We all had boyfriends who hated us, right?
Just me? Cool, ok haha just kidding. Me neither!
Made in Chelsea: Season 5, Episode 3 (E4)
“You’re not going to like this…” he hesitated.
I took a deep breath, and braced myself with a reluctant bite of my bland Pret lunch.
“Go on…” I coaxed.
“there’s just no way we can hire a woman.”
“Mmmm…” I hummed, pretending to thoughtfully chew on my chalky sandwich to buy enough time to swallow my rage “why do you say that?”
“I’ve known my co-founder for a long time. You’ve seen our offices - they’re just a small room! There’s no way we can hire some gorgeous influencer and have her come into our office every day. I just don’t trust him to treat her respectfully. Or, it would be even worse - he’d fall madly in love with her, and they’d start dating! The dynamics in the office would shift. I wouldn’t be able to give her feedback. Or what if they break up? Then I would have to choose between them….”
“…right” I swallowed my rage, searching for the most diplomatic way to respond.
The tone of the conversation had audibly shifted. Our relationship was on a knife’s edge, things were already so tense. We were circling each other in the arena, eyes locked. One wrong move could trigger the other to lunge for the jugular. I was familiar with this dance. I knew that one ‘unsupportive’ word about the business would lead to a nasty tirade that would throw me off for the entire day - a day that I needed to study.
As always, I deferred to the Socratic method: “..do you think it’s a good idea to be in business with someone who you can’t trust to be professional around women?”
Sensing my ulterior motive, he devolved - as always - to defensive threats: “What, you’d rather me spend every day working in the same room as some up-and-coming influencer?”
“If she’s going to be best at doing the job, yes,” I retorted.
Silence.
“Why, is there something I need to be worried about?” I feigned concern, rolling my eyes. Frankly, I was finding it difficult to care.
Our feelings had for one another had soured weeks ago. I had tried to break things off multiple times, only to be talked into giving it another chance using logic I struggled to recall when relaying it to my incredulous roommate. If this hypothetical influencer wanted him so badly, godspeed.
After he delivered some nebulous, unconvincing reassurances, I hung up and joined the queue for the BSG (if you know, you know).
Queue to enter the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
Unsurprisingly, our relationship ended shortly afterwards. It was catalysed by a similarly tense conversation shared, comically, amidst the throng of the Christmas market at Jardin des Tuileries. Amongst happy couples and families celebrating the holidays, we were exchanging barbed words over a glass of cheap champagne purchased to celebrate the end of my first exam season at graduate school. On our walk there from lunch, he mentioned Jordan Peterson’s insane, bad faith interpretation of Bill C-16, an anti-discrimination law in Canada. Peterson claimed there would soon be mass-incarceration on the grounds of misgendering, even accidental or unintentional.
Obviously, Peterson’s argument was a scare-mongering, implausible attempt to incite distrust of the ‘woke agenda,’ amongst his followers. A quick google debunked this dumbass myth. Yet, there was no trace of irony in my boyfriend’s voice when he brought it up. It had triggered another tense and meandering conversation wherein I felt obliged to ask probing, seemingly harmless questions that slowly undermined the foundation of his straw-man argument. Our conversation reached its climax as we faced each other in the tent, clutching our respective drinks. We plastered false smiles across our faces as we stared each other down, performing a love and affection the atmosphere demanded.
A sinking feeling in my stomach told me his answer before I posed the question: “if we were to have a child then, would you support them if they came out as trans?”
“Of course not!” He blustered.
My champagne turned acrid in my mouth. It was so glaringly obvious we weren’t meant for each other. I didn’t have the energy to feel disappointed, all I felt was shame.
My shame didn’t come from my association to this man - that had come months before when my girlfriends had showed me screenshots of his instagram story, on which he shared Joe Rogan posts mocking pronouns. Rather, my shame came from letting it go on for this long. I knew from the very start it was wrong, but I let it happen anyway.
Joe Rogan, the man who loves to platform grifters and peddle dangerous myths :)
In fact, I can pinpoint the moment I should have ended it - on our first date.
We were exchanging the classic first date introductions: allergies, siblings, pets, relevant traumas, schooling (if you’re posh and English) etc. He had teased, playfully but pointedly “Ugh you’re not one of those feminists, are you?”
I had laughed, tersely “You do realise I’m going to grad school next week to study human rights, right?”
“Of course…” he responded. He didn’t need reminding, he had been the one who had eagerly pushed to go on the date before I left for Paris. He backtracked “I’m just kidding… I have two sisters! Of course I’m a feminist!”
A common mistake, my smile tightened. I should have spoken my mind: I’m not interested in how you humanise a group of people because of their relation to you. Instead, because he was eye-wateringly gorgeous, I pretended to sigh with relief and ordered another whisky.
We drank a disgusting amount of whisky that night, and shared a kiss in the back of the cab home that genuinely weakened my knees and made my heart flutter. I spent a sleepless night grinning at my bedroom ceiling and kicking my feet. I floated on air the following day. I knew it was wrong, but it was too late. I was hooked. I had already begun chanting the delusional girls’ mantra in my head:
I can change him.
What a fucking idiot.
Uncomfortably, I’m sure he felt the same way about me when we met. He likely felt that I was ignorant, irrational, indulgent and overly-sensitive. In fact, I know he felt that way. He would do things like refuse to speak to me when I got upset, or show up an hour and a half late to meet my friends and then call me needy when I confronted him about it. He stayed because I served a purpose.
He admitted when we met that his parents were concerned about his previous relationships: mostly instagram models. Let me be clear - this is nothing against the profession itself. Content creation is literally the path I am, unsuccessfully, pursuing now. Specifically, he said those he had dated with were disengaged with and disinterested in history and politics. In one - certainly exaggerated - story, he said his ex-girlfriend had asked him what the Holocaust was.
Consequently, he was embroiled in a fight for legitimacy amongst his family, friends and colleagues. He wanted to be taken seriously, and entrusted with more responsibility. He needed to show up to family gatherings with someone with the trappings of being ‘well informed.’ I’m privileged enough to have benefitted from a great education. My own insecurities at the time meant I was desperately trying to prove how smart I was to everyone all the time (ew, I know). I would, therefore, spend every waking moment trying to ensnare others in tiresome, sanctimonious debates. At the time, I could even hold a conversation in his family’s native Arabic dialect (not anymore, sigh)
Many superficial characteristics deemed me the perfect candidate for his rebrand, and he was extremely keen to lock it down. Everything went into overdrive. On our second date, we browsed engagement rings. I was 24.1
In turn, he ignored all of the other red flags in my own behaviour. Throughout our relationship, I wasn’t loving, understanding or affectionate. In fact, I was stubborn, distrusting and withholding. It’s no excuse, but I really should not have been in a relationship at the time. My heart was a giant, weeping wound that I was desperately trying to piece back together since it was crushed only months earlier.2 The feeling of being chosen after such a sweeping rejection was an intoxicating, cathartic balm that made me weak with relief.
Siwa, Egypt 2021 (It’s rude not to fall in love in a place like this, let’s be honest)
That’s the point, though. We both went against our better judgement. We made each other laugh, and we were attracted to each other. We didn’t really like each other for who we were, but rather what we represented. That felt like enough for a time.
Eventually, as our respective disillusionment began to calcify, and the reality of our incompatibilities were exposed under the harsh lights of the Jardin de Tuileries Christmas market, we parted ways.
The break up wasn’t too painful. Deep down we probably both knew we were mutually serving a need of some kind - a status symbol, validation, proof of that you’re a desirable partner. Cynically, our use for one another had run its course.
I toyed with the idea of turning this essay into a larger reflection on how the manosphere has harmed women, and how I was naive enough to think I could protect myself from it even from within my own relationship. My naïveté had indeed sucked me into the age old quagmire of defending someone else’s behaviour for so long that I felt I couldn’t admit I had made a mistake in entangling myself in the first place.
But I knew this wasn’t the point I was trying to make.
This essay has been in my drafts for a while, quietly hibernating until the conclusion to the thoughts I’ve been turning over in my mind revealed itself.
Finally, as I was gleefully indulging in Love is Blind this week, a storyline reached its conclusion, and my own hit me like a freight train.
Chris and Jessica (Love is Blind, Episodes 8 & 9)
The scene is as follows: Chris and Jessica are chatting on the sofa, after spending weeks basking in the glow of a new relationship. Seemingly out of nowhere, Chris confesses that he was never physically attracted to Jessica, and implies that he was never as invested as he led her to believe.
It is a painful watch to say the least. Jessica is humiliated on television, Chris secures a searing villain edit and widespread public condemnation and I, unfortunately, was plunged back into a painful memory.
Embarrassingly, I experienced my own Chris and Jessica moment in college.
I was returning to New York to start a new school year. I landed in JFK to a loving message from my then partner (completely different guy) to the effect of: “I woke up this morning so excited knowing that tonight you’ll be sleeping in my bed next to me.”
Cute, right?
I could tell something was off, because I asked my partner if he could lend a hand hauling boxes out of my storage unit. He responded to my text with: “idk that sounds like a you problem,” and went to get a haircut.
Eventually, with the help of two kind men who respectfully approached me in the unit because I looked particularly tired and desperate, I got all my belongings back to campus. They dropped me off from their van, for free, declining any payment and insisting I return the favour by “working hard and graduating.” I will never forget the kindness of these strangers.
At the time though, I was blinkered by a blind loyalty to my partner. I didn’t want to give the wrong impression. So, as I climbed into their car3 I mentioned I was in a relationship, to which they responded: “You have a boyfriend and you’re moving alone? Where the hell is he?!” They were not impressed when I told them about his haircut.
I felt a stirring in my gut.
That night, when I went to my partner’s house to reunite after my time in England. I nervously asked the question: “Are you happy in this relationship?” and was met with a devastating tirade listing all of my shortcomings, including but not limited to: “all my friends hate you,” “when we’re alone together I find you awkward and difficult to talk to,” and my personal favourite “I don’t think I can handle a girlfriend whilst I’m beginning my new finance job.”
Even typing this out now - almost ten years later - I want to vomit. Up until that conversation, I had truly believed we were happy. The pain I felt in hearing it was compounded by the utter humiliation of not having seen it coming.
He broke up with me, of course. I was left to analyse every conversation we’d shared for the entirety of our relationship, tearfully trying to decipher which moments indicated how it would end.
I’m sure I have selective memory of our time together. Maybe it was more obvious than I realised. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. I heard he’s married now, I truly hope he’s happy.
I don’t think my role is the same in my college relationship as it was with my red-pilled partner in grad school. In college, I definitely wasn’t a status symbol. In fact, he made this clear by continuously undermining the ‘success’ of my social life in comparison to his own. Before breaking things off he said: “I think I’ll move on from this fairly quickly and you’ll struggle to do the same.”4
Instead, the comparison serves to show that I’ve weirdly had a lot of boyfriends who - whether I knew it or not - fucking hated me.
Watching Chris and Jessica, I knew I wasn’t alone.
In fact, there was an enduring discourse online about whether men in heterosexual relationships even like their girlfriends. There was the woman on TikTok who unboxed the dog food lunch her boyfriend packed for her as a ‘joke.’ There were the male Love Island contestants5 who joked to one another about manipulating their partners so they can fool around with other women. There are the manosphere influencers who use their disrespect of female partners to drive engagement. There’s the speculation about Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s relationship dynamics (on this, I have no opinion). There is the infamous video that continues to circulate of Spencer Matthews taunting Louise Thompson for his continuous infidelity. The examples go on.
I have elaborated in - frankly too much - detail, how and why I found myself in a relationship with someone I didn’t really like. I will also concede that I am not doing enough to help repair the fraught gender dynamics I’m explicating here. Indeed, I often and openly joke that I’m a ‘certified man-hater,’ in no small part because of the experiences I’ve shared in this piece and the examples listed above.
However, I do believe that with the loss of third spaces and community to the consumerist and digital world, respectively, have rendered relationships much more transactional. Certain corners of the internet have adopted ‘high value’ man or women into their vernacular - a term I find utterly spine chilling. In fact, the looksmaxxing community - which has recently taken to the fore - bases it’s entire ideology on assigning numerical ratings to people. Personally, I think assigning value to one human life over another is weird and creepy. Yet, even if you don’t participate in or subscribe to those communities, their maxims still infiltrate our culture in insidious ways.
As a woman in my late 20s, I am currently swimming in the implied pressure to find a long-term partner. I can assume it will only get worse as I enter my 30s. Even amongst my closest friends, there’s sometimes a weird competitive undercurrent to our interactions - a distinct anxiety about the possibility of being ‘left behind.’ Whilst irrational, this is entirely understandable given we were raised on the story of Bridget Jones - an independent, financially stable women with a career and a close group of friends, who is deemed a failure because she is single at 32. Before you come for me in the comments telling me that culture has changed, I recently sat and listened to a senior colleague at a work offsite declare that “women lose their value after 27.” There were no repercussions for his behaviour, but guess who got told off for reporting it?
You guessed it!
Bridget Jones, an iconic British romcom (2001)
Specifically, women are trying to negotiate the competing truths that it’s embarrassing to be in a relationship, but also gain status that is conferred through the perception of traditional ‘romantic success’ i.e. engagement, marriage etc.
I don’t think there is a right or a wrong way to do this, I don’t think people are bad for succumbing to that pressure by entering relationships that are available, rather than fulfilling. I have been to the weddings of each of my three siblings totally dateless and I can tell you, fielding questions at the cocktail hour is not a good time.
The only thing I would offer is an abrupt, rather uninspiring and seemingly obvious conclusion, but apparently one that needs to be heard right now: a relationship is supposed to be a mutually supportive, loving interaction. Fundamentally, then, you are supposed to actually like the person with whom you are in a relationship.
Might not be earth shattering news, but I think I and the people I dated would have benefitted from hearing it sooner.
Life is long. Romantic commitments are substantial. Do not settle for less.
The people who push the hardest to move things forward with little to no information are the most fickle. There is a difference between love and infatuation, and it’s enticing but dangerous to conflate the two. I once had a man beg to fly me out to Miami within minutes of meeting. When we did actually spend time together, he ghosted (of course).
It is a truth often (tearfully) acknowledged in the women’s bathrooms of Dubai clubs: if you haven’t had your heart broken by an Egyptian, you haven’t lived. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
I know, this is extremely stupid and dangerous behaviour. Unfortunately, I’ve done worse. I’m learning.
If you’re planning on breaking up with someone, no matter the circumstance, never ever say this. No matter how much you believe it to be true.
Yes I love Reality TV, sue me x