Breaking up on Valentine's Day
it happened to me. kind of.
I wrote this essay back in 2015 for She Does the City. I wanted to write an essay about Valentine’s Day — because, as a freelance writer, I’m always up for a good news peg (IYKYK). However, I don’t have many Valentine’s Day stories because I haven’t really had a Valentine. Except for this one. Which actually was a shitty Valentine’s Day and served as the prelude to my first major heartbreak.
Readers of this newsletter know I have a series called “From the Archives” in which I pull old essays of mine from the internet and share them here. I typically introduce them with some reflection, the kind that hindsight and time can generously offer, and more often than not, I point out how differently I would’ve written the essay in question. Most times I remark how emotionally STUNTED I’ve been and how I shied away from GOING THERE — meaning refusing myself the opportunity to break open my own heart again in order for everyone else to fuss and wince, and *hopefully* glean some wisdom over the fragmented pieces.
But, really, I shouldn’t be that hard on myself. I think accessing this sometimes painful openness and awareness to one’s own life comes only with age and experience. And lots of therapy. I’m much better writer now. I’m a much more evolved human now (though still very much a work in progress in both cases).
So I thought it might be a fun* experience for both of us if I were to share an old essay of mine and then add what I would write now — or what I think I should’ve written — underneath some of the text. (*still nauseatingly vulnerable but a true test of my current emotional fortitude to not full out cringe at my own writing and the painstakingly obvious fact that I was trying so desperately to distance myself from this experience with some on-the-nose-humour and terribly vague insight.)
Anyyway. Here’s the essay. My current thoughts are in bold Italics.
Breaking Up On Valentine’s Day
I was twenty-four years old when I had my first “real” Valentine.
Oh, sure I had my fair share of drugstore Valentines exchanges and moments of “I like like you” and awkward slow dances and fumblings in the dark, but this was different. I had a boyfriend who I was crazy in love with and I wanted to have the Valentine’s Day that the commercials had promised me all those years.
WHAT IS THIS?! I mean, yes, I had my fair share of weird slow dances with guys I didn’t like who had spaghetti arms and pizza breath, sure. But there were absolutely no fumblings in the dark. BRIANNE YOU WERE A VIRGIN UNTIL YOU WERE 22! And while we’re being honest, I only told guys that I “like liked” them who were NOT like liking me back. And the guys who did like like me, I ran away from them! I didn’t even want to slow dance with any of them except for Jason C. who repeatedly chased after me to dance to “With or Without You” TWICE at two separate high school dances, so I guess that meant it was “our” song even though there was never an “us” and now whenever I hear that song, twenty years later (!!!), I think of him. So, well played, sir.
But, yes, I did want a Valentine! Not just something cheesy and romantic but the type of feeling that comes from feeling adored and loved by someone in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
I wanted a romantic dinner by candlelight. I wanted strawberries and champagne, caviar and roses, and boxes of Godiva chocolate.
I don’t think I really wanted any of that. I just wanted to celebrate the occasion for the first time with the guy I was in love with. It felt like a benchmark I needed to hit in order to feel “normal.” LOOK AT ME I CAN HAVE A NORMAL RELATIONSHIP! I AM LOVABLE. I HAVE WORTH. That’s what we were really going for, Brie.
But I was poor. And so was my boyfriend. So, instead, I settled for store-bought cupcake batter and ready-made, pink icing, and a Netflix romcom.
My first clue that my Valentine’s Day wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, was the fact that I planned everything.
Actually, that was my second clue.
The first sign of trouble in paradise was having to remind my boyfriend about Valentine’s Day in the first place.
“So, you’re coming over for Valentine’s Day, right?” I asked him a few days before.
“Oh. Right. Yeah, I guess.”
Sure, my type-A tendencies could have been to blame for my take-charge attitude, but looking back, I knew better than that.
The truth is, I was ignoring that feeling. That gnawing, nauseous feeling that sits at the bottom of the stomach, screaming at you: something isn’t quite right with this.
The feeling had started to come up over the past few weeks whenever my boyfriend and I talked. But, I was tone-deaf. Or, more like, love-deaf. I told myself we were just going through a rough patch. He was stressed with school, I was in the midst of a quarter-life crisis; we were just a little fucked up at the moment, that’s all. No biggie.
I wanted to celebrate Valentine’s Day in the most clichéd, conventional fashion because I was missing love and attention from the guy I loved. I hoped the spirit of the holiday would inject the romance back into our love-starved relationship.
Okay, this is all very true. I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t want to have planned the Valentine’s Day celebration. I wanted him to do it. But I knew there was something off between us, so I swept it under the carpet because I was in denial.
As planned, my boyfriend came over to my apartment. We baked our pink cupcakes and ate Chinese take-out on the couch. We chatted, but our conversation was stilted and small. There was something hanging above us. A heavy, unspoken weight, otherwise known as The Talk.
But it was Valentine’s Day! And no one breaks up on Valentine’s Day.
Well, we’ll see…
So, in full-on denial mode, I decided to pop in the movie. I had chosen what I had thought would be the ultimate romance, The Way We Were.
I had absolutely no idea what this movie was about. I knew it was considered a romantic classic and starred Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, but I didn’t know that (spoiler alert!) THEY BREAK UP IN THE END!
Hey Brianne, ever hear of Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb?! Because those things existed back then! YOU DUMMY!
Granted, the title alone suggests something past tense, but I was hopeful that these two crazy star-crossed lovers would get their shit together and make it work. “If these two can make it,” I thought, “maybe we can, too!”
I didn’t think this at all all. Why would I compare my relationship to a fictional one? I’m not an idiot. I think I could see parallels between the characters and us, but I did NOT think “If these two can make it, maybe we can, too!” THEY’RE NOT REAL! Sheesh.
My third clue happened after the movie ended and Babs and Robert had gone their separate ways FOREVER. My boyfriend turned to me and said (without a hint of irony): “That was the perfect ending.”
He literally said this.
I was dumbfounded.
“How can you say that?” I said. “Sure, Barbra and Robert were polar opposites from each other and fought like crazy, but they had passion. And they loved each other.”
“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” he said.
He literally said this too.
He was right, of course. Truthfully, we were opposites and we wanted different things out of life. We had mad crazy chemistry, and there was love there, but we had spun a complicated yarn of a relationship. It wasn’t enough to transform into something long-lasting. This was becoming more apparent everyday, and we had chosen to ignore it in our own ways. Like, Streisand’s Katie, I had pushed and pushed for us. While he, like Redford’s Hubbell, chose to let go and not try.
There’s a LOT to unpack here. One simple paragraph does not do our relationship — or its flaws — justice at all. Did we have a complicated yarn of a relationship? I mean, 20 years later, we attempted something again, so, yeah, I guess we did/do. But “complicated” is such a blanket statement. We were young. We had unresolved trauma and no tools. He was avoidant, I ran anxious. We didn’t know enough about ourselves let alone know how to have a relationship with someone else that was going to last. We were also young, inexperienced, not equipped to handle the simplest forms of communication and conflict resolution. Neither of us knew how to make this work.
Officially, we didn’t break up on Valentine’s Day.
That would happen a few days later when he dumped me.
Well, technically, he ghosted me.
Here’s basically what you need to know about the breakup. It happened on President’s Day because that was the day I was able to track him down at his work – the comedy club where we met – and confront him after not hearing from him for an entire week. His responses were vague. “I’m not happy,” he said. “I don’t know” was his only other response. “
What does ‘I don't know’ mean?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said in a conversation equivalent to pounding the bottom of a ketchup bottle to get the last remnants out. And then we were done. Just like that.
But it was that night when we both knew it was over. (My fourth clue happened when he didn’t want to have sex with me, to which my heart, head and loins told me in unison: “It’s done, sister.”)
I mean, I don’t know if I really though it was over…but something definitely didn’t feel settling to me. I think I was in full on denial mode for three years. LOL.
I finally allowed myself to surrender to that feeling in the pit of my stomach. It hurt more than I care to remember.
Soon after our breakup we met at Starbucks so I could return his belongings in a trash bag and cry all the way home on the subway. And then I didn’t stop crying. I cried whenever I ate, I cried whenever I showered, and I cried whenever I tried to sleep, and then I moved home to Toronto a month later because I wanted to stop crying. Then time went on, and more things happened, like moving to New York again, and talking and sleeping with him again, and then leaving New York again. Then I dated other men, slept with other men, and not typically in that order. I even cared deeply about one of those men, and maybe even convinced myself as I was being wined and dined in cosmopolitan cities that I could possibly, maybe fall in love with him, but I never did. And it’s not because this man talked endlessly about his expensive dishwasher – although I did start to wonder how I might ever measure up to this magnificent dishwasher – I didn’t because I never wanted to feel as heartbroken as I did.
But I do remember the pink cupcakes we had baked together made great comfort food.
I lost 15 pounds after our breakup and basically couldn’t eat anything. I was so desperate for nourishment of some sort that I fished out our cupcakes from the freezer and ate one every night for dinner. Then after the fifth “meal” of these old cold, stale cupcakes, I was like, “WTF are you doing, Brianne?!” and I promptly threw them in the trash…only to retrieve one FROM THE GARBAGE out of sheer desperation! Much like Miranda did on Sex and the City.
I still think Valentine’s Day is romantic and clichéd and commercialized. I still want caviar and champagne and Godiva chocolates. But I know now to recognize that sick “SOS” feeling and to address it ASAP. Before the 14th of February – because no one woman should ever eat pink Valentine’s Day Day cupcakes out of a trashcan.
HAHAH. Oh, Brianne. You were 32 years old when you wrote this. Can you honestly tell me you knew how to communicate your needs and address conflict sooner than later?! Riiiight. That’s like you bragging about your “fumblings in the dark” prior to college. But, it’s fine. We’re better now. We know we don’t want the caviar and champagne and Godiva chocolates. We want the reliability. The stability. The safety. And the ability to communicate and conflict resolve, and watch a rom-com in peace along with some snuggles and kisses.
But, no, I haven’t eaten a cupcake out of a trashcan again, although I did sneak a chip before. It was a really good chip.