273 Beyond Girlfriend-Boyfriend

AnnaMartin

I had my first boyfriend in sixth grade. I remember hewore skate shoes, these really puffy skate shoes, and he had hair that was solong it was impossible to see his eyes. We met up at the flagpole after school.And I distinctly remember he gave me a fist bump, and then that was it. We weregirlfriend-boyfriend.

By the way, you had to say it like that,“girlfriend-boyfriend,” really fast as if it was one word, because we were nowone entity. We were girlfriend-boyfriend. But I remember feeling nervous thatwe weren’t living up to whatever it meant to be girlfriend-boyfriend. And thepressure got to be too much. We broke up a few weeks later. Which, I mean, itwas middle school.

[Music]

From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin, and this isthe Modern Love podcast. This week’s essay is not about middle school, but itis about the pressure of that girlfriend-boyfriend entity. It’s called “MyChoice Isn’t Marriage or Loneliness.” It’s written by Haili Blassingame andread by Shana Small.

ShanaSmall

I broke up with my boyfriend of five years duringquarantine. I sent him an email with the subject line “My Terms,” and proceededto outline why I wanted to be single. In an effort to impose order on mydecision, I included subheadings, like “Why I Need This,” “What This ChangeMeans for You” and “What We’ll Say To the Outside World,” followed by a trail ofbullet points. Under the subheading “What this doesn’t mean,” I wrote “that Idon’t love you anymore.”

We were three months into the pandemic, and most of uscouldn’t fathom the devastation to come. By then, though, we could begin to seeour loneliness stretching into the future with no endpoint. And here I wasalone, and equally desperate for connection, breaking up with my boyfriend offive years even though nothing between us had broken. For months afterward, Istruggled to understand why. I had to look back on flashpoints throughout therelationship to see that my singleness was inevitable. I was simply finding thewords to explain it to myself.