All My Exes: Part 2
Gentle Permission
Writer and Producer: Evan Roberts
Story Editor: Kate Sullivan
Consulting Producer: David Boyer
Illustration: Andy Gottschalk
Table of Contents:
PART 2: GENTLE PERMISSION
The Gentle Engineer is an early riser.
On Sunday mornings, he’ll make us both breakfast. NPR is always playing in the background - probably his favorite show, “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”
We do the New York Times crossword together in ink.
He gets the science questions while I usually know the actor’s last names.
“Actress Ward”? Always SELA.
It was also a Sunday morning when we first swiped right on each other.
Gentle was visiting a high school friend in Austin for the weekend.
I was still lying in bed when I opened Tinder.
The moment his face popped up, I shouted out:
“What. The. Fuck. This guy…. again??”
The Five Times Over the Previous Eight Years That I Noticed Him Before We Actually Met
The First Time: September 6, 2007
On the very first day I created an account on Facebook, I tumbled down a rabbit hole of other people’s profile photos. The user interface was nothing like Friendster, and I got lost clicking through a photo album from the birthday party for the best friend of someone I went on a date with once.
…Wait a minute…
The best friend’s boyfriend was kinda cute.
This was the first time I ever saw Gentle.
I filed his face away in the Cute Boy folder in my brain.
The Second Time: November 2008
Single and in-between boyfriends, I dressed up for jury duty that morning believing that love was just around the corner.
I was a hopeful/hopeless romantic.
As I waited to be sent home, a door way down at the farthest entrance swung open.
As if in slow motion, Gentle glided down the aisle and through rows of empty chairs.
Emotionally, this aisle felt as long as two football fields.
My visual memory cuts to a tight close-up, starting at his shoes:
Brown leather Oxfords… snug light blue chinos… a brown leather belt… an egg shell button down with a tailored neck collar… draped with a light-weight brown cardigan… glass-cutting jaw line…
By the time I soaked in his black horn-rimmed glasses, I recognized him from that birthday party photo album on Facebook over a year ago.1
As he breezed by, my mouth agape, I guessed he was headed for the men’s bathroom behind me.
I asked myself:
“Do you have game today? How smüth are we feeling?”
I closed my eyes and imagined going to the restroom, intending to just wash my hands, then turning my head slightly toward Gentle at the urinal and slyly catching his eye.
With a wink in my voice, I’d say:
“Haeyh…”
Before my urinal reverie could shake dry, Gentle was whizzing past me and stomping back down the runway.
I comforted myself:
“It’s a small city. I’m sure I’ll see him again.”
And I did.
The Third Time: March 2009
I was waiting for the BART at 16th and Mission, listening to music on my iPod shuffle that hung around my neck like a slender piece of white soap.
Fresh from a break-up (more on him later) I was probably shuffling from one song to the next until I found Robyn’s acoustic version of “Every Heartbeat.”
My eyes were wandering around the station, mindlessly reading the ad taglines.
WE NEVER KNEW HOW PROUD WE COULD BE…
UNTIL WE ADOPTED ANA & CARLOS
Wait a second, is that…?
It’s that fucking guy! I said, shuffling from Robyn to Britney:
But wait… a non-profit wouldn’t hire models to be a fake family, right?
It’s a black-and-white image so it’s figured it was telling me the truth: this man was Married with Children.
I threw away the cute boy file, and shuffled from Britney to Rufus Wainwright.
The Fourth Time: April 2010
I had been accepted into grad school and was preparing to leave San Francisco in four months.
Facebook was the biggest social media platform and everyone in their 20s and 30s was friend requesting someone they met only once at a party.
The chances were high that I’d run into his profile again.
I recognized the Gay Adoption photo posted on his wall right away. No pictures of his husband.
I scrolled through the comments to find one from him:
OK… so maybe he wasn’t a married gay dad after all.
Cute boy file restored.
The Fifth Time: October 2012
I had been in Austin, Texas for two years and was wistful for the boys in San Francisco.
On OKCupid, I searched for men in my old SF zip code.
Gentle’s profile showed up and again: “Oh, it’s that guy!”
I liked all his responses to OKCupid’s inane prompts.
We had an incompatibility that made me pause:
Sharing a toothbrush with your partner is…
My answer: utterly disgusting
His answer: a sign of closeness
But then again, he looked like Clark Kent with his adorable glasses.
I started to draft a message….
But I never sent it.
His profile said he was looking for someone in his city. Not someone 1,500 miles away.
What was the point?
Not long after, I deleted that account.
March 1, 2015
The fateful Sunday morning on Tinder.
In my profile, I mentioned something about This American Life.
I wanted to manifest dates with public radio heads like me.
It worked.
“Fantasy husband” is a bit over the speed limit for me, but it didn’t scare him.
We met for a drink that night and hit it off.
That following weekend he came back to Austin, and I told him this whole sequence of events.
For him, the first time he ever saw my face was on Tinder.
INT - MY APARTMENT - PRESENT DAY
Back to Sunday morning breakfast with the eggs and the melons and the avocados.
Gentle and I both shared a love of listening to public radio.
One of his all-time favorite stories happens to be Starlee Kine’s “Dr. Phil” from This American Life’s Break-Up episode that features Phil Collins.
But… I didn’t know how he would feel about my new idea of interviewing all my former flames.
I wondered if he might feel threatened that I was reaching out to old boyfriends to have a long chat about our relationship.
But he wasn’t.
Like, at all.
The thing is, I am friendly with many of my exes… or at least everything ended on OK terms.
I can think of at least 10 people I’m still in touch with….
…… out of a total number that will be revealed later.
We’re Facebook friends.
We follow each other on Instagram.
But since breaking up, it’s not as if we’ve had an in-depth conversation about our relationship, why it ended, what we learned etc.
Once you become friends, that stuff rarely comes up.
But staying friends with exes is pretty common in the queer world.
I known lesbians and gays who stay close friends with their ex-partners.
And they might be pals with their exes partner. No big whoop.
But straight people don’t have it like that, it seems?
I’ve conducted casual surveys while working on this. When two heterosexuals break up - it’s often a “clean break.” There is no interest in staying friends, perhaps to protect a future partner from being suspicious. It might signal to a potential suitor that there is unfinished business.
There aren't a lot of studies on what are called Post-Dissolution Friendships (PDFs) that focus on the queer community.
The study “Similarities and Differences in Relational Boundaries among Heterosexuals, Gay Men and Lesbians”2 by Lynne E. Harkless and Blaine J. Flowers is the oldest and most specific study about lesbian and gay post-dissolution friendships, though it’s a relatively small study of 181 white participants - 97 of them gay or lesbian.
TLDR: They found that gay men and lesbians reported higher levels of post-breakup connectedness than heterosexuals.
This makes sense to me for many reasons, but here’s just one:
There are less of us queers out there, and so sometimes we just have to deal with/get over the fact that our ex is dating our roommate.
If we can’t move past heartbreak, we might not have anyone to hang out with on Friday night.
Gentle is still friends with an ex-boyfriend or two from his life.
I think he understands this project and what I’m trying to figure out.
“It’s not like you’re trying to get back together with these people,” he said later.
“No. Not at all,” I said, truthfully.
Gentle was on board.
With his blessing, I started making my list of exes.
But first I had to figure out…..
What makes someone an ex?
Less of a concern to me was whether or not they considered me one of their exes.
To Be Continued….
Thank you, Next:
I still marvel at this, but at that time in 2008, the internet had not filled my brain with a million different pages and so it was quite easy to recall this specific one.
this is AWESOME and funny and beautiful. can't wait for part 3