It was mid-winter in Boston. I had been lying, saying I wanted to get back together, when all I wanted was to fuck. This seriously blew up in my face when, five months later, we cut contact and never fucked again.
The relationship had been unpleasant—but no more unpleasant than most things. My ex’s company felt like finding a spider in my bed; our interactions were full of jumpscares. Because the stereotypes about queer relationships involve emotional overextension and endless talk about how people feel, I tried to embrace the hours-long phone calls consisting almost entirely of interpersonal criticism.
Rachel, you’re pretty toxic, they said to me over and over again. I’m sorry for being toxic, do you want to tell me more about how you feel? I replied. A long conversation always followed. This went on for about a year.
It’s not like my partner was wrong. My toxicity took the form of constant mistrust and came from my unrelenting hatred for non-monogamy, which we said we were practicing but never acted on. I was really bitter; I begged for reassurance that I could be loved despite my bitterness.
The begging was a lie—I didn’t want to be loved. I wanted to fuck.
On vacation, we had the conversation that ended our relationship. It was a stupid conversation in an Airbnb with a massive window overlooking what had once been East Berlin. The studio was full of Ikea furniture, rigid and still cozy, and included only a bed, a cuck chair, and a counter island covered in Berlin Metro mugs. My then-partner was sitting in the cuck chair, and I was standing around, fondling the mugs.
I asked them: What will you do when my kidneys fail, and then I will be sick all the time and on dialysis or immunosuppressants from a transplant? What if I won’t want to be non-monogamous anymore, once this happens to me, cuz I’ll be sick and need care?
The future is unknowable, they said, but my needs will still matter, and so I will still date around if I want to, regardless of your health, since we’re separate people.
I guess it’s fine to prioritize your own needs, but Jesus Christ. That was not the answer I wanted to my (toxic) ‘what-if’ question. It was especially not the answer I wanted from my non-monogamous partner who had never gone on a date after we met.
I saw a clear, almost-hallucinatory vision of myself as an eleven-year-old child, freshly diagnosed with an incurable kidney condition. I was a stupid, gay kid in a “NO PARKING” t-shirt, with skyrocketing blood pressure, swinging their legs over the side of an examination table.
What happened in that exam room is that all my paths narrowed. The timeline for my whole life, for family planning and for having a career, had changed completely. If I wanted kids, I’d have to have them before my thirties. If I wanted a cool job, I’d have to find it before my forties. If I wanted something, I had to know I wanted it, and fast!
It’s not like I understood that at the time. I was eleven. I only appreciated the gravity of the situation once I grew up to be someone who was never good at knowing what I wanted, unless it was fucking or fucking-adjacent. But this vision—this grubby kiddo on the exam table—still had the panache to say to me: You’ve gotta get out of this relationship.
No! Our relationship must not end! I told myself. We haven’t fucked enough.
A few days later, after fucking in Berlin and Warsaw, we broke up. Except we didn’t actually break up. We tried to break up—we stopped having sex, and I was no longer allowed to ask any what-if questions, reassurance questions, security-seeking questions, and so on. We did, on the other hand, continue our codependent phone calls. A while after that, we started kissing again, went to a wedding as a couple, and co-hosted a dinner party.
I was indescribably happy, but I also thought that all we needed was to fuck one more time, and then we could be done. We could stop wanting repair. I could finally leave. Having sex would be the breaking of a curse, which I guess was the curse of sexlessness, which isn’t a curse for everyone, but it was for me.
Then, my ex decided that they had to move to New York to build community around doing shrooms, eating olives, and working for NYC Health—trading the Charles River for a Brooklyn-based posse of Harvard alumni with personality disorders—so they ended things between us forever to do that, of all reasons.
At the end of our final conversation, I thought… Is this when I make my move? Are we going to fuck now? What should I say? I said nothing, and we didn’t.
