Three days after they told me they couldn’t marry me because they wanted a husband, not a wife, I found my ex moving their stuff out of our bedroom. They were just moving into the room next door; I still sobbed. The pain was physical: a pit in my chest, a wind tunnel in my stomach, a flu in my joints. But I picked up my dumbbells: it was strength day. They stood in the doorway, distraught.
‘I wasted your time,’ they said. ‘I ruined your life.’
We were together eight years, across five states, two dogs, four rats, and a snake. They were the first openly bisexual person I’d ever gotten to know. A friend we were both a little in love with set us up. In past relationships, my own bisexuality had been a secret, a novelty, or a threat. With them, bisexuality was just something we shared, like growing up with attics and liking Taking Back Sunday’s music. We were at a house party once, maybe our third date, me sitting on a counter while they stood against the fridge, cracking jokes about how ‘half of me is attracted to half of you.’ Even when our relationship looked straight – they presented as a man, I as a woman – it was always queer.
I was in a rare out-of-the-closet phase when I first met them, after years of intermittent denial. My first crush was on my best friend in sixth grade. I was pulling a shirt from my dresser, thinking about how funny she was, how much I loved being around her, when I felt a flutter in my stomach. I froze, feeling everything – shame, disgust, disappointment, fear – at once. A few days later, I told her I didn’t want to be friends anymore. When I tried coming out in my late teens, my high-school BFF – on whom I did not have a crush – looked at me with such pure disgust that our friendship never recovered. Enough reactions like that, and I decided to just be straight.
But crushes, attraction and love are joyful things. To be disgusted by your own capacity for connection is a violence; it turned me into a walking defence mechanism. After a physically and sexually abusive relationship in high school, I spent a decade believing I deserved the brutality rather than admitting someone could love me and still leave lasting scars. All those years later, being with my ex – watching them drift in and out of the closet, hating the shame and fear they struggled with even as I enabled it in myself – made it easier to accept myself. We held each other through substance abuse, panic attacks, queer reckonings, depression, and grief. It wasn’t perfect – they became the voice of my imperfections; I became the voice of their anxiety – but we had matching tattoos and a memory jar in the closet. Their name in my phone was a Bright Eyes song.
Yet even when I was out of the closet, my mind lived in a cage with razor-wire walls – in pain all the time, overwhelmed by the impossibility of ever feeling safe. Generously, I could be called high-strung. More honestly: reactive, difficult, exhausting to love. Believing myself to be bad, I overreacted to anything that felt like proof or exposure. I slammed doors when I felt misunderstood, threatened to leave when I felt unloved. I would apologise three times for something I didn’t do to avoid facing what I had. I self-harmed after failing a driver’s test. A one-word text could incite 10 paragraphs in response. Sometimes it felt like I was frantically throwing myself into the exposed wire, sometimes like I was cowering in the centre, making myself as small as possible as the sides closed in. I’d managed, over years, to make the cage nicer, insulating it with therapy-speak, but the razors were still sharp.
And now the person I loved, whom I had let love me, had hurt me.
The morning they broke up with me, I twisted the engagement ring off and tossed it onto the bed we’d bought and built together. My muscles still carry some memory of that moment; my body wanted to hurl it through the mattress, the floor, the downstairs apartment, the foundation, and into the earth’s core. Three days later, I prepared to do Romanian deadlifts by that bed as they watched me from the doorway, waiting for my response. I could punish them, make them feel worse than they already did, or I could ask for space and wait until I felt differently, leaving them to their guilt and uncertainty. My options: negativity or neutrality.
‘I could’ve spent these years with anyone, doing anything,’ I said instead. My voice was even as if I was just stating facts – because I was. ‘I’m glad I spent them with you. Thank you.’
My ex cupped one hand around their nose, arm crossed tight like they were holding themselves together. It was a gesture I knew as well as my own reflection, one that meant they were feeling something in a big way – in this case, relief. For me to express gratitude when given an excuse to lash out surprised us both. When I started crying again, it was because my brain felt like it had mutated; the cage was now an infinite hallway, with as many rooms as I cared to enter.
The summer before our engagement, driving into the country to stargaze, we’d joked how we’d spent our lives convincing ourselves we weren’t really queer, because everyone was.
‘If someone said they’d never been attracted to the same gender, my brain just went, they’re lying,’ I said.
‘Or they just haven’t met the person who’s gonna make them bi yet,’ they said.
There was something comforting in sharing that specific, solipsistic form of denial: are you even gay if everyone else is gay, too? Believing that had helped me feel less alone; knowing I wasn’t the only one who’d blurred reality to survive made me feel like I belonged somewhere.
The break-up destabilised me – fearing the loss of my future and of my best friend, I threw up everything I ate, drank water only by force of will – but it somehow didn’t darken my self-esteem. Where earlier wounds built the cage, this one burst it open, lighting me up like sun on snow.
When I’d finally come out, and stayed out, as bisexual, it was a reclamation of the full breadth of my life
I get it, I wrote to a friend. I believe them when they say they thought it could work with me.
That’s great, she said. But you don’t have to be OK with it right now. If you want to be mad, you can be.
But I wasn’t mad. I knew how queerness feels easier when it’s compartmentalised. When I’d finally come out – and stayed out – as bisexual, it was a reclamation of the full breadth of my life. For me, being bisexual always meant I could choose to love men and call it enough; even so, when I told my parents I was seeing someone and my father asked who ‘he or she’ was, it felt like the life I had fought for was finally catching up to me.
For my ex, it turned out differently: they wanted to be with a man. Realising that denying my identity also denied me liberation had been a hard-won victory – how could I not celebrate that in someone else, even at the expense of my comfort?
It’s not that I didn’t continue to grieve the relationship after it was over, waking up at 3 am, heart burning in my throat. It’s not that I carried no fear into my next relationship, that I never viscerally anticipated a repeat of that moment when my life was torn open. But I can now look back in wonder at the cage I once lived in. Therapists had told me for years: I can’t control other people, only my own response. When I finally did it, not acting like the person I wanted to be but being her, I opened the door to a room where I was brave and kind. All those years, while one part of me pushed at the razor-edged walls, another part was secretly building new rooms: one where I could appreciate a relationship without needing it to be forever; another where I knew I’d survived everything so far and would survive this, too; as well as the one where I could be proud of my partner for coming out as gay. Grateful they trusted me. Glad they might find someone who could love them fully, and glad for myself, too.
I’m not sure I needed to be dumped to finally leave the cage, but I do think it helped. Like any queer relationship, ours didn’t follow the script of a straight one – not in its flourishing, and not in its ending. But I should’ve trusted the generations of queer breakups before mine – being best friends with your ex is a very gay thing to do. They aren’t my partner anymore, but they’re still my family. We run errands together, see each other’s parents, talk about our new relationships. I kept the memory jar. We got new matching tattoos after the breakup. We’d spent our relationship healing each other; somehow, the breakup healed what we hadn’t reached.
