Cold in the Courthouse

The stickiness of losing yourself in someone else's love.

Hi, hello!

Another two months have passed since my last column, and the sky and trees have successfully transitioned into summer. April and May, my two favorite months as they hold so much potential, came and went. This summer: a fresh young freak. It is still open and raw - the year has not yet chosen its course.

Many things in my life have changed that I might not talk about for a long while, but I am ready to talk about someone else. So. Brace yourselves for a record-breaking submission that literally stopped me in my tracks when I opened my inbox this Sunday night. And here I am, already typing. Let me set the scene: I just opened a cold beer, and outside? Rain. Pouring. An anxious moth is circling through my room.

Sometimes I get so genuinely frightened that someone is trusting me with their whole heart, and I myself am just this half-broken girl on the internet. But I guess here we are now. Sharing. This is gonna be a long one, so grab your emotional support drink!

Here goes the message:

Dear Princess Bitterness,

I am a man in my late twenties and I have spent two years inside a breakup that never quite became one. We ended it officially. Then she kept calling. She told me she saw us on separate paths, then drove for hours to spend a weekend with me. She said she wanted to give me space, then we texted every day. She told me she wasn’t pursuing reconciliation, then sat across from me two weeks ago, opened up in ways that felt like the early months. The night ended the way some of those nights ended.

The next morning she sent a message that was warm and direct and drew a line in the exact same breath. She even caught herself beginning to soften the line and stopped herself. I have never respected someone more for a thing they did, and I have never felt more comprehensively insane.

Here is what I am trying to understand. I have a reflex, a fast automatic thing, that translates every statement she makes into its provisional. She says it’s over. I hear: over for now. She says she’s not sure she sees a future for us. I hear: she’s protecting herself from heartbreak. I have had this reflex for two years. I only caught it working in real time recently, watched it run like a program I didn’t write and couldn’t switch off. That was disturbing in a specific way I wasn’t prepared for, the recognition that no statement from her, however clear, is ever going to do what I have been waiting for it to do. Because the machine will just translate it.

But here is the complication I can’t resolve by myself. The reflex did not invent the ambiguity. She genuinely kept reaching for closeness. She said herself that she hadn’t given me the space I needed to actually grieve and let go. And offered, even in the same message drawing a final line, to be part of that grieving process going forward. I don’t know how to hold all of that. It is not a simple story of someone who was clear and a man who couldn’t hear it. It is a story about two people who loved each other so specifically that neither of them could quite stop, and one of them eventually managed take some steps towards letting go but the other still running the program.

The deeper thing, which I suspect is what you’d actually want to write about: she was the first person who ever loved me without requiring me to earn it. I grew up with a fairly thorough installation of the belief that I am defective by default. Her love was the evidence against that. Not a nice feeling, actual evidence, the only sustained counter-proof I had. So I did not just lose a relationship. I lost the single argument I had been using against my own foundational verdict about myself. Which leaves me needing to build something that should have been built much earlier, a self that doesn’t depend on someone else’s continued willingness to be its reason. I have no idea where you start that. I am asking because I think you might.

Yours in moderate structural crisis, Anon

Dear Anon,

My heart aches when I read your words. There is so much understanding you bring to the table, but is it really her that needs it? You are messaging from a desperate place. My dear, dear Anon. We will get through this. As you, eventually, will.

For the first half of your letter I did not hear you. I just heard an echo of somebody else. A woman that seems unable to stop herself. I did not see you either. I saw her driving to you. Calling you. Reaching out beyond what she promised herself she would do. Leaving, then returning. Picking you up again and again before dropping you like an old teddy bear. Where are you, Anon? Can you hear anyone else but her? Can you feel anyone else but her? You seem to be a bottomless pit; a passive ghost without a will of his own, swirling through the streets of a changed place that doesn’t contain your former lover. I wanted you to appear. I found myself desperately searching for you between the lines.

Feel, my dear, the things that happen inside your broken little heart when I write all of this. Do you immediately run to protect her? Do you start making excuses in your head?

Because you write so beautifully about her. Her confusion, her honesty, her impulsivity, her regret, her grief, her dedication to you. All of her contradictions. By the end of your letter, I feel like I know her. I can almost picture her. But I still struggle to find you.

You spend so much time defending her. Making sure I understand that she is aware of the confusion she is causing, the boundaries she is crossing, all that grieving she is postponing. You are her strongest lawyer, Anon. Every mixed signal has context. I have yet to receive a submission so carefully crafted to present a specific case. And perhaps that is because someone else spent years acting as yours. Your lawyer for that hard case. You, sweet unlovable Anon.

You write that her love was evidence against the old verdict. Against the belief that you were defective by default. Ultimately worthless. For years she acted as your protector, bravely arguing against it. Now that she is gone, you are struggling to take over her job. And because you do not know how to defend yourself, you have resorted to defending her.

But I must put forward a message, slip a subpoena under the desk. A procedural objection, if you will, that I hope doesn’t come off as judge…mental. I know, just as you have said, that this is not just a story about a cruel woman and a helpless man. This is not an easy case. Yet even the kindest, most intelligent, generous and gentle people can resort to using others. Love breaks down boundaries by offering closeness in return. I know what it is to lose yourself a little in the desire to be close to someone who understood you, who contained you. And I am afraid your former lover may be doing the same. Just like you, she is fighting loneliness by holding the door open. And sometimes that means using another person, even when we love them. To, well, soften the loss.

I can feel it getting cold in your little courthouse. So much is still in motion but nothing is really warm anymore. It is hard to leave. I understand that very well. But it is getting dark already. The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to find your way out.

See, I am not a perfect ethical person. I do not always abide by the laws. I think that being loved once, like truly, truly being loved by anyone, can sustain us an entire lifetime. And I don’t think that it is insane to hold onto that feeling as a safety net. Some are loved by their mothers and fathers, some by their friends and some by lovers. But we all need it from somewhere. We need it to keep going. That is not insane and you are not insane either.

You do not need her in your life to remember that love.

Get it out of your back pocket every once in a while when all that self-care and self-love isn’t doing its job and all the TikToks in the world cannot explain away the emptiness you feel in a double bed that used to hold two. Even when she’s long gone, living a different life without you, you get to keep that feeling your whole damn life. She gave it away for you to keep.

It is funny how you think that I might know where to start building a self that doesn’t depend on someone else’s continued willingness to be its reason. Do I? Do any of us, really? We depend on each other. We can deny it, but we cannot stop wanting it. We can only learn how to better survive the pain it causes.

I think the first step is simpler than that.

Where are you, Anon?

Best

Princess Bitterness