On Being Friends with My Ex

Don’t be fooled, all of my other exes can choke.

Sep 21, 2023

I am my mother’s son in many ways. We are both extremely sensitive, yet have a flair for the dramatic: from how we dress, to how we react to even the slightest of inconveniences, and even how we talk with our hands (if we gestured any more wildly, we would become airborne). We have both spent years working in nightlife—she in cities all over Europe, I in New York—in our twenties. Our middle toes are longer than the others on our feet. We are both high-functioning depressives with panic disorders and chronic migraines to boot. Chief among our similarities: our policies on exes.

My mom had a lot of boyfriends before she met and married my dad, and I say that with pride. She was—and still is—a hot, bad bitch. Now, I haven’t had as many boyfriends. I have, like, maybe four exes, and a handful of other individuals who enjoyed straddling the labels of what we were more than they enjoyed straddling me. But when it came time to move on, I followed in my mother’s footsteps: I didn’t. See, we don’t forgive and forget. We remember and stew. Sleight us in the most minor of ways or break our hearts into a million pieces, and we will make a record of it to file away. Even if it didn’t render our relationship broken beyond repair, the memory lingers like a shy yet curious cat—hiding in the shadows, but always there, watching, witnessing. My body is exclusively a storage unit for grudges, and I pay for unlimited space. I will hold a grudge for you and a friend. Come one, come all!!!!!!!!

It is for that reason that I am not friends with any of my exes. Even if whatever between us simply dissolved over time and circumstance, without one hurting the other, I still immediately go no-contact the second that union breaches. Except, of course, for the times I got blackout drunk and/or high and texted them 47,000 times in a row over the course of several months. Sometimes years. (I was in my twenties, bitch, give me a break.) It was just too painful for me. My mother is the same; she’s even gone so far as to relocate after a breakup, her twenties a game of hopscotch in cities all over Eastern Europe. Now, seeing as most of my breakups happened in New York, I couldn’t really avoid a certain neighborhood for the rest of my life—I’VE TRIED—because it’s just not possible, whether for work or personal reasons. I steered clear of Pratt’s campus for six years until I had to go there for a friend’s exhibit. I successfully avoided the Bronx for a few years until I went to rally behind Bernie with some friends in 2016.

Still, the idea of being friends with an ex was never something I could see myself doing. Until Pete.

Pete and I were together for almost six years before breaking up last November. I’m not going to get into the why because that’s our business, but I will say that it was the most amicable breakup in the history of breakups. And I don’t mean “amicable” in the way that it’s used in a statement written in the Notes app and then screenshot and posted to Instagram by a celebrity announcing their split from whomever they were dating or married to—when I see that word used by a rich, famous person to describe their very-public breakup, I know someone has thrown a dish at the other’s head at one point or another, or even while they were picking a filter for their post!!!!—I mean we literally watched White Lotus together in bed after The Talk. Sure, we cried. A lot. It fucking sucked. Breakups suck, even if they’re for the best.

While I knew it was the healthiest decision for us, I also knew that the real heartbreak would be losing Pete forever. I’m being mildly facetious when I say a stalactite hangs off of my heart, that my heart never fully recovers from any kind of heartbreak—which, in some ways, is true—and that I will be lowered into the earth surrounded by all of my precious grudges, but I’m being completely serious when I say that I would feel a gaping absence—one that I would never be able to fill—in my life without Petey. It would truly feel like a part of me had died.

Pete and I met on an app—Scruff, no less—in 2017, a few weeks before I graduated from my master’s program at The New School, and we began dating shortly thereafter. We would make it official by the end of that summer. Life has thrown a lot at us during the course of our relationship—namely both us getting diagnosed with our respective chronic illnesses in the middle of the pandemic; Pete with multiple sclerosis, me with fibromyalgia a year later—and we took on every challenge together. But for every challenge met, there was a success to celebrate. A new job to toast to. A debut memoir to rejoice. A beautiful, new apartment to throw a party in. A milestone to commemorate.

The joy and hardship we once celebrated and faced as boyfriends, we now celebrate and face as brothers.

While we still—and always will—care deeply for one another, it goes much deeper than that. This bond wouldn’t have been able to be forged without the physical and emotional intimacy of our relationship, without being able to trust each other with the parts we deem deep and dark about ourselves, the things we’ve never revealed to anyone else out of fear or shame or embarrassment or, more times than not, some combination of all three and any other feelings or emotions that forestall establishing a true and honest connection. The very same feelings and emotions that, when shared with your partner without equivocation, result in a love that’s unconditional.

Pete knows things about me that no one else does. Contrary to what the title of my first book, Born to Be Public (plug!) implies, I am actually a very private person in many ways. For every flagrant display of bravado or flamboyance is a moment spent lying in the dark questioning literally everything I’ve ever done or said, or results in my doing breathwork at Pret a Manger in the middle of the day because my recollection that we are all going to die one day registers again as if I’ve just discovered that fact for the first time.

Again, I’m being somewhat jocose here, even though both of those scenarios have happened—more than once. I’ve always been scared to reveal the unvarnished me to my previous partners. And not just with the superficial things, like how I look without make-up or having my hair done—polished, curated, intentional—but the things that I thought made me difficult, if not impossible, to love. I worry not if, but when a bad pain day will ruin plans made in advance, and I will have to lie in bed or on the couch all day, covered in ice packs, doused in no fewer than twelve different THC-CBD topicals with a joint in my mouth and surrounded by multiple bottles of Advil—and it certainly won’t be the first nor last time my chronic illness and pain will affect us as a unit. For years I went undiagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, made a hundred times worse when I developed small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—SIBO, for short—about a year or so after Pete and I started dating. I couldn’t take four steps out of the house without immediately needing a bathroom. Not to be an overachiever or anything, but as a result of this debilitating bowel urgency, I started isolating a good two years before the pandemic. I stopped leaving the house; we stopped having sex; I became extremely depressed because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I retreated from everything—from family, from friends, from life. From even my own relationship.

I thought that that was it: Pete would leave me because I had come with too many issues. Issues that seemed to multiply by the day, from this once-mysterious bowel disease, to complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), and then fibromyalgia in 2021. (And that’s not all, folks! I got diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] just a few months ago!) I wondered how much longer they would find their lives to be interrupted because of my (literal and figurative) shit until they came to the conclusion that this was not what they had signed up for and enough was enough. How many more nights of uninterrupted sleep (because I get really bad night terrors and panic attacks) would they force themselves to endure before running for the exit? How many more times would they go to the pharmacy for me to pick up my medications, or accompany me to a doctor’s visit for a procedure that required someone else bring me home, or fill a bathtub with ice for me to lower into because my entire body was seized in immense pain and panic, so I needed the cold to shock my nervous system into rebooting and bringing me back down? How many more times would they show me unconditional love before they realized that it wasn’t worth it; I’m not worth it?

The answer is: the limit does not exist. Because even now, almost a year after breaking up, they still do the same things for me. And more.

Just last week, I took the train up from New Jersey to run some errands in Brooklyn (for those of you who don’t follow me on social media or otherwise know, I’m moving to Los Angeles in a few weeks, but let’s stick a pin in that for now) and Pete took me to lunch after getting off work because they knew that—on top of getting ready to move across the country and attempting to stay on top of work and my other responsibilities—I was going through a rough time, and I just needed space to simply be—even if no words were exchanged.

I was able to get the things off my chest that had been sticking to it like taffy. Not only do we talk every day, but because they know me so well—more specifically, my character, my nature, how I move through the world, emotionally and mentally—I didn’t have to do a recap, because they’ve been along for the ride every single day for over six years now. I don’t have to tell them how the things that are stressing me out or upsetting me or weighing me down are affecting me because they already know. What they know above all else is that I need calm and stillness, and they facilitated that for me, even at a popular lunch spot in Bushwick at the height of lunch, just by being there—in every sense of the word.

Our relationship was, and still is, a gift to me. All of the insecurities that I once harbored when it came to sex and intimacy, the fears that I had about not being worthy of the kind of love people are driven to make art about, about not being enough, faded over my time being Pete’s partner. And the insecurities I still have, the fears and anxieties I still contend with, I know, now, are not a burden, least of all to those I love, and that my issues are not daunting enough to repel the right person away. I was able to realize all of this because of them. Because of Pete.

That’s not to say that we don’t have boundaries, which is another thing our relationship has taught—and I’ll speak for both of us here, because not only has Pete given me permission to write this, but they’ve also read every draft—us. We were able to teach each other the importance of showing up for each other by showing up for ourselves. Besides learning the best way to take care of ourselves (and knowing when to ask for help and how), we are diligent about our mental health. We go to therapy, regularly check in with our respective psychiatrists, and do the work needed to continue having a happy and healthy friendship. I have been the de facto therapist in so many of my previous relationships, including friendships, and let me tell you: THAT SHIT IS EXHAUSTING. Our mortifying lack of mental health resources notwithstanding, I would emotionally burn myself out multiple times a week if I didn’t clock when I started fully taking on other people’s problems as my own. There’s a difference between sharing a burden and making a burden exclusively your own, forsaking your own health and wellbeing until a solution—or something close enough to serve as one—is achieved. That is not love. How the hell are we supposed to show up for the people we love and care for if we don’t show up for ourselves first? (If you read that in RuPaul’s voice, you are a giant homosexual.) What use are we to those we hold near and dear if we’re completely depleted because we don’t respect boundaries, both self-imposed and otherwise?

Being friends with your ex is hardly a unique position to be in, as many folks (read: lesbians) are friends with their exes. One of the things that I find unique, and am, in a weird way (but maybe not so weird?) thankful for is: Pete and I are both single for the first time in five years. Putting yourself—and your heart—out there again is fucking scary. But at least Pete knows where I’m coming from, and vice versa—which makes staring down the barrel of dating again a little less unnerving. We have each other to remind ourselves what great catches we are—a phrase I’ve been told countless times, but haven’t fully believed until now, until Pete. And I know Pete feels the same way about me. (I can prove it because I made them sign an affidavit in blood.)

Pete and I are no strangers to change and transition. “No one is,” says you. And you’re right. But when you’ve faced one extenuating circumstance after another—like both of you getting diagnosed with your own respective chronic illnesses in the midst of a global pandemic, for example—you develop a uniquely thick skin. Even with things that are exciting, like my upcoming move to Los Angeles. We’re both excited: I’m looking forward to starting a new chapter; they are excited for me; and we’re both excited for them to visit—especially since they’ve never been to the West Coast. Still, with change comes uncertainty; it is irrefutable, like the facts: I will be across the country, living in a city I still get lost in. They will remain in New York. But one thing will remain for certain: We will…

You fill in the rest.

SOS (Save Our Serotonin)

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