019 - Valentine Rewind
Reflecting on the noble - if uncomfortable - truths of my last relationship
I met M outside of a concert on a cold night in Williamsburg at the tail end of 2023. I was living in Los Angeles but was in New York that week on business, a sentence I particularly relish typing for how firmly it roots me in my adulthood, despite not having a wife or child or single parcel of landed property to show for it.
She recognized me from my game show hosting days, an ice breaker for which I am increasingly grateful the further removed I get from that viral epoch. We started breezily chatting and then aimlessly ambling the streets of North Brooklyn, ostensibly following “the group” to some undetermined after-party but quickly losing pace as we lost ourselves in conversation.
Key Takeaways:
We were born eight days and three years apart in the same NYC hospital
We attended rival private high schools in the presumptuously termed “Ivy Prep League” (neither of us were accepted into an Ivy)
Upon graduating from a midwestern university with a reputation for hard-partying and corn-fed quarterbacks, she settled in Williamsburg “when it was chic”
She ventured down variegated career paths while earning her own hard-partying reputation as a doyenne of turn-of-the-2010s Brooklyn nightlife
The pandemic reset her professional priorities and prompted a pivot to psychotherapy (utilizing an attachment-based, trauma-focused approach rooted in psychodynamic and interpersonal theory… if I’m remembering correctly)
Obvi, we had mutuals, but she was a few years older than me — age appropriate! — which probably explained why it had taken this long for us to meet, although we figured we must have unknowingly shared the same social spaces during our decade-plus tenure as boroughmates (or met in a past life, perhaps on a train car to Auschwitz… WE CAN MAKE THAT JOKE).
I found her wryly funny and effortlessly cool, and hardwired as I am for Ashkenazic attraction, I was epigenetically smitten by her Semitic smile. It felt like hours had elapsed (because they genuinely had) by the time we reached the Greenpoint bar that had been texted to us as the rendezvous point. That’s where she informed me of her sobriety, a result of having been scared straight by an early morning car crash and subsequent DWI arrest during the dog days of that first COVID summer.
I took this news in stride, being practically sober myself — not for any reason other than my digestive system’s pathetic inability to metabolize alcohol like a normal person and my sincerest desire to never again participate in what society so blithely describes as a “hangover,” but what I experience as a nuclear bomb detonating in my forebrain and nausea that might reach the high 7s if measured on the Richter scale.
Hell, she wasn’t even the first therapist-with-a-rap-sheet I had fallen for. And I was falling for her. Something about our encounter that night seemed bizarrely fated. I had gone into the evening preternaturally confident that I would meet “my person,” and in fact I had spent more time than I’d care to admit scanning the crowd for female faces from my side stage perch during the show. For a good while I was locked into a prime prospect whose high cheekbones and unbridled enthusiasm for the music had my gears turning, that is until the guy next to her threw a wrench in the cogs when he threw his arm around her shoulder.
Even as my friend Alex and I filed out into the lobby, I remained inexplicably assured of an unshakable conviction that my soulmate was attendant, and as we started back towards the apartment from whence we had pre-gamed, I abruptly stopped at the corner, and under the half-true guise of wishing to thank the guy who had gotten us the tickets, I told Al to go ahead without me while I returned to the venue. Outside the lobby I fell in with a crew of fellow loiterers.
M was among them.
By the power vested in me by our apparent destiny, we kissed on the sidewalk in front of Ponyboy, somewhat haltingly, and then trudged half-frozen towards Transmitter Park on the waterfront, trading memories of long-ago closed establishment on Manhattan Avenue (Manhattan Inn, where Ponyboy now stood, being one). Between gazes at the midtown skyline while wintery winds whipped off the East River, I kissed her again — better this time, or at least good enough to earn an invitation into her nearby apartment where we… warmed each other up WINK WINK. Our conversation and giddy laughter continued unabated in bed until just shy of 6am. It was one of the most magical nights of my life.
We saw each other a couple more times that week while waiting out my flight back to LA. Before we knew it we had an Airbnb booked for New Year’s in Joshua Tree, and by the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, I had moved back to New York (NOT FOR HER, I SWEAR) and into her apartment (BUT WE WEREN’T “LIVING TOGETHER” YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?).
I shall now pause for Q&A:
Don’t you think you might have been moving too fast?
Yeah! Was I on the verge of turning 40 and she 43? Also, yeah!
Is it possible to really ‘know’ someone after two months of a mostly long-distance relationship?
We were both Sagittarius! We were born in the same hospital! She was funny and pretty and had a truly killer vintage t-shirt collection and made incredible meatballs and skillet cookies and she loved my dog and had impeccable taste and didn’t smoke or drink and she’s Jewish and she had a great job and she owned her apartment and her parents lived in the Hamptons and she’s a drug dealer and remember how convinced I was that I would meet my soulmate at that concert and we met at the concert so we were clearly soulmates and did I mention we were born in the same hospital? Mt. Sinai! WHAT MORE WAS THERE ‘TO KNOW’???
Wait, what was that part at the end there?
Her parents live in the Hamptons! They sold their Park Avenue apartment during the pandemic and moved out to the island full-time, except for a few months in the spring when they rent a place in —
No, the part about her… being a drug dealer?
Oh haha yeah, but it’s her “side hustle,” and it’s just weed and shrooms, nbd. And it’s a woman-owned business! Show some respect!
Oh, okay, sorry. Was that the only red flag?
Well, she had a counterfeit handicap placard that she would leave on the dash so she wouldn’t have to pay the meter or move her car for alternate side parking — a car that would start only after the passing of a breathalyzer test thanks to a court-ordered Intoxalock installation stemming from her DWI. She also bought a fraudulent service animal certificate for my dog, over my vehement protestations. Oh and then eight months into our relationship while vacationing in Italy, she finally disclosed a chronic STI she had been hiding from me the entire time we were together, having nothing but unprotected sex — and only because I started exhibiting mysterious symptoms that THANKFULLY was diagnosed as an unrelated, non-sexual environmental reaction by an extremely handsome Sicilian doctor (and reconfirmed by a straight up fugly urologist back in New York).
Are… are you guys still together?
Negative, just like my latest STI test :)
On this Valentine’s Day, as I reflect on last year’s romantic extravagance (surprise front row seats to Cat Power covering Bob Dylan at Carnegie Hall) and the 11 months I spent in the thrall of a relationship that I whole-heartedly believed was divinely ordained, I feel a Whitman’s Sampler of assorted emotions. There is tremendous gratitude for all the joy in what was, some sadness for the untapped potential of what could have been, a tinge of grief for the vintage tees absorbed from my collection into hers, a distinct sense of relief in no longer being accessory to a conspiracy to distribute/possess with the intent to distribute Schedule 1 substances, and ultimately, a serene contentment in knowing that in any given moment I am in the exact place I’m supposed to be, with the people I’m supposed to be with, doing the things I’m supposed to be doing.
For the near entirety of 2024, that place was Brooklyn, with M, walking the dog to Transmitter Park, trying every offering from Radio Bakery, picking up lox and whitefish direct from the Acme factory, seeing Oh, Mary! off-Broadway, celebrating friends’ weddings from coast to coast, roadtripping to the Catskills to look at houses we’d never buy…
And then one day in early November, that place became Westchester, with my parents, walking the dog around the cul-de-sac, making pancakes and eggs and my own whitefish salad, cleaning out the garage with my dad, driving my mom to her hair appointments, visiting my sister and her kids in Scotland, solo roadtripping to the Catskills to continue looking at houses I’ve yet to buy, starting this Substack at the dining room table…
It’s all good either way.
And just so we’re clear, don’t think I broke up with M because of the drugs. I’m not a dweeb — and if I’m being honest, I miss having a reliable (and complimentary!) source.
As part of her journey to sobriety, she connected with a yoga and meditation recovery practice offered by a sober guru who publishes his sādhanās to YouTube. We would watch these together and follow along as the guru led us through prayer and breathwork and core-strengthening exercises. At the conclusion of each meditation, we were instructed to put our hands together at the heart center and repeat the phrase Sat Nam — “truth is my identity.” M was apparently so moved by this mantra that she told me she considered getting “Sat” and “Nam” tattooed on each of her wrists.
And yet… she used a fake name with the landlord of her “office” (stash house), a fake handicap placard, a fake service animal certificate. She concealed her illicit activities from most people in her life, including her personal therapist for fear of jeopardizing her own therapy career. She kept her sexual health a secret from her sexual partner, going so far as to disguise the daily medication she used to treat her condition by switching out pill bottles. She habitually stole cutlery and glassware from restaurants and lied to gain unauthorized access to exclusive hotels or events. She lied to herself every time she referred to her six-figure drug-dealing operation as her “side hustle” when it was very plainly her primary hustle (the therapy is a front!).
No one is an expert on how to live a life, and I make no judgment as to how M chose to live hers. I was evidently approving enough to stay partnered with her for as long as I did. But in the months following my personal transformation last summer, I came to the profound realization that truth truly is my identity — the only identity I can respect for myself and in others. For as much I as I could love this woman and feel a soul connection with her, I couldn’t bear to be in relation with someone so glaringly wrapped up in a web self-deception, to the point of being blinded to the brutal irony inherent in her daily practice: when she says “truth is my identity,” nothing could be farther from the truth.
So Happy Valentine’s Day to you, dear reader! And Happy Valentine’s Day to me: a single, childless, propertyless, 40-year-old man living in the snowy New York suburbs with his parents. That is my truth, and I am loving it.
Awesome read! Happy vday /(VD-day?)
Damn, this was good, but I was really hoping it would be more about Bobby Valentine