This is part of Breakup Week. We just can’t do this anymore.
When I was in graduate school, I started dating a woman who was significantly older than me. I was 21 when we got together; she was 29. I’m from New York, she’s from Australia, and both of us were living in London at the time. So, for the extent of the relationship, there was never this understanding that the two of us were going to spend the rest of our lives together. It seemed natural—maybe even a little bit romantic—that after graduation, we’d go on to our own respective chapters in life. At least, that was the plan—until COVID hit. We weren’t living with each other at the time, but she moved into my apartment so we could shelter in place. In those close quarters, some existential relationship questions started to pop up with more regularity. That’s when things started to go wrong.
You have to understand just how seriously London took the COVID lockdown. If you were unmasked on a park bench, a police officer would walk over and usher you along, back to your home. It was like being in prison. That means my girlfriend and I spent every waking moment with each other, which we never did previously. Our days were dedicated to our online classes—a total joke—and our evenings had us crowded around the television for whatever Netflix slop was on. It’s the sort of ritual that can blur long-standing boundaries or expectations about what a relationship is supposed to be. I learned that the hard way.
And so, as the summer rolled around, cracks in our relationship began to reveal themselves. Graduation was right around the corner, and both of us needed to leave London. I wanted to go home to New York, and there was just no chance—in the middle of the pandemic—that she was going to be able to navigate all of the immigration paperwork to migrate to the United States with me. All of a sudden, some of the more abstract tensions in our relationship evolved into something realer. We never really discussed our future much before, but now she started asking me about why I didn’t want to move to Australia with her. I responded by saying that I missed home, and I looked forward to the opportunities I could find there. What I didn’t mention, of course, is that I also looked forward to embracing singledom and reinventing myself away from school. Those inquiries disrupted the status quo. We were supposed to just be these star-crossed lovers who came together during a transient moment in our lives. Now, it was clear that she wasn’t satisfied with that conclusion. The pressure made the age gap in our dynamic more apparent than before. We processed the lockdown in completely different ways. Again, I was 21. I didn’t have a career I was worried about, and the rest of my 20s were a blank page. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was about to be 30. She was contending with what she wanted her life to look like in a much different way than I was.
So, I booked my flight to New York, and she booked her flight to Australia. We rounded out our last few weeks together, a sadness hovering over everything—which I didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand or respond to in the right way. In fact, this is when I start rekindling some old friendships and relationships with friends back home. One of those relationships was with an ex-girlfriend I had in college. We actually dated long-distance for a while when I moved to London. I wouldn’t say we crossed a line in those conversations, but I did find myself having long, nostalgic talks with someone about a life I used to have, and one I would be returning to shortly. If my current girlfriend stumbled upon those texts, I imagined that she wouldn’t be thrilled. Turns out, I was spot-on.
Fast-forward to our last day together. We each had flights out of Heathrow later in the afternoon. The two of us were clearing out the apartment before the departure, so we loaded a bunch of garbage into this tiny elevator in the student housing we were living in. The elevator started to descend, and, of course, it got stuck between the second and third floors. Great. We pushed the emergency button, and it was immediately clear that it wasn’t connected to anything. Thankfully, I called the help line and somebody did pick up. The operator told us that a maintenance guy would be dispatched to solve the problem, but I had no idea how long that might take. Maybe we’d even miss our flights.
There wasn’t enough room inside for both of us to sit down at the same time. So she leaned against one of the garbage bags while I stood against the wall. It’s safe to say that this was an environment where emotions might run high. And then, as if on cue, my girlfriend picked that exact moment to tell me she had seen some texts I sent to my ex.
There is no good answer to an allegation like that. The text she saw was in regard to a four-hour layover I had during the trip. I wanted to see if she could grab coffee with me. I genuinely meant it in a cordial way. Honest to god, I was not trying to engineer some sort of huge romantic airport tryst. But the damage had already been done.
So there I was, in this stalled elevator, with a woman screaming at me. I tried to maximize the distance between us, which was impossible because the chamber was the size of a shoebox. I was unable to defuse her anger, because there was nothing I could say to make her feel better. I could barely even tell you exactly what we said, but we had a wide-ranging discussion for several hours that covered the breadth of: Why would you want to see your ex-girlfriend? Why don’t you want to move to Australia? Why do you think we have to break up? Are you ashamed of me? Did you ever love me at all? What has any of this meant to you?
To be clear, she never made me feel unsafe, but there were a few moments of, Oh, I might be about to get hit here, and maybe I deserve it. It was the most visceral relationship fight I’ve ever had, where someone you care about is really hurt and upset by something that you did, in a way that is unresolvable. And there’s no way for you to escape it. You can’t just step outside into the other room to take some air.
Mercifully, about two hours later, the maintenance guy showed up, and we were let out of the elevator shaft. I ran back upstairs, packed all of my stuff, and headed back to the lobby. I called a cab for us, and my girlfriend told me that she was taking it herself. She got in, and right before the car peeled out, she leaned out the window and told me to go fuck myself. Fair enough. I called a cab for myself, and immediately started composing a series of long, apologetic texts to her. Surprisingly, by the time we were both boarding our planes, the two of us were on speaking terms again. We actually ended things in a good place.
When I think back about all of this stuff, it makes me realize that one consistent issue I have in relationships is this desire for them to be easy, even when there’s difficult terrain to work through. The reason we ended up in that mess is because I took this avoidant posture about some major questions coming down the pipeline. If I had been more forthright from the beginning—if we actually attempted to work through the reasons why I wanted the relationship to end (namely, the fact that I was just getting my feet wet in adulthood)—then perhaps all of the hurt feelings wouldn’t need to come out in a broken elevator. Instead, I stuck to a faulty narrative to make myself better. This idea that due to the life-altering fluctuations of COVID, and graduation, and our dueling nationalities, we weren’t meant to be together. I thought I had removed myself from any complicity, and then I got a rude awakening. Sometimes you just have to be honest with someone you love, even if it’s going to hurt you both.
