All My Exes: Part 1
Why I Decided To Interview My Exes
Writer and Producer: Evan Roberts
Story Editor: Kate Sullivan
Consulting Producer: David Boyer
Illustration: Andy Gottschalk
Table of Contents
PART 1: The Legend of Mark Phelan
We begin this story on the phone with my mom.
She’s laughing because she wasn’t expecting me to ask about her high school ex-boyfriend, Mark Phelan.
P-H-E-L-A-N
When I was a little kid, I saw a black and white photo of Mark from his senior year. He was handsome. Blond. A football player type with nice teeth and a strong jawline.
My mom was a good Catholic girl. But she appreciated his statuesque physique, too.
Mark was the only guy she dated seriously other than my dad.
Because he was her only ex-boyfriend, Mark Phelan was a tragic hero in my mind. I wondered if he felt bad for missing out on having my mom in his life.
Pondering my mother’s origin story made me think about this twist of fate that brought me into this world. It was a good thing they didn’t work out, or I wouldn’t have existed!
...Or would I?
Young Evan would get lost in multiverse daydreams often.
What if they had stayed together… gotten married… had kids… and Mark was my dad?
In this timeline, I was happy to be my mom and dad’s son. But it was just all the possibilities of “the paths not taken” in my mom’s life that sent my cute little imagination into overdrive.
Or maybe I just wanted blond hair and a strong jawline.
One day, I got to meet the man behind the legend.
Our family was visiting my grandmother in upstate New York. We went up for a week to visit relatives on my dad’s side.
One sunny afternoon, Mom was driving us home on a wide country road. My sister was up front, I was in the back. For some reason, Dad wasn’t in the car.
Suddenly, mom pulled the car over and turned around in the middle of the road.
She told me later that her childhood best friend, Jodie, had told her where Mark and his family were living now, and we had just passed his house.
Mark was outside on his riding lawn mower, shirtless and sweaty when our blue Dodge Caravan pulled into his driveway.
They were in their 40s now. It had been about 25 years since they were high school sweethearts.
Mark never got off the John Deere, and mom never turned her engine off.
She smiled a lot as she leaned out the driver's window, talking and holding her hand over her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun.
Their conversation didn’t last long. Mom said she sensed he was embarrassed to not be presentable for company.
They said goodbye, she backed out of the driveway and we continued down the road.
I looked back and watched him as we drove away.
He was still on the mower, his eyes on the grass.
The urge to reconnect with exes from your past – to wonder what they’re up to now and what kind of person they became…
…it’s universal… right?
It’s more than just wanting to see how an ex has aged or if the future they talked about when you were together came to be.
It’s about whatever reason you’re thinking of right now.1
The memory of my 40-something mom chatting up her high school boyfriend has become more relevant these days, because I’m in a big relationship status change situation2 and it’s got me hyper-reflective.
A few years ago after turning 40, I moved across the country from Texas to live with The Gentle Engineer, my long distance boyfriend of three years in California.
I had never been in a relationship for this long before.
I had more experience with short term relationships: 3 to 6 months was the average expiration date.
Things that last longer than my average relationship:
A jar of pickles in your fridge
An unopened can of Coke
A perm
A Brita filter
Pumpkin Spice Lattes on the menu at Starbucks
Years ago, I remember telling a friend's mother that I hadn’t had a relationship longer than 6 months and I was in my early 30s.
“Oh no” she said. “That’s not good. You’ve gotta work on that. Are you seeing a therapist?”
She was a therapist.
But then I met Gentle.3
I remember the day we passed the six month mark and I broke my streak. I celebrated with a glass of Rosé.
Three years later, he added me to the lease on his rent-controlled San Francisco apartment.
Cohabitation.
I’d never made it to this highly advanced level in a relationship before.
I started to reflect on how long it took me to get here…. and think about the experiences that were on my Relationship Resume.
“Am I ready for this level? Am I gonna fuck this up?”
I had the impulse to reach out to everyone I’ve ever dated.
Hi. This is just the kind of person I am.
I’m a professional audio producer. Sometimes photographer. Former filmmaker.
Some of my stories and personal projects are about memory, and how we construct our personal narratives. I have projects with production timelines of 10 years and 20 years.
I’m a perpetual documentarian, so my personal archive runs deep.
I’m an introspective, reflective4 person. It's a muscle I’ve exercised since childhood.
When I was 8 years old, my parents bought me a journal so I could process the death of my paternal grandfather.
In the entry below, I was mostly processing what it felt like to ride in a limousine.
My journal was also where I would go to complain about my family. Or obsess about my friendships… mostly friendships with boys.
Dear Journal,
Seth Hall said H.W, Dennis called me a fag. Why did Seth tell me that? No one likes a bad news messenger. VH1 had a Laff-a-thon with Rosie O’Donnell.5 She’s so funny!
These journals were the seed of my compulsion to document.
Since then, I’ve been making some kind of physical object or media that I could go back to later to make sense of my experiences.
One day, my father came home with a new cassette recorder.
I loved pressing the buttons and hearing my voice.
Here I am in 1986, inventing podcasts in my bedroom.
I kept writing, recording, photographing, filming, documenting, and archiving.
My practice eventually became my bonafide profession.
When I started thinking about bringing All My Exes to life, I went back into my archive and saw I had a lot more than I realized.
I’ve alluded to this already: the thing I talked about most were my relationships.
The meaningful relationships in my life have been preserved in some form of media.
Summer of 1997. Stoned with college friends and obsessed about my latest break-up:
Summer of 1998. I kept a cassette recorder in my car for soliloquies on long drives. Sometimes I got so riled up I would find myself going way over the speed limit:
Summer of 2007. I recorded messages off my answering machine, like this one from an ex who doesn’t know what happened, or what he did or said:
Fall of 2007. I recorded many sessions with an astrologer over the span of four relationships:
April of 2009. I taped a year of meetings with my therapist, which covered the break ups of two relationships:
I started to see how All Of My Archives was just about All Of My Exes anyways.
I’ve recorded my side of the story, to excess.
But I don’t know my exes side of the story.
The worst they could say was no… or so I thought.
Turns out the actual worst is no reply at all.
The more I thought about how crazy/scary/stupid this Walk of Shame Down Memory Lane was, the more I couldn’t stop wondering if I could pull it off.
So I yielded to the urge.
…like my mom making a U-turn in the middle of the road.
Mom and Mark broke up the summer after their senior year of high school and mom was sad about it for months, she said.
Mark wanted to get more serious, like have-premarital-sex-serious.
My mother, a devout Catholic, wanted to wait.
So she ended it.
Within a few months, she was a freshman in college and met my dad in the cafeteria. 6
She never hung out with Mark again, until she saw him that day on his lawn, shirtless on his John Deere.
Somehow I really hadn’t thought of a downside.
What was I risking by revisiting with all my exes?
Feeling uncomfortable. Unpleasant truths. Disturbing old wounds. Making new ones?
I can handle all that… right?
Before I did anything, I had to get clearance from the person who mattered the most.
My Gentle Engineer:
Scroll for Part 2 of….
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this series and your stories about exes. Leave a comment below!
Thank you, Next:
What were you thinking there? I’m curious!
I started this project in 2018. These stories are very personal and vulnerable making so this project is the epitome of being precious, Darling.
More on this in Part 2.
Self-obsessed? Navel-gazey? Jury’s out.
During lunch in the cafeteria, someone had dared my mother to go up behind my father and whisper in his ear “Hey cowboy, where’s your horse?” He was wearing a leather shirt with fringe. These were the first words she ever said to him.