Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
Three weeks ago I confronted my then boyfriend about his need to talk. We’d been together five years at the time. After his third futile attempt to initiative (We still need to have that talk, he cowered.) I realized, not for the first time in our relationship, it was up to me to be the mature one.
The actual breakup was swift. “We’re moving towards different futures,” he said. I stood calmly, confidently in my power, and left (at least temporarily). We shared a home, two dogs. I drove his truck. Nevertheless, I announced my unwillingness to prove my worth and asked him whether he wanted me out immediately or if we planned to consciously uncouple. He encouraged me to take my time, hoping I’d stay in the dog’s lives. Two days later he started meeting strangers from Grindr for sex, lying to my face about it. Three days later he hosted an orgy in a hotel room. I had caught him cheating several times in the past. Each time, I’d confront him, he’d lie. His evasion skills evolved alongside a brewing hatred of me (imagine living with a person you’re actively cheating on).
I spent a few weeks grieving, journaling, meditating, while he continued to f%*k away his pain. I got sober, went to the gym every day. Dormant creativity sprouted to life. Long lost friendships reignited over nightly phone calls. I found joy lip-synching to my favorite TikTok songs. What a thrill to be inspired again, like being reacquainted with a missing limb.
One of my videos circulated on Facebook where my ex’s mom, his coworkers, our friends and immediate families, not to mention near strangers watched. “I thought you was the one/I guess you just the two/You want the last laugh look, now the jokes on you,” I mouthed along to the lyrics of Punk Rocky by A$AP Rocky rolling around on my sister’s lush granite kitchen countertops (eternally grateful for my soft place to land). A follow up video featuring an Audrey Hobert song listed the following hash-tags, #ShootingStar #CheatingEx #GlowUp #WinningEra.
Soon after I received a DM from a mutual friend. “Do Better,” the message commanded. The friend then unfriended me. “Do better?” I thought to myself. Better than what? He was the one who cheated. I stayed faithful. He immediately started screwing strangers while I was still sleeping in our bed. All I did was make a TikTok. To cope, to process, to heal. To empower myself post trauma. I was flabbergasted.
I instantly felt vulnerable posting anything else. Suddenly sharing what was not my burden but my ex’s dysfunction, in the public eye, felt irresponsible, no matter how cathartic. I wasn’t doing it to be petty and yet I felt immature. Whiny. But why? I didn’t cause his cheating. His choices had nothing to do with me. If anything, sharing the sordid details, even inadvertently, should have been powerful. So, what is all this guilt all about? Could I have done better? Is there such a thing as a moral high road when it comes to revealing a cheating ex on social media?
Signed,
Proudly Moving On
There are a lot of unanswered questions in this letter, PMO – ones you don’t ask and ones you should probably answer.
A question worth asking would be “what did your ex-friend mean by ‘do better’?” This could go any number of ways. Were they complaining about your performance? Were they critiquing your song choice? Your shooting location? Or were they talking about the way you were carrying on about your break up?
I realize it sounds like I’m just making fun of you, but I’m being serious here; two words and an immediate unfriending doesn’t really convey any real meaning other than “this friendship was probably on its way out anyway”. There’s no real way of knowing if, for example, they thought you were acting the fool, pretending that you were the wronged party (in their opinion), that you were putting on a performance to convince other people you were in a better state than you actually were, or what. Maybe they don’t get why it was the seventh time he cheated that made you finally break up instead of the first or second, and so they’re kind of tired of it all. Or they think maybe you’re trying to get some sort of West Elm Caleb digital dogpile going. Perhaps they were saying that they thought you were wallowing and making a production of having been cheated on and making it your whole personality.
(Ok in fairness, you were making a literal production but you know what I mean.)
It could well be that they picked sides and decided that they thought your ex was in the right. Or that you were airing your laundry about your ex and they found that distasteful, regardless of who was in the right or in the wrong. Some folks love mess like Marie Kondo, and some folks think that we all err too far on the side of mining our private lives for content.
I have no idea. They’re the only ones who do.
But I have a question that you might want to answer – to yourself, if not to me: what, exactly, were you hoping to accomplish with the videos? Obviously, you were performing for an audience, so there was at least the intent of other people seeing it, but what was the overall goal, because I find it a little difficult to believe that this was just about catharsis. Especially when you add the hashtags in, which give the game away.
(Really, the best way to get that sort of catharsis would be to write a song about what a cheating shitbird your ex was, have it become an iconic anthem that your band is known for and also your ex now has to sing it with you every time you perform because it’s one of the band’s greatest hits.)
Look, I grew up in the 80s and came of age in the 90s. My generation inventedthe passive-aggressive public song choice – first as away messages on Instant Messenger, then LiveJournal and Myspace posts, descriptions of moody-as-fuck drawings on DeviantArt and so on. Everyone would pretend otherwise as they did it, but we all knew it was bait. It was an invitation for friends and strangers (but mostly friends) to say “hey, what’s going on”, so you could complain without coming off like you were trying to gossip or be whinging. It was kinda cringe and immature then and it’s kinda cringe and immature now.
And even if you had a point… it’s the sort of behavior that folks would get annoyed about because it was so passive-aggressive, especially the longer it went on.
Of course, we didn’t stomp that behavior out fast enough or hard enough and that’s how it ultimately mutated and spawned emo music, a crime Millennials are still paying for.
Here’s the thing: the issue at hand isn’t necessarily about having the moral high-ground or not. It’s about what you’re hoping to achieve and why, and how you’re going about doing it.
You should, at the very least, be honest with yourself about what you’re hoping to do with this and why, and then be ready to deal with the opinions of others… including people who think what you’re doing is distasteful. Many of those would be people in your social circle who knew everyone involved, and their seeing it or having it shown to them was pretty much inevitable.
You had to understand that. You know as well as I do that the Internet is now basically five websites and we post on one to talk about what other people did on the other four. Did you honestly think that this wasn’t going to filter out to your social circle? Was that not part of why you made those videos on a site whose algorithm would ensure they crop up in the feeds of people who are six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon away from you? You say you wanted to empower yourself, which is admirable. But if I’m being honest, the performative nature of this doesn’t read as empowering to me, it reads as wanting validation from others. That’s understandable; when you’ve been wronged, you want other people to see and agree that you’ve been wronged.
I don’t think it’s necessarily healthy or helpful, but it’s certainly understandable. But understandable isn’t the same as being “worth pursuing”, because it’s not going to give you what you want.
You want closure, but you are mistaking wanting to be told that you were right and he was wrong for closure. Closure is something you have to give yourself; waiting for others to give it to you means you may be waiting for a long, long time. Especially, as you’re discovering, that other folks don’t necessarily agree with you.
That’s the problem with seeking that validation in the guise of closure; past a certain amount of time, you start running into the wall of “man, why are you bringing up old shit?” That only gets more likely when everyone else has moved on and sees this as done and dealt with. Maybe they thought he did you wrong, maybe they didn’t, but it seems that they’ve all made their peace with it in one way or another and are wondering why you won’t. And it’s pretty clear that either they don’t see his sins as being as mortal as you do, or they don’t see it as worth making a spectacle about it. While that isn’t “fair” (because fairness doesn’t really come into it), it does mean that they’re going to roll their eyes about it and find it to be a bit much.
And hey, maybe this is how you find out that your “couple” friends were mostly really his friends. Yeah, that absolutely sucks, but it happens more often than you’d think. And it sucks even more when you know you were wronged and wronged badly only to see folks say “ok… so?” or decide that they’re not as bothered by it as you are. It burns like acid, I know, but again: this is why you don’t want to confuse validation with closure. Some folks are just not going to see it the way you do, even if it’s seemingly clear cut and obvious.
That’s where you have to decide whether you’re doing this for the validation and agreement of others, or if you’re doing this for you. If you’re doing this strictly for you, then you’re going to have to be willing to brush off the opinions of folks who disagree with you or think you’re Doing It Wrong. Power doesn’t require the buy-in of others, especially if you’re reclaiming it for yourself. If you’re doing it for validation… well, you’re still going to have to expect that people are going to disagree. And then you have to decide whether their opinions are going to matter. If you have the moral clarity to say “this was shitty on his part and I don’t care if you disagree,” then it may be better to just take this as weeding your life’s garden and moving on.
If you ask me, with the full understanding that I am both An Old and have an allergy to public drama: I find the whole public performance of “look how over you I am” to be tedious and also false on its face. It’s the sort of act that makes it clear that no, they’re still living in your head rent-free and they’re looking into subletting. It’s very “any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king” in its way. I especially don’t see much value in public performances of petty revenge. I understand the impulse, but you’re really setting yourself up for folks paying more attention to the ‘petty’ part.
Also: the hashtags are almost certainly what pushed it over the line to being gauche.
The best revenge isn’t just living well, the best revenge is not letting them occupy a single iota of your bandwidth. The “I don’t think of you at all” is far more devastating than any glowup or lip-synch performance. And it’s one of the surest signs that they don’t have any power over you any longer.
Good luck.
Hi! My girlfriend is poly and I’m mono, and we’ve been together for around four months. We are both female and have known each other for five years before we started dating!
She was the one who asked me out or said she had feelings for me, and of course I said yes, because I loved her and I wanted to try dating again after a toxic relationship. Then, I had no clue she was poly at all and I thought I was the only woman she was seeing at that time, but it turns out she had been seeing someone else at the same time as me.
This obviously came as a shock to me, and I questioned her about it, after finding out, and she just said she was poly and moved on. But I’m still stuck on that. The woman she was seeing at the time behind my back when I didn’t know she was poly, broke up with her three weeks ago or so, and she called me just to vent to me about how much she’s going to miss saying “good morning” and texting this other woman.
This woman who is her ex, she had known for one week before dating her. And she texted her daily and hourly. Whereas, she went weeks without texting me, and whenever we did text? I was the one initiating it.
I just found out today she’s now dating two more people. And I’m so tired of it
I love her so much but whenever I see her repost things talking about love or post things about loving someone online, it just hurts. Because I know it’s not about me, and I know it’s about the other people she’s seeing. And I hate it. I know she doesn’t love me.
Do you know what I can do? Maybe? Because I’m sick and tired of feeling like this and I want to be able to love her without hating her for what happened and without hating myself more for not being enough for her.
The Other, Other Woman
Two things can be true, TOOW: your girlfriend can love you and she can be a shitty partner who has been treating you badly and acting like an asshole.
The issue here isn’t that she doesn’t love you, and it’s not that if she loved you, she wouldn’t be with other people. Nor is it some failing of yours that makes you “not enough” for her. You’re not “enough” for her, because nobody is; no single person can be all things to another person, and trying to be is a path to heartbreak and madness. It’s one of the failings of our culture that we teach folks, implicitly and explicitly, that our romantic partners should be able to fulfill all of our needs. That puts an insane and impossible amount of pressure on all of us to fill roles that we are ill suited for and in many cases, simply can’t keep up with.
Nor is it that she doesn’t love you, or love you “enough”. It’s that she loves you and she’s with other people. That’s the thing about being polyamorous – shitty etymology aside (really it should either be multiamory or polyphilia), it’s about love not being a zero-sum game and that love for one person not taking away from a person’s capacity for love for another person. When she posts about love, she’s not excluding you or talking about other people, she’s talking about you and others. It’s “yes and” not “instead of”.
Nor does loving someone mean that you automatically treat them with great grace and care; love doesn’t magically download new instructions on how to behave with someone. Someone can love you to pieces but still be an inconsiderate dickbag; the two don’t cancel each other out.
That’s important to remember, because while she has the capacity for loving more than one person, that doesn’t prevent her from conducting herself with selfishness and a complete lack of thought or care. Quite the opposite, really. If anything, she’s managing to avoid all the best practices for a poly relationship. The fact that she didn’t tell you up front that she’s poly and has other partners is, in and of itself, deeply shitty. I realize I’m Captain Monogamy-Isn’t-Our-Default-State, but that doesn’t make it ok to just spring non-monogamy on someone, especially someone who doesn’t realize it’s what’s being offered.
Non-monogamy isn’t for everyone, and folks have a right to make an informed decision as to what kind of relationship they’re being invited into. Your girlfriend took that choice from you by concealing her other partners, which was shitty. Responding to this revelation with “well, I’m poly, that’s just how it is” made it worse. And then complaining to you about her break up with the other woman – when you are still trying to come to terms with suddenly finding out that you’re in a relationship you didn’t consent to – is just callous and uncaring to the point of cruelty. It’s often an emotionally fraught situation for folks who are polyamorous; dropping it on you like this break up is profoundly thoughtless.
And “thoughtless” does seem to be the theme of the day here; while every ENM is different and folks can make their own rules about how they’re conducted, there’re a number of best practices. One of the big ones is “while you don’t necessarily need to get other partners’ approval to date someone new, they should at least know there’re other folks in the mix.” Again, even at the most basic level, it’s about informed consent – something that your girlfriend seems to think happens to other people.
It’s also important to note that you aren’t defective or at fault here for not being ok with this. Your monogamous and monoamorous, and that’s fine. That’s who you are, that’s how you are and that’s great! All that it means is that, even under the best of circumstances, this is a relationship model that wouldn’t be right for you. It’s the definition of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole; it can be accomplished, but only by sanding away all the edges and corners until it’s a completely different shape.
And these are far, far from the best of circumstances as you can get without coercion or abuse getting in the mix. Your girlfriend is treating you with, if not disdain, then at least with indifference; taking you for granted would imply that she seems to think about you at all. You may have been friends, you may have been lovers, but she doesn’t treat you with the respect or consideration that both of those are owed. She’s being a shitty partner to you, and I honestly have to wonder if she’s treating her other partners the same way. Not that it matters – whether she’s just as inconsiderate and unthinking as she is with you or not doesn’t change that the way she treats you is unacceptable and an absolute deal breaker regardless of whether you’re mono or poly.
There’s only one path forward here, and that’s for you to leave. There’s nothing to save here, nothing to salvage and nothing you could do differently to make things right that doesn’t involve a flux capacitor or a traveling doctor with a big blue box. The best time to leave would’ve been when she surprised you with a metamour. The second-best time is right the fuck now. Staying a moment longer is a moment that you could be sharing with someone who is right for you, who wants just one partner (whether at a time or ever) and someone who treats you with the respect and care you deserve.
But, again, I need to hammer this home: there is no reason to be upset at yourself for not being “enough”. This isn’t about being enough, and it’s not because you did anything wrong. You, as so many others, have loved not wisely but too well, and you should forgive yourself for doing so. Maybe in time you’ll be able to forgive her for doing the same when and if she has some startling moment of awareness and realizes what she’s done wrong. But if that day ever does come, it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to do it from a distance, and with the healing you won’t be able to get while you’re with her.
This isn’t on you. It’s not about your not being worthy, it’s not about your not being loveable, it’s not about your being flawed. It’s all about her, her selfishness, and her inability to see any further than her own wants and desires. This is her flaw and her fuck up, not yours.
Treat this like ripping off a bandage: the quick pull will sting, but it will be over like it never happened. And once you’re settled, you will feel like a massive weight has been lifted off your shoulders.
I know it hurts, but you’ll be ok. I promise.
All will be well.
