I’ve had a number of long relationships in my life. Oddly enough, I’ve kept most of the men. Apparently, I’m much better at turning boyfriends into friends than keeping them as boyfriends.
How to Break Up Without Hating Your Ex | Jon-David
My last serious boyfriend was named David.
I’m using his real name because that’s his name.
Ha ha ha.
And David knows I’m a writer.
In fact, when we broke up, after six years together, he had one specific request:
“Please don’t write about me.”
Oops.
In my defense, I’ve waited.
And I’m not telling you anything terrible about him.
That’s because I don’t have anything terrible to tell you.
David was a good man.
Most of my exes were good men.
And that may explain something peculiar about my romantic history:
Almost all my ex-boyfriends are still my friends.
Some of them are even friends with each other.
Which can be inconvenient.
The Table of Ex-Boyfriends
Years ago, I was sitting at a table with about twelve men.
My friend Keith looked around the table and suddenly announced:
“Hey, Jon-David. Out of the twelve men sitting here, you’ve dated eight of them.”
Thank you, Keith.
I hadn’t actually requested an audit.
But once he announced it, the ex-boyfriends started comparing records.
“I was 1986.”
“No, I think I was after you.”
“When were you?”
Suddenly my romantic history had become a group project.
I was mortified.
But there was something kind of wonderful about it too.
These men didn’t hate me.
I didn’t hate them.
We had loved one another at different times in our lives.
Then those relationships ended.
Why did that have to erase the love that came before the ending?
I’ve never understood that.
“I met Keith in Chicago at a party. We were both L.A. ex-pats. I hired him as lead actor in my play, Success In Numbers. We are stilll best friends.”-Jon-David
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David and Junebug
David and I didn’t exactly plan to move in together.
A Yorkshire Terrier named Junebug helped.
I had a roommate. She a dog named Tina. A pug. My dog hated Tina.
Something had to change.
David and I had only been dating about five months.
So I said, essentially:
I love you. You love me. My dog hates Tina. Let’s do it.
I moved in.
And you know what?
It worked.
For quite a while.
We had three really good years. And then two… not so much.
Over time, our lives began moving in different directions.
My professional life was exploding.
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“Mafia Hairdresser had become part of my public identity. I had become remarkably visible through social media. I was speaking professionally and had developed a speakers bureau. I changed the way I worked as a hairdresser so I could have greater control over my schedule and pursue all these other projects.” – Jon-David
I was writing.
Speaking.
Working.
Creating.
Going places.
Meeting people.
And David loved riding his motorcycle.
Especially on summer weekends.
Guess when hairdressers work?
Summer weekends.
Nothing horrible happened.
There wasn’t some great betrayal.
There wasn’t a villain.
We just started disappearing from each other’s lives while technically still sharing one.
Sylvia Friedman Astrologer and Jon-David Writer
We Need Counseling
I knew we were in trouble.
At the beginning of one summer, I told David I wanted us to go to counseling.
He agreed.
Then summer happened.
He rode his motorcycle.
I worked.
We continued living our increasingly separate lives.
Eventually, at the end of the summer, we finally went.
And of all the people in the world David could have chosen to help us navigate our relationship, he chose my friend, Sylvia.
An astrologer.
I still don’t completely understand this decision.
Perhaps if you’re going to break up with Jon-David, having someone in the room who understands planetary movements is prudent.
We sat down.
Sylvia looked at us.
And, of course, immediately, she knew. She had done our charts. She new the past and future. Of our relationship.
She looked at David and said:
“David, is there something you want to tell Jon-David?”
David said:
“Yes.”
And then, he said, “It’s over.”
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There Is No Negotiating With “It’s Over”
I’ve been through enough relationships to know the difference between:
I’m unhappy.
Something needs to change.
I don’t know if I can do this anymore.
and:
It’s over.
There is no wiggle room in “It’s over.”
And, strangely, I respected him for that.
David was communicating.
Clearly.
Painfully.
But clearly.
So I asked them both for fifteen minutes.
And I cried.
Not cute crying.
Not one dignified tear rolling down the cheek while someone hands me a monogrammed handkerchief.
I heaved.
I sobbed.
I let my body do whatever it needed to do.
For fifteen minutes.
Then I stopped.
And I said:
“Thank you.”
Because what else was there to do?
He didn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore.
I’ll tell you one of the things that ran through my mind when I was ugly-crying. I thought, “I’ll get over this. And David and I will be friends. And I’ll make one of my characters in my future books go through this too!”
“One of my exes, John, and me. At a Halloween party. I was a tsunami and he was a tropic depression.” – Jon-David
There Was One Small Problem
I couldn’t afford to move immediately.
I needed about two months.
So I explained the practical situation.
I was staying.
I was also not buying another bed for two months.
Therefore, I was staying in our bed.
I believe David briefly reconsidered whether breaking up with a professional storyteller had been wise.
But we survived it.
And eventually, I moved out.
Then something happened that has happened with many of my relationships.
David migrated into the friend zone.
And he seemed quite happy there.
Actually, he fit in beautifully.
Because, apparently, there was already a welcoming committee. For him.
Maybe I’m Good at Breakups
I’ve thought about this a lot while writing How I Killed My Mother.
Chuck was my first great love.
We were together for eight years.
When that relationship ended, my heart was broken.
And here’s something extraordinary:
All these decades later, I can’t even tell you with absolute confidence who technically broke up with whom.
Does it matter anymore?
Chuck and I went decades without being close.
Today we’re friends.
Real friends.
While I was writing the memoir, Chuck actually called me. I was able to ask him about things that happened almost forty years earlier. He listened to my version. I listened to his.
We agreed that our memories weren’t necessarily identical.
Of course they weren’t.
Two people can live through the same relationship and leave with two different autobiographies.
That doesn’t mean one of them is lying.
It means there were two people in the relationship.
I Have Written About Almost All of Them
This is where my ex-boyfriends deserve some sympathy.
I am an artist.
Worse:
I’m a memoirist.
I’ve written fictional versions of people I’ve loved.
I’ve written versions of myself.
I’ve moved events around.
I’ve changed names.
I’ve turned pain into scenes and scenes into jokes.
Mafia Hairdresser.
The Glow Stick Gods.
How I Killed My Mother.
And eventually Saving the Father.
My life keeps becoming material.
I’m not sure I know how to prevent that.
Writing is how I understand what happened to me.
Sometimes I don’t know what I think about an experience until I write it.
And occasionally the person who once slept next to me wakes up twenty years later and discovers he’s a chapter.
Sorry.
Maybe the Work Was My Greatest Love Affair
There is a harder question I’ve begun asking myself.
Did I ever really want the relationships enough?
I loved these men.
I’m certain of that.
But I also loved my work.
I loved hair.
I loved building businesses.
I loved writing.
I loved performing.
I loved speaking.
I loved being known.
I loved creating something out of nothing and then watching people respond to it.
And creative work is extraordinarily demanding.
So are relationships.
A partner wants your attention.
He should.
He wants to tell you about his day.
He wants to know about yours.
He wants some portion of that person everybody else gets.
But I have spent forty-five years talking to people all day.
A hairdresser is “on.”
We listen.
We entertain.
We advise.
We reassure.
We perform.
Then I come home.
And sometimes the thing I most desperately want is silence.
Or a computer.
Or a story.
Right now, I could probably be spending some of these hours pursuing another relationship.
Instead, I’m sitting here writing.
And loving it.
That tells me something.
I’m just not entirely sure what yet.
Fame Didn’t Help
There were also periods of my life when being with me probably wasn’t especially easy.
I was Jon-David the successful Southern California hairdresser.
Later I was Mafia Hairdresser.
Then I became weirdly Twitter famous.
I’d go somewhere and people knew who I was.
People wanted to talk to me.
That can be fun for the person being recognized.
It’s not necessarily fun for the person standing beside him.
A relationship needs two people.
A public personality can accidentally turn that into one person and an audience.
I’ve learned that.
Maybe a little late.
Nobody Has to Be the Bad Guy
This is what all those relationships have finally taught me.
When love ends, we have a strange desire to hold a trial.
Who cheated?
Who neglected whom?
Who stopped having sex?
Who worked too much?
Who drank?
Who changed?
Who failed?
Who left?
Who is the asshole?
Sometimes there is one.
I’ve certainly met a few.
But sometimes two perfectly decent people simply reach the end of what they were supposed to be to each other.
David wasn’t wrong for ending our relationship.
Chuck wasn’t wrong for needing a life different from mine.
And I wasn’t necessarily wrong for wanting the life I wanted either.
We were people.
We changed.
I Keep the People
Perhaps that’s why I’ve been able to remain friends with so many of the men I’ve loved.
Once the hurt goes away—and sometimes that takes years—I can remember what made me love the person in the first place.
That part didn’t become false because the relationship ended.
The six years with David still happened.
The eight years with Chuck still happened.
The laughter happened.
The trips happened.
The sex happened.
The arguments happened.
The breakfasts happened.
The dogs happened.
The lives we temporarily built together happened.
Why would I throw all of that away simply because we stopped sleeping in the same bed?
I don’t need every love of my life to remain the love of my life.
Sometimes I just want the person back.
And somehow, remarkably, I’ve managed to get many of them back.
Just not as boyfriends.
Which is probably why I can end up at a table with twelve men and discover that eight of them have dated me.
That’s not a failed romantic history.
That’s a reunion.
Although next time, Keith?
Keep your mouth shut.
Jon-David is the author of Mafia Hairdresser and The Glow Stick Gods and creator and host of the memoir podcast How I Killed My Mother. He writes about relationships, family, reinvention, aging, hairdressing and the questionable wisdom acquired from living a spectacularly complicated life.
Listen to How I Killed My Mother
How I Killed My Mother is a memoir podcast about mothers and sons, depression and hope, family and forgiveness, caregiving, spirituality, humor, death, and the uncomfortable business of discovering who we really are.
The podcast also became the foundation for my upcoming memoir, How I Killed My Mother.
This isn’t a story about having all the answers.
It’s about what happened when I finally started asking myself the questions.
If you’re standing at the bottom of something right now, I can’t tell you how long your climb will be.
I can only tell you that I’ve stood at the bottom, too.
Climb with me.
— Jon-David
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