Vol. 1, Post #23 Breathtaking...Literally

Strap yourselves in, Dear Readers. it's a biggie. My ongoing sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A modern dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.

Before I get to what I’ve “learned” or “discovered” about myself in this last month, let me get right to the punchline and tell you this: All those things that we believe about the people we date — how we tell our friends, “Oh, he’s got avoidant attachment style and even HE knows it because…” or “Oh, his ex was a narcissist so that’s why he’s skittish because…” — NONE of those things matter even a tiny bit IF WE OURSELVES ARE NOT WILLING TO LOOK AT OUR OWN DAMAGE.

So, Dear Readers, with that in mind, I will spill the beans on what can only be called a BANANAS month, one that ricocheted from horribly absurd to deeply sublime, and all of it — every minute of it — is on me. What I knew and ignored, what I knew and finally copped to through a veil of tears, what I didn’t know until it slapped me in the face, and what I still don’t know even though that part is starting to feel very delicious.

Also…this post is dedicated to my pal Wendy, to whom I have said, on multiple occasions, “You must go online to meet people today. You MUST. Even if you hate the idea. Because 90% of single adults meet online. The chances of you walking into a bakery and reaching for the last blueberry muffin at the same time that Clive Owen reaches for that last blueberry muffin, at which moment you lock eyes and then it’s a year later and you’re madly in love, vacationing in Nantucket with friends and laughing about the day you met, that, my friend, is the exception to the rule. Hold your nose and dive in, Honey. ‘IRL’ is, well, rare at best.”

Keep this conversation in mind as you read on.

This story begins not with blueberry muffins, but with an utter SHIT SANDWICH that I willingly made for myself a few weeks ago, bit into, chewed, swallowed, said “Ew! Gross!” and then took several more BIG bites.

(Speaking of sandwiches, I've always wanted to be in the middle of a Rachel Maddow and Clive Owen sandwich, but that’s another story, even though I’ll use this opportunity to post the photo I took with Rachel a few years back, before we dive into me spilling some super personal shit that really stabbed me in the heart before it lifted me up to the sky.)

Ok, ready?

In mid-June, about four months after my last goodbye with my ex (when have we heard this before, Abbe?), and yes, after I had already spent a month dating a whole bunch of new people with some mild interest building there with one or two of them, my ex and I started texting each other.

If this were a live reading, I’d be ducking from the rotten tomatoes that my closest pals would be throwing at my head, because no one, and I mean, NO ONE thinks that my ex and I have anything more to discuss. We don’t, but we do have the hands’ down hottest sex I’ve ever had, as I’ve endlessly written here in various posts, so you can stroll through the earlier shenanigans if you feel like a literary jerk off session. We were completely and utterly naked with each other in the most intimate sense of the word and as is always the case when we take a break or in fact, break up (we’ve done both before), we hungrily miss each other, which leads to one of us getting weak and folding. And that’s what happened. One of us broke, and suddenly we were in touch, admitting that we were dreaming about each other, fantasizing about each other, blah, blah. Since I was able to retain a tiny semblance of sanity about me, I cut off the texting pretty quickly and told him that if he had anything of substance to discuss with me, he could call me, but I was not having this convo over text. We made a date to talk.

Dear Readers, leading up to that call? I was ALL THE THINGS I wrote here that I hate about dating people who “activate” me — I was on edge, breathless, thinking and rehearsing what I’d say based on what I assumed he was gonna say, running scenarios — basically being a dumb-ass. I had my phone at the ready, looking over the texts we were sending leading up to our talk, at dinner with friends, at my son’s gig, ugh, I’m getting nauseated because I had JUST THAT VERY WEEK told some other women friends how important my peace had become in my life and here I was, panties afloodin’ because I was going to have a Big Talk with my ex after what I had promised myself was the last breakup. We had too many of these “pauses” in three years. It had gotten ridiculous, no matter how we felt. Even I knew that.

So we spoke. Since it was a conversation that defies all logic, let me just summarize it this way. On one hand, all the bells and whistles. He loves me. He wants me. He thinks he’ll go into the ground thinking about me and how he desires me. But on the other hand, he also thinks that he can’t (these are his words) “level up” (i.e., do his work) so that we can end our cycle of stop/start every time he gets a Grown Up Feeling That Scares Him.

So he suggested…

He suggested…

(I wish I could adjust the font size on this Substack because I’d either make the next few sentences POSITIVELY GIANT or ridiculously small; not sure which would better convey the insanity).

He suggested that since his business and therefore his life (he’s a chef/owner, yes, I know) is starting to go up in flames after a decade of 24/7 toiling, and that since he’s basically losing his identity along with his restaurant, that yes, we should give in to what we always crave, and what has always felt like a very soulful connect in addition to a deeply physical one, as long as I was good with the following caveat:

He might want to have a baby.

In the almost five months since our split, my ex had randomly met someone who was “very young.” The meeting someone else wasn’t surprising, even though he said he had not gone looking for it. I, on the other hand, had gone looking for it, which I told him, as part of my moving away from him, with real intent. After hearing that I was also dating someone (Mister T. was my primary candidate in that moment, remember him?), my ex told me that he needed to see me STAT, basically so that he could take back what was once his (what a caveman. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that hot), but that he wanted me to know that he was also questioning everything in his life, was seriously adrift, and if I’d agree to see him again, we might need to keep it sort of quiet because this woman, or any potential Baby Mama that he could manage to lure into his lunacy, “might not understand” our relationship.

As I felt my lip start to curl in disgust, I tried to keep my composure when I responded to this (before I subsequently hung up on him). I told my ex that the last thing I am is An Option for him. Or anyone. Dear Readers, he pressed on. He was trying to convince me that having a baby was actually MY idea for him — and on this, he’s correct. When I started seeing him back in 2021, I was polyamorous, partnered with B., and my now ex was my secondary partner. At one point, I told him that I wanted him to be happy and maybe what he needed to do was meet someone who could give him a family. At the time, I meant it. I was committed to B. and our life together, and knew this guy wanted kids.

But that had been years ago. He and I had been monogamously together for some time, so the idea that he was now suggesting, that in lieu of a restaurant, he might want a BABY (because babies are so much easier than restaurants, especially when you are a burned-out shell of a man who hasn’t taken a day off in 10+ years) MIGHT’VE been laughable, if I wasn’t so busy having the breath sucked out of me. I was gutted. We had indeed loved each other mightily over the past years, and this conversation was just erasing all of that like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind at warp speed. Funnily enough, he didn’t seem to understand how disrespectful, selfish, or, OK, let’s just say it, INSANE this was, and so I hung up.

I would like to tell you that I shared this story with deep outrage with my besties over the next few days, but that would be untrue. Every person who knows me and knows the situation with my ex (he RUNS from any sort of emotionally challenging discussion and always has —and I know that all too well, so who’s the idiot here?) had the same disgusted HOLY FUCK reaction. But I did not. To each of those people, I sadly asked, “How could he treat me this way if he loves me?”

No one understood that I couldn’t see what they saw. They heard a ridiculous story about a selfish man-child who is spiraling and thinking that a baby will somehow make him feel whole (meanwhile, he only mentioned “a baby” to me, nothing really about the woman who might birth one for him except the fact that she was young. In that, I felt as sorry for her as I did for me). I knew my friends were correct in that this was preposterous, but I also knew I felt rejected, diminished, and confused. You love me so much that you just want to fuck me on the side? Is this really even happening?

I went into a very deep, deep, deep pit of darkness on this. No amount of journaling, walking in the park, meditation, tarot pulling or similar could stop my tears or turn off my brain that played the conversation over and over again. I hated the way he kept putting himself down, telling me “your star shines bright; you don’t want a guy like me” to say nothing of how DELUDED he was. He basically kept returning to this barely formed sentence, “Restaurant No Work No More. Maybe Me Have Baby.” Ok, he’s not Big Foot but that’s the gist.

I was even more flabbergasted and utterly devastated as I started to digest how fucked up I WAS, in that part of me was still longing for him. There was no doubt in my mind that we are now completely and finally through, but had he asked me to come back for real that night, I probably would have, would have supported him as he got through this absolutely classic mid-life crisis (that’s ridiculous in its own right, the idea that I could support someone who did not want to take accountability himself, but, confession time, I’ve had partners who have relied on me too much and I’ve allowed it.) The realization stung like hell.

It surprised me not one bit when I started to run a fever, started to cough with a burning sore throat. I was home for a week, testing for Covid and smacking myself around for taking that phone call. I hadn’t spoken to him in MONTHS, had avoided all temptation, had congratulated myself on moving ahead with intention. What a moron I had been for setting myself back.

You still with me or are you fainting with horror?

And then…the following week, three things happened on the same day that snapped me out of it. One. Two. Three. Three things that illuminated to me how important that phone call actually was. Three things that reinforced that I was in fact goddamn LUCKY that I picked up when he rang.

The first thing that happened is that I went back to therapy. Therapy with someone you like and trust is just as good a release as sex. I go in and out of therapy based on discovering something that I want to explore and I had not been going for some time, but a quick call to my therapist, the sharp intake of her breath in disgust (see? even my therapist) sent me running in to her office. And for the first time in over a decade of seeing her on and off, she helped me make a very important connection between what I wanted from my stunted, emotionally unavailable ex and my dead parents — and how it was ok to mourn what I wanted and did not get, to make that pain real and not brush it off by saying “fuck it, I can get through anything.” And it was a big moment. Like, an “Ordinary People” moment*.

*If you haven’t seen this movie in decades, and you’re the kind of stubborn asshole like me who spends a lot of time needing to be strong, who ENJOYS being strong, and likewise, can be scared of admitting that something is causing you too much pain because you have to be a Super Hero, it’s worth a rewatch.

My therapist pointed out to me, via the phone call with my ex and the feelings it brought up in me (I was ashamed that I was sad about it — yes, ashamed. I wanted to just stay hardened to his bullshit, tough as nails that his inability to love himself simply meant he couldn’t love me properly, done and done, and when that didn’t work, I started to panic), that it was ok to be human and in fact, it was ok to be heartbroken. I can’t remember the last time I sobbed like this as I sat through our session.

I was still crying when I called my darling Acacia on my drive home from therapy. In a manner that defines Acacia’s overall delivery, which is loving and no nonsense, she echoed my therapist. “Everyone in the world goes through what you’re going through. I don’t know why you think you have to have the hardest shell about it.”

She’s right. My therapist is right. The hard shell I took on since childhood to deal with really shitty parents who most certainly were not emotionally available to themselves, much less to me, needed to crack. It took that fucked up call with my ex to start the process.

So I told you that three things happened on that day, remember? (1) Therapy breakthrough and (2) Acacia, who I admire more than most people, both of them telling me it was ok to be a mess until I wasn’t. I’m not sure I ever truly listened to anyone else tell me that before, even though I’ve also advised people to just let the tears flow until you run dry. I guess it was finally my turn to hear it.

And the third thing? I sketched out some of this last week, at the end of this post. It still doesn’t seem possible.

I went home after therapy, stood under a hot shower for what seemed like days, and actually put VISINE in my eyes because they were slits. I had plans to meet friends for dinner and I told myself that it was also time put on some real clothes since I had been humping around in yoga pants and a tear-stained shirt, listening to Chappell Roan non-stop, with Stevie singing that version of “Silver Springs” thrown in for good measure (this was not a Beyoncé moment — I wasn’t indignant; I was soppy sad). Taking a shower and getting dressed was a nice change of pace and I realized that I had been VERY depressed since that phone call and only now was starting to shake it off. I put on lipstick. I put on perfume. I left for the restaurant.

I greeted my pals outside the place by saying, “Ok, at least I’m not crying, right?” and we had a delicious, expansive meal. We ordered the entire menu of small plates, told stories and laughed. I hadn’t laughed in weeks. And then, as some of you know, this happened.

I can’t summarize it better than in this text that I sent to my darling ex-husband a couple of weeks after that night.

After weeks of being scared to allow myself to feel heartbreak, after the “permission” to start releasing that pain, both in therapy and in the safety of a conversation with one of the people I love most, I started to remember who I really was and what I could do. I reminded myself that I was proud of how I parented myself when I was little and no one else took care of me, and I also reminded myself that I was not here to parent a 40something year old man. As soon as I gave myself a pass to just sit in that pain as long as it took to dissipate, it weirdly (or correctly?) started to fade away fast. Even that night, I felt myself sitting up straighter in my chair at the restaurant, scanning the room, seeing what was out there in the world.

And, as ridiculous as it sounds, in that moment, the man I am now dating crossed the room, looked at me, sat down at our table and we all started to talk. My dining companions are still slightly agog at this, but as my eyewitnesses, if they were chiming in on this post, they’d tell you that this is precisely what happened that night.

It’s now a couple of dates in and New Guy and I are definitely in a groove that feels comfortable, nourishing, sexy, and safe. And I don’t think ANY of this would’ve possible if I hadn’t answered that fucking phone and bit into that shit sandwich, which became my blueberry muffin.