then and there. I decided to play it regular for now, then make up an excuse and leave early tomorrow. I knew full well that this act would send a signal that there was a problem that would foreshadow the ensuing break-up. In fact, I was counting on it. (end brutal honesty segment)
As we ate mediocre chili, I was already considering the least-painful break-up option. I could get them angry, start a fight and end the relationship in like ripping off a Band-Aid. If I admitted to being a drug dealer, would that be enough? It was probably too late to claim I had AIDS. Or did tactics even matter – I was already effectively lying to them right now, just an actor playing a gig in their world.
That night I slept in the same bed with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. If possible, I woke up feeling even guiltier. As I showered, I mentally finalized the details of my escape. It wasn’t a fancy plan; I would arrange for one of my friends call me and pretend it was an emergency just severe enough for me to leave. After the holidays were over, I would finish the job on my home court.
At breakfast, I learned that Ellen’s father (Larry) would soon be arriving and staying with us. Ellen had previously told me that her parents were divorced but friendly; her father stayed at the house all the time. This kind of live-in visit was an entirely different realm of post-nuptial familiarity, probably an “exes having sexes” situation. It changed nothing for me as I continued to prepare to slip away into the late afternoon.
My plan to leave under false pretenses did not survive meeting Ellen’s father. Within ten minutes of meeting Larry, I had diagnosed him as being, I believe the technical term is, “batshit nuts.” The man was leaking oil pretty badly and he was about a yard and a half from falling into the abyss; it was clear that he was not here for a booty call, but rather because he had nowhere else to go.
Larry excreted the kind of vibe you’d get from a guy who’d be somewhat normal all the way up until he walked into an elementary school with an Uzi. He was twitchy in a way that made everyone nervous. I struggled to put a finger on it then, but later in life I realized he reminded me of an adult version of that one sad kid from middle school who all the teachers knew was headed for a bad ending.
Pieces were falling into place rapidly as we had lunch. It didn’t take training as a marital counselor to determine that Larry was 100% responsible for the failure of his marriage. Likewise, cryptic comments Ellen had made throughout our relationship about her father’s lack of involvement in her life suddenly became crystal clear. Larry was a man born to disappoint, and the faded psychological scars he’d left on his family grew prominent in his awkward presence.
Basic human decency demanded that I remain, blocking my escape with a moral impediment too large for even the shallowest human being to circumvent. Any attempt to abscond would be an obvious reaction to Larry’s presence. Ellen and her mother knew it, were apologetic, even. At one point, Jeanette pulled me aside and assured me that Larry wasn’t dangerous.
Despite this warning sign, I wasn’t too nervous. Larry could probably go another 48 hours without skinning me in my sleep; the odds of his ultimate breakdown occurring before then seemed low enough. But I was trapped there for the duration.
The day dragged on in a series of interminably awkward conversations with Ellen's parents*. I learned Larry had lost his legal job around the same time he lost the ability to function normally. He now supported himself by driving used cars across the border into Mexico, where they apparently fetched higher prices. The long drives helped him stave off dark, suicidal thoughts, he informed me in a matter-of-fact voice as we ate late-evening sandwiches in the kitchen.
Larry’s presence levied an incredible emotional strain on his daughter, who was doing double duty juggling an unstable relative and coping with her own mental baggage. Adding to this were worries over whether I would be too weirded-out by the combined might of her parents' many infirmities to continue the relationship.
To her complete delight, I appeared totally fine with Larry. And I was. Well, sorta. This was the last time I would ever see him, as far as I was concerned. Let's be clear on this - I was sympathetic, but nothing had changed. Don’t think for one second that meeting Ellen’s sad husk of a father had any effect on my decision to leave her ASAP. Quite the contrary, it galvanized any remaining waffling. If I had any lingering guilt over leaving Ellen after meeting her mother – and I didn’t – meeting dad cemented my decision to break up with her like a thousand tons of concrete. I was but a passenger in a taxi passing through their lives.
But there was that one side effect of my apparent equanimity: As each of her father's eccentricities failed to generate a negative reaction from me (mainly because I simply didn’t care anymore), Ellen was visibly relieved, overjoyed even. And then she drew exactly the wrong conclusion – she assumed that I was so into her that I could overlook the massive issues of her family unit. The net result was predictably terrible: the girl fell even more in love with me. Eventually, she gave up on watching me for signs of instability and, struggling to balance conflicting emotions, turned to me to steady her.
If you thought I felt bad before, it was ten times worse now. I was coping with massive guilt. Imagine going to an orphanage in the worst country in the world, telling the cutest, most vulnerable kid you're adopting them and going to live in America, let them pack their bags and then leave them in our dust as you yell, "Sike!" and peel out in your gold-plated Mercedes. This is, roughly speaking, how what I was doing felt.
That evening, Ellen’s mother made her ex-husband sleep on an air mattress on the living room floor so Ellen and I could have the guest room to ourselves. Larry accepted this without complaint.
That night, Ellen began to confide in me several of her father’s more significant failings. At some point in her childhood, he became unable to function in a legal environment and was forced to retire. Then came the unexpected absences, where she was left waiting after school for a man that would never come. And then her mother got sick.
The poor girl had one parent who was physically falling apart and another who was fraying mentally. I commiserated as best I could. To do so, I drew on the current sensation of feeling like a traitorous shitbag. If Ellen and I had one thing in common at this point, it was that we were both simply trying to survive this weekend.
Larry fully destabilized the next day. At breakfast, he began to voice paranoid thoughts. Apparently, one of the door handles on the used truck he’d just purchased was loose. By lunch he had convinced himself that someone in this quiet retirement community was planning to jimmy open the door of this nondescript used vehicle and spirit it away. While these mental calisthenics were clearly bullshit aimed at masking his anxiety over this bit of prolonged social contact, they quickly ground down everyone’s resolve for a nuclear family holiday. Ellen’s mother, in particular, seemed perfectly fine letting him leave. And so, barely concealing his eagerness, Larry rolled away on December 26th, leaving behind the only two people in the world that might still care about him.
That afternoon, Ellen and I took a walk, during which even more of her feelings began to leak out. She began opening up to me about some of the sad shit she’d gone through as a child. It’s too personal for me to share, but it was tragic stuff. I nodded dutifully and held her hand, playing the role of an emotional support dog.
A few minutes later, Ellen suddenly stopped. “I want you to know that I’m falling in love with you,” she said solemnly.
I flinched, unprepared for an eventuality that I should have anticipated. I’d been detecting the vibe, but thought I could hold off open declarations until I could depart. Now my sole remaining goal of maintaining emotional stasis had also failed.
Do not automatically say it back. Things will be far worse later if you say it now. “I am so impressed you became the person you are today,” I replied carefully, studying to see how the remark landed. For such a bullshit line, it went over fairly well. She hugged me fiercely and we returned home.
As happy as Ellen was, I was laid low by my conscience. I felt like a traitor. It was such a breach of privacy to openly see into the soul of someone who’d survived such shitty parenting as well as she did. I truly felt terrible about all that stuff had happened to her. And I felt even worse that she was letting all this stuff out to a guy who was effectively out the door. I wondered if there was some way I could end things so that Ellen wouldn’t (correctly) assume I’d bolted solely because of her family. I would have faked my death, but was worried she might do something dumb like vowing a life of celibate grief.
The next morning I left as scheduled.
Towards the end of January, it was time to make my move. It was predictably awful. I had been executing a planned social withdrawal, making myself less available and cooling our relationship so as to make my coming exit less of a shock. I know, I know – not the best way to play it, but I was young and intent on putting one final dollop of shit on the whole thing.
The actual break-up was an anticlimactic train wreck. Ellen was smarter than me. She saw what I was doing, read ahead in the text, and ultimately let me off easier than I perhaps deserved.
And then we moved on. At first, we decided to be friends. I actually wanted to be friends, but we all know that’s impossible. After exchanging the occasional email for a few weeks, I got a message from her that read (paraphrased), “Noah - it’s difficult being friends with you, so I’m not going to do it anymore. Good luck with… (etc).” I wrote back that I understood, and that was the last time we ever spoke.
You can break up with someone, but they never completely leave, do they? There’s an inevitable circling back from time to time as we check up on former friends and lovers. As part of writing this, I tried to find Ellen online. I didn’t have much success, so it’s not possible to give the story a happy (or even unhappy) postscript. Since I don’t write anonymously, there’s a good chance that Ellen may eventually read this story and recognize herself in my words. If so, I hope she’s been luckier in love than she was with me. More selfishly, I hope she doesn’t blame me too much – breaking up, as hard as it may be in the moment, is usually the long-term cure. And while we may feel momentary pangs of regret in these fleeting moments of looking back, these echoes of our romantic past grow inexorably fainter as time, the world's best rescuer, drags us to safety from the burning, broken remains of our hearts.
*I had no idea what was activities occur while hanging out with an obese disabled woman for several days. Fortunately, Ellen and her mother were both tremendous fans of Alias, the hokey-but-also-kinda-awesome JJ Abrams show about an attractive female spy. I'd never seen it and we watched two seasons in three days. If one good thing came from the weekend, this was it.
(Disclaimer: This is not a funny story. The most appropriate word might be ‘cringey’.)
Breaking up with a person you are dating who you like (but do not love) is perhaps the most underrated of the everyday tragedies. It’s an event that happens in a vacuum of adversity. No one has done anything wrong, there are no looming storms on the horizon, no incompatible long-term plans or the specter of a long distance relationship or anything else that explicitly spells out doom. And yet these frail relationships die as others thrive because it's inexorable; the only thing worse than breaking up is staying together.
One other thing: the ache of the missed connection is most keenly felt when only one of the parties realizes it’s over.
During graduate school, I began dating a girl I’ll call Ellen. We met online back when online dating wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now.
On paper, Ellen was an amazing catch. She was pretty (but not pretty enough for me to deal with the inescapable fear that I was punching too far above my weight). She was a sapiosexual’s dream girl – she spoke multiple languages, had a master’s degree in organic chemistry and was finishing up her final year of law school when we met. Best of all, she was very tall (thus, no need to stoop down for a kiss goodnight) and a former cross-country runner who was able to push the pace on a jog.
Despite these admirable qualities, this was not my soulmate. Almost unknowingly, I began to drift in those horrible ways that come so naturally to disenfranchised lovers - not calling so often, sizing up other romantic opportunities, etc. Ellen, however, was laser-focused on me; as I began the first struggles of trying to break free - like a cat unhappy at being picked up - she merely held on tighter. As Ellen intensified our relationship, I allowed it to happen, possibly because I didn’t fully realize the extent of my apathy or possibly because I was too much of a wuss to end a relationship that was amiable, albeit somewhat bland.
The idling momentum of our tepid romance carried us into the fall. Four months into our relationship, with the holidays looming, Ellen invited me to spend four(!) nights in southern Florida at her mother’s house. I had never met her parents. To be sure, this represented an undeniable step up in our relationship. Still largely oblivious to the fact that I was not (nor had any chance of) falling in love with this woman, I agreed to the visit.
Ellen had left on Christmas break a few days earlier, leaving me to drive down on my own. I don’t recall why I didn’t travel with her, but there’s a decent chance I had, consciously or not, done this to guarantee I’d have my own vehicle in case things got ugly. Again, it seems obvious in retrospect that I should have seen the light when means of escape factored into my relationship planning.
Meeting a girl’s parents for the first time is a big moment. Spending the holidays with them is even more serious. I do not recommend combining these occasions.
Ellen’s mother’s home was a planned retirement community in south Florida called Rotunda (fun fact: Rotunda was designed by Ed McMahon (of Publisher’s Clearinghouse fame) and other celebrities). Its roads are literally shaped into the form of wagon wheels with spokes. The entire area was a 50-mile-wide swath of condos and drug stores. There was nothing to do but spend quality time with the family.
Ellen’s mother's house was a nondescript ranch-style bungalow on a quiet street. Creaking audibly as I removed my weary body from the folds of my shitty Toyota, I grabbed my overnight bag and gathered myself on the cracked asphalt of the driveway in preparation for the big meet. It was dusk and I could hear insects gently beginning their familiar nocturnal cacophony. Steeling myself for social interaction, I headed for the door, double-checking the mailbox against the scrap of paper I’d written the address on.
I rang the bell and heard a flurry of slightly-too-excited voices from within. Footsteps beat across the living room, moving just a little too fast to avoid concealing the anxiety behind them. Ellen threw open the door. Satisfaction spread across her face and she kissed me hello.
“Come meet my mom!” she cried, after kissing me hello. I trailed after her, noticing that her grip pressure was high enough so that I escape would require some doing.
Before we meet Ellen’s mother, I must remind everyone that there are prescribed rules for courtship, especially when it comes to revealing the less savory parts of our lives. We treat new lovers as we would a stranger, showing only our best side and tucking in any weaknesses into the shadows. As we become more comfortable, our masks begin to slip; we gradually show our cards, doling out our problems, liabilities and insecurities one by one. We do this slowly, titrating our demons and evaluating the response from the other party at each step, ready to pull back at a moment’s notice if we sense we’ve shown too much, too fast. We deceive by mutual covenant, with the overriding understanding that it’s all part of a process as intuitive as the need for companionship.
In a perfect relationship, we find the bottom, the point where everything’s on the table and no more secrets/surprises remain. In most other cases, we simply hit our limit and decide to bail, suitably sick of the other person's shit.
As an anthropological construct, this approach works fairly well – it takes a while, but at least there are no surprises. However, this Darwinian Love System can break down spectacularly when one person thinks they’re done with surprises while the other is still playing the game. In our relationship, Ellen had been slowly doling out the cable and, although I thought I’d heard everything by now, there was still one or two more bitter pills I had yet to swallow. And so I walked into her lair blissfully unaware that tonight was to be my final spoonful of medicine.
I met the mother. I walked across the small Florida-style foyer into the central kitchen where Ellen’s mother (let’s call her Jeanette) was preparing dinner.
Jeanette was enormous. Shockingly so. Three-hundred-plus pounds. FUPA for days. It was the first thing I noticed – let’s be honest, there was simply too much of the poor woman for me to overlook – and I was taken aback. Summoning my inner chi, I fought through the surprise and fell to charming this massive human being, all the while wondering why Ellen had never mentioned her mother's morbid obesity and whether I had ever offhandedly said anything disparaging about fat people.
Unfortunately for me, mom’s size was probably my smallest problem.
Things were going well. The shock had receded and I was now embroiled in routine conversation. As we talked, I made my calculations. The giant mother was an issue, no doubt about that, and I weighed (no pun intended) the potential negatives (i.e., long-term invalidity) against the positives of our relationship. Honestly, I was on the fence at this point, so 'meh' were my feelings for Ellen. It's an ugly truth, one that I mention only to show you how close I was to the edge of calling it.
Jeanette seemed to like me. She smiled broadly at me in a way that suggested I would be a well-received houseguest as she perched on a stool. She apologized about not getting up as she offered me handshake, explaining that she had a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis.
Wait, say that again. Ellen had never mentioned anything about serious medical conditions in her family.
I shook Jeanette’s hand. Between her arthritis and my desire to do no harm, it was the limpest, dead-fish handshake I’ve ever participated in. As our hands broke apart, Jeanette’s deadened, inflamed fingers trailed across my palm and I visibly shivered. Worried for social graces, I shot a sidelong glance towards Ellen to see if she’d noticed.
She had. Behind a frozen smile, My girlfriend nervously watched over the kitchen, her eyes darting between me and her mother. It was obvious that she was closely monitoring my reaction to her final bit of news. It was also obvious that she had deliberately waited, perhaps out of fear of my reaction (I must have said something about fat people), but more likely because she knew I would be committed to spending time here and was gambling that I would get used to/like her mom enough to offset her lack of candor.
The girl understood how the game was played, but she'd drastically overestimated how much I wanted to play. Speaking of - how was I handling this most recent development? Well… not so well, actually. A quick review of things left me with these facts:
(1) Were I to remain in this relationship, Ellen’s mother represented enormous future medical costs.
(2) Rheumatoid arthritis has a strong genetic component – there was an excellent chance Ellen would suffer the same fate.
(3) I do not like, much less love, Ellen enough to deal with (1) or (2).
And like that, our relationship was over. I had just mentally broken up with my girlfriend, on Christmas Eve, in her mother’s kitchen, ten minutes into a FOUR-DAY-LONG stay in their family home.
Ellen and her mother were still speaking, unaware that I had just mentally terminated our relationship. I made polite noises as I puzzled over the etiquette of what needed to happen next. It seemed as though there were two options: One – go full asshole. Explain that discovering that Ellen’s mother was crippled was the deal-breaker and walk out right now. Option two – stay put, play the role of dutiful boyfriend. String it out, then dump her in a couple of months after wasting both our time.
I've given this situation to many people as a hypothetical and no one has a clean solution. There's simply no way to get to the inevitable final result (Dumpsville. Population: you) through a course of action that is completely morally defensible. Lying was bad, but honesty might have been worse. Underneath all of this was the shame of knowing that I was probably a shallow asshole and – this was worse – that knowledge wasn’t enough to keep me in this fresh corpse of a relationship.
Since we’re being honest about what a shitbag I can be, I might as well admit that I wasn’t strong enough to attempt a break-up right then and there. I decided to play it regular for now, then make up an excuse and leave early tomorrow. I knew full well that this act would send a signal that there was a problem that would foreshadow the ensuing break-up. In fact, I was counting on it. (end brutal honesty segment)
As we ate mediocre chili, I was already considering the least-painful break-up option. I could get them angry, start a fight and end the relationship in like ripping off a Band-Aid. If I admitted to being a drug dealer, would that be enough? It was probably too late to claim I had AIDS. Or did tactics even matter – I was already effectively lying to them right now, just an actor playing a gig in their world.
That night I slept in the same bed with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. If possible, I woke up feeling even guiltier. As I showered, I mentally finalized the details of my escape. It wasn’t a fancy plan; I would arrange for one of my friends call me and pretend it was an emergency just severe enough for me to leave. After the holidays were over, I would finish the job on my home court.
At breakfast, I learned that Ellen’s father (Larry) would soon be arriving and staying with us. Ellen had previously told me that her parents were divorced but friendly; her father stayed at the house all the time. This kind of live-in visit was an entirely different realm of post-nuptial familiarity, probably an “exes having sexes” situation. It changed nothing for me as I continued to prepare to slip away into the late afternoon.
My plan to leave under false pretenses did not survive meeting Ellen’s father. Within ten minutes of meeting Larry, I had diagnosed him as being, I believe the technical term is, “batshit nuts.” The man was leaking oil pretty badly and he was about a yard and a half from falling into the abyss; it was clear that he was not here for a booty call, but rather because he had nowhere else to go.
Larry excreted the kind of vibe you’d get from a guy who’d be somewhat normal all the way up until he walked into an elementary school with an Uzi. He was twitchy in a way that made everyone nervous. I struggled to put a finger on it then, but later in life I realized he reminded me of an adult version of that one sad kid from middle school who all the teachers knew was headed for a bad ending.
Pieces were falling into place rapidly as we had lunch. It didn’t take training as a marital counselor to determine that Larry was 100% responsible for the failure of his marriage. Likewise, cryptic comments Ellen had made throughout our relationship about her father’s lack of involvement in her life suddenly became crystal clear. Larry was a man born to disappoint, and the faded psychological scars he’d left on his family grew prominent in his awkward presence.
Basic human decency demanded that I remain, blocking my escape with a moral impediment too large for even the shallowest human being to circumvent. Any attempt to abscond would be an obvious reaction to Larry’s presence. Ellen and her mother knew it, were apologetic, even. At one point, Jeanette pulled me aside and assured me that Larry wasn’t dangerous.
Despite this warning sign, I wasn’t too nervous. Larry could probably go another 48 hours without skinning me in my sleep; the odds of his ultimate breakdown occurring before then seemed low enough. But I was trapped there for the duration.
The day dragged on in a series of interminably awkward conversations with Ellen's parents*. I learned Larry had lost his legal job around the same time he lost the ability to function normally. He now supported himself by driving used cars across the border into Mexico, where they apparently fetched higher prices. The long drives helped him stave off dark, suicidal thoughts, he informed me in a matter-of-fact voice as we ate late-evening sandwiches in the kitchen.
Larry’s presence levied an incredible emotional strain on his daughter, who was doing double duty juggling an unstable relative and coping with her own mental baggage. Adding to this were worries over whether I would be too weirded-out by the combined might of her parents' many infirmities to continue the relationship.
To her complete delight, I appeared totally fine with Larry. And I was. Well, sorta. This was the last time I would ever see him, as far as I was concerned. Let's be clear on this - I was sympathetic, but nothing had changed. Don’t think for one second that meeting Ellen’s sad husk of a father had any effect on my decision to leave her ASAP. Quite the contrary, it galvanized any remaining waffling. If I had any lingering guilt over leaving Ellen after meeting her mother – and I didn’t – meeting dad cemented my decision to break up with her like a thousand tons of concrete. I was but a passenger in a taxi passing through their lives.
But there was that one side effect of my apparent equanimity: As each of her father's eccentricities failed to generate a negative reaction from me (mainly because I simply didn’t care anymore), Ellen was visibly relieved, overjoyed even. And then she drew exactly the wrong conclusion – she assumed that I was so into her that I could overlook the massive issues of her family unit. The net result was predictably terrible: the girl fell even more in love with me. Eventually, she gave up on watching me for signs of instability and, struggling to balance conflicting emotions, turned to me to steady her.
If you thought I felt bad before, it was ten times worse now. I was coping with massive guilt. Imagine going to an orphanage in the worst country in the world, telling the cutest, most vulnerable kid you're adopting them and going to live in America, let them pack their bags and then leave them in our dust as you yell, "Sike!" and peel out in your gold-plated Mercedes. This is, roughly speaking, how what I was doing felt.
That evening, Ellen’s mother made her ex-husband sleep on an air mattress on the living room floor so Ellen and I could have the guest room to ourselves. Larry accepted this without complaint.
That night, Ellen began to confide in me several of her father’s more significant failings. At some point in her childhood, he became unable to function in a legal environment and was forced to retire. Then came the unexpected absences, where she was left waiting after school for a man that would never come. And then her mother got sick.
The poor girl had one parent who was physically falling apart and another who was fraying mentally. I commiserated as best I could. To do so, I drew on the current sensation of feeling like a traitorous shitbag. If Ellen and I had one thing in common at this point, it was that we were both simply trying to survive this weekend.
Larry fully destabilized the next day. At breakfast, he began to voice paranoid thoughts. Apparently, one of the door handles on the used truck he’d just purchased was loose. By lunch he had convinced himself that someone in this quiet retirement community was planning to jimmy open the door of this nondescript used vehicle and spirit it away. While these mental calisthenics were clearly bullshit aimed at masking his anxiety over this bit of prolonged social contact, they quickly ground down everyone’s resolve for a nuclear family holiday. Ellen’s mother, in particular, seemed perfectly fine letting him leave. And so, barely concealing his eagerness, Larry rolled away on December 26th, leaving behind the only two people in the world that might still care about him.
That afternoon, Ellen and I took a walk, during which even more of her feelings began to leak out. She began opening up to me about some of the sad shit she’d gone through as a child. It’s too personal for me to share, but it was tragic stuff. I nodded dutifully and held her hand, playing the role of an emotional support dog.
A few minutes later, Ellen suddenly stopped. “I want you to know that I’m falling in love with you,” she said solemnly.
I flinched, unprepared for an eventuality that I should have anticipated. I’d been detecting the vibe, but thought I could hold off open declarations until I could depart. Now my sole remaining goal of maintaining emotional stasis had also failed.
Do not automatically say it back. Things will be far worse later if you say it now. “I am so impressed you became the person you are today,” I replied carefully, studying to see how the remark landed. For such a bullshit line, it went over fairly well. She hugged me fiercely and we returned home.
As happy as Ellen was, I was laid low by my conscience. I felt like a traitor. It was such a breach of privacy to openly see into the soul of someone who’d survived such shitty parenting as well as she did. I truly felt terrible about all that stuff had happened to her. And I felt even worse that she was letting all this stuff out to a guy who was effectively out the door. I wondered if there was some way I could end things so that Ellen wouldn’t (correctly) assume I’d bolted solely because of her family. I would have faked my death, but was worried she might do something dumb like vowing a life of celibate grief.
The next morning I left as scheduled.
Towards the end of January, it was time to make my move. It was predictably awful. I had been executing a planned social withdrawal, making myself less available and cooling our relationship so as to make my coming exit less of a shock. I know, I know – not the best way to play it, but I was young and intent on putting one final dollop of shit on the whole thing.
The actual break-up was an anticlimactic train wreck. Ellen was smarter than me. She saw what I was doing, read ahead in the text, and ultimately let me off easier than I perhaps deserved.
And then we moved on. At first, we decided to be friends. I actually wanted to be friends, but we all know that’s impossible. After exchanging the occasional email for a few weeks, I got a message from her that read (paraphrased), “Noah - it’s difficult being friends with you, so I’m not going to do it anymore. Good luck with… (etc).” I wrote back that I understood, and that was the last time we ever spoke.
You can break up with someone, but they never completely leave, do they? There’s an inevitable circling back from time to time as we check up on former friends and lovers. As part of writing this, I tried to find Ellen online. I didn’t have much success, so it’s not possible to give the story a happy (or even unhappy) postscript. Since I don’t write anonymously, there’s a good chance that Ellen may eventually read this story and recognize herself in my words. If so, I hope she’s been luckier in love than she was with me. More selfishly, I hope she doesn’t blame me too much – breaking up, as hard as it may be in the moment, is usually the long-term cure. And while we may feel momentary pangs of regret in these fleeting moments of looking back, these echoes of our romantic past grow inexorably fainter as time, the world's best rescuer, drags us to safety from the burning, broken remains of our hearts.
*I had no idea what was activities occur while hanging out with an obese disabled woman for several days. Fortunately, Ellen and her mother were both tremendous fans of Alias, the hokey-but-also-kinda-awesome JJ Abrams show about an attractive female spy. I'd never seen it and we watched two seasons in three days. If one good thing came from the weekend, this was it.