reflections on the open relationship to breakup pipeline
We opened our relationship after seeing the Challengers movie, but after the presidential debate, we just broke up.
I know what everyone’s thinking. A couple opens their relationship after four (plus) years and then two months later breaks up. Everyone knows I’m the one who couldn’t handle it. Everyone knows that I’m the one crying myself to sleep every night while they go out on dates with women from the internet.
We go see Inside Out 2 together. We hold each other on the couch, weeping. We sleep in separate beds. We sleep in the same bed. We drink a bottle of screw top red wine. We smoke a bowl.
It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
Being queer often (almost always) means that you are operating with a chosen family. If you’re anything like me, that’s your only option. My parents are the kind of homophobic conservative Christians that most people think aren’t around anymore. They’re around, and they have some form of love for me, and they say “I see,” quietly on the phone as I choke out the words “We broke up.”
To them, we were only ever friends anyway.
For me, my family is falling apart. The love is still unconditional, but as the title changes, something is lost that I can never get back. The grief pins me down and sits on top of me and smothers me like the July heat. I’m sweating, choking, gasping for a breath of fresh air that won’t sweep in until September. (It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.)
They’re seeing three new girls in three days this weekend and I’m seeing my ceiling fan above my bed. I’m too old and too mature to self-destruct. If I were twenty-three, I could drink and smoke my way through this and romanticize the chaos of something ending. But I am no stranger to loss. Loss visits my house and leaves it in shambles. I have held her hand. I have pushed her away and she has come back with a vengeance and a key to my apartment.
My friend takes me to a workout class and then buys me a smoothie. My other friend takes me grocery shopping and then buys me a sandwich. It’ll be okay, they say. This is a chance to start over. How exciting! Train for a marathon! Take a cooking class! (It’s over! It’s over! It’s over!)
I was in my mid-twenties when it started, and in my early thirties as it ends. I know who I am – I think. I’ve gone to therapy, built a support system, deconstructed my religion, recovered from my eating disorder. I pay taxes and have health insurance and I know better. I know that it’s time and I know that I’ll be fine and I know that, as the Hot Priest in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s masterpiece Fleabag pronounced: It’ll pass.
The pulsating ache of my heart persists, reminding me that life is actually very, very long, and I have much more of it to face if I’m lucky and if the Red Dye 40 doesn’t kill me first. I remind myself that lots of our grandparents, buried side by side, were probably deeply unhappy and never had the chance to reinvent themselves the way I do now. I’m sure my great-grandmother would have loved to live in a 450 square-foot studio apartment for $1,100 a month if she had the chance. It’s over… it’s over… it’s over…
There are so many administrative tasks associated with my heartbreak. The lease will be up in October, who gets the dog, are those my books, do you want this print, who keeps the couch, the electric kettle was a birthday gift. Innocent children are dying, the country is descending into madness, it’s the hottest summer on record. I need to find an apartment.
Life will go on. It went on after November 2016 and March 2020 and it will go on after July 2024. It’s only love and loss, not the first and not the last. Change is a pill I have to swallow to get better. I have rolled its bittersweet taste around my mouth a thousand times. I know every step of the routine, every sharp piece of gravel in the driveway, and the screech of packing tape as I rearrange my DNA one more time. Life will go on and the planet will survive long after the human race is gone.
It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.
July 2024
Elizabeth Bradshaw 