When Hope Hurts: Navigating a Situationship and the Fallout of a Broken Heart
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For a middle-aged person I spend way too much time on Tik Tok and listening to Taylor Swift. On April 19th she released The Tortured Poets Department and I was four days deep into having publicly outed my former partner of 8 years as a serial liar, cheater, and manipulator on Twitter. All I could do to keep myself sane was watch Tik Toks. My usual FYP of country guys who like older women, masc lesbians pouting and Chappel Roan concerts had been entirely replaced by TTPD listening reaction videos. All the Swities had expected the album to be about the end of her 6 year relationship with Joe Alwyn. Instead as they got deeper into the double album they realized most of the songs were about her several months long situationship with the 1975 lead singer, Matty Healy. I couldn’t get enough of the Swifties eye’s widening as they listened to the lyrics and pieced it all together.
In a strange parallel, what turned out to be my several months long situationship, started that same night.
@cassandrarosechauvin sorry i wont stop talking about this album for a MINUTE #fyp #ttpd #ttpdtaylorswift #ttpdtracklist #2am #taylorswift #swiftie #thesmallestmanwhoeverlived
Two and half months earlier I had caught the man I had been planning to spend my life with in some inconsistencies and when I confronted him, he admitted he had been lying and had cheated on me multiple times. We tried counseling briefly but his behavior during that and his abruptly ending the relationship in a fit of rage in early March had left me with a nagging feeling that I still didn’t know the whole truth. He continued to manipulate me into staying on his hook because he feared being outed and losing his ability to continue to practice Pokémon polyamory – gotta catch em all – in a completely unethical manner. He held a position of power in a niche fandom community and I eventually realized he was the missing stair, using his long relationship with me to con other people into believing he was the epitome of ethical non-monogamy. The diffuse nature of the community meant newcomers routinely fell into his charming web.
The absolute shit-show that ensued after I outed him to that community felt like it would never end. As was entirely predictable, more women came forward to tell me about things he had done to them. The scope of his lying, betrayal and manipulation was jaw dropping and had gone on for the majority of our 8 years together. The death of the relationship had been torturously slow, so by the time the massive explosion of revelations came pouring in I was so emotionally done with him, I was more than ready to move on with my life. I removed every reminder that the relationship had ever existed from my home. Even my family joined me in covering up his existence.
Prior to moving to a small town in the Sierra foothills in the middle of the pandemic, I had lived in the Bay Area my entire life and had long been involved in the kink community there. It was something I had pursued independent of my relationship and like so many other things, it had disappeared from my life during the pandemic. Shortly after my relationship crisis began, I reactivated my years dormant Fetlife account and searched for events near my new town. In pure kismet there was a shibari class being offered in my neighborhood the next day. As an experienced rope bottom I didn’t need a class but I was absolutely thrilled to be meeting other rope enthusiasts in my area. The instructor, Eddie*, was planning to offer them monthly and after I missed the March class because I had to do the exchange-of-stuff with my ex, I was counting the days to a happy hour Eddie was organizing and the next class in April.
That happy hour was when I first met Josh*. He was tall, ruggedly handsome with a little gap in his teeth and just enough awkwardness to make him approachable and charming. Eddie and I were the first to arrive. Josh happened to be at the same bar with friends and Eddie called him over. He introduced me and said Josh had been at the March class I had missed and being a little bit of a yenta, casually mentioned later that he was a rope top without a partner.
When I arrived at the April class Josh was there and I asked him if he wanted me to bottom for him and he agreed. There was instant chemistry. I can sometimes be oblivious when people are flirting with me but he was overt. One of the first things he said was “is your only job to stand here and look pretty while I tie you up?”, to which I eagerly agreed it was indeed my only job. At a certain point he had me tied up, lying on the carpet and Eddie asked for everyone’s attention. Josh sat down next to me and while Eddie was speaking Josh placed his hand on my leg and began gently petting me. It was electric. Everyone in the group noticed what was happening.
The next day while I was an hour deep into Swiftie Tok, Josh texted me to tell me what a great time he had and that he wanted to get together to practice tying outside of class. He followed my instagram and I friended him on Fetlife. After a week of back and forth texting and then several days of silence he finally admitted he was seeing someone and really wasn’t comfortable with tying with me outside of class. That was how my situationship began.
There was another month and a half of flirting at happy hours, tying me in class, meeting for beers, stopping by my house to see if my ceiling could support a suspension hard-point and texting about increasingly intimate topics. People who saw us together just assumed we were dating and I had to correct them, even though it was obvious I was crushing hard. Then on a warm Saturday night he texted me to see if I wanted to come meet him in town for a drink. That turned into dinner and a few more drinks and we came back to my place to practice tying. He then revealed he was single and the situationship was really on. Two months of hookups and increasingly elaborate kink scenes. One even involved me using my Taylor Swift playlist to torture him (he hates her). There were also dinners out, a trip to the river, inside jokes, flirty photos and all the things that make new relationships fun. But this was a situationship, so there were also strings of days of non-communication, statements of keeping things casual, not being emotionally available and mutually hiding the baggage that we were both carrying.
Then one night I sent him a typical flirty text and he never responded. Four days went by with silence and I knew it was over. I sent him a text asking when I was going to see him next trying to prod him into being direct. It worked and he tried to break up with me over text. He wanted to go back to being friends, but I reminded him that that would require an in-person conversation. After an hour and a half of discussing what the realities of a friendship would entail he admitted he was still attracted to me and I knew if we stayed friends the situationship would eventually resume and that seemed like a bad idea for both of us. I took friendship off the table. Then he walked out the door and I haven’t seen or talked to him since.
Fuck it if I can’t have him.
@audzphelps My world is shaken up. Eating my words by the minute. I am in denial. #greenscreen #taylorswift #mattyhealy #swiftok #swiftie #ttpd #torturedpoetsdepartment #fantheory
Josh agreed he would skip the rope class two days later. I walked in, Eddie took one look at me and said I looked sad. He wasn’t wrong, but I was so emotionally numb that the next day I started running again after many years off. Running was my masochistic form of self-harm that I could convince myself and everyone around me was actually good for me. I could also induce myself to cry with a painful sprint at the end of each jog. Everyday for a week I cried over Josh, my cheating former partner, my dead mom and the friendships that had faded away in the pandemic. I just couldn’t figure out why the end of things with Josh was hurting so much. Why had the end of a three and a half month situationship brought every painful thing that had happened over the last four years to the surface?
I often do my best thinking in the shower and while washing my hair after one of my run-and-cries, I suddenly remember the phrase – it’s the hope that kills you.
Like everyone else during lockdown I took solace in the feel good show Ted Lasso. When my mom died in early 2021, in the middle of yet another covid surge, I couldn’t hold shiva or a memorial. Instead I ate the food people had no-contact delivered to me and rewatched Ted Lasso alone in my Noe Valley apartment. I returned to the episode The Hope that Kills You again and again. A Richmond fan tells Ted they never get their hopes up so they wouldn’t be disappointed when the team lost, because it’s the hope that kills you. Ted argues to the team that he believes in hope and asks them if they believe in miracles. The locker room speech is routinely held up as classic inspirational Ted but ironically there is no miracle, the team loses and end up being relegated to the lower league. The real point of the episode was that there is no avoiding disappointment and pain in life. Not getting your hopes up will not avoid the pain.
That was what was destroying me. My situationship with Josh had given me hope. Hope that the public humiliation of my last relationship wasn’t going to define me. Hope that people out there still found me interesting and attractive. Hope that I was capable of trusting someone again. Hope that even in a small town in the middle of the Sierras I could find someone who matched my freak. It was the dashing of all that hope that killed me.
Lucky for Josh, I am not an internationally famous singer-songwriter so there won’t be a double album detailing my every emotion. I’m just like any other girl in a small town, reconciling a situationship, dealing with all the losses that life brings, crying at the gym and trying to remember how to hope.
*all names were changed to protect personal privacy
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