When I have thought about how to write about The FuckFace, for some reason it’s always felt important to start at the end. In one sense, The Middle doesn’t matter. It was as comfortable and filled with Chinese food on the couch as any other long-term relationship. The Beginning was the same as most beginnings: polite and halting first dates, the question of I wonder… as the other person unfurls their true self to you over coffees and whiskeys, in whispers and declarations. But, The End seems to eclipse the rest of it; a logline distilling three years into the first ten minutes of a really predictable romantic comedy.
For years after we broke up, I couldn’t write anything about The FuckFace. I’d stare at a computer screen or a journal and nothing would surface. Any attempts felt hollow and fruitless. Which is odd, because, as you are VERY well aware by this point, I have always processed love and loss by pouring out my sadness, elation or rage onto a scrap of paper or into Word document — and then hitting Publish for all the world to see. You’re welcome. (ILYSM. Don’t leave me.) But, at the time, that loss was too much for me to process. It was too big and far too consequential. It hurt much too much and I had absolutely no idea how to begin putting it in its this-is-how-I-move-on-and-learn-from-this box.
The FF and I broke up in October 2016. We’d been dating for three years, living together for one and a half. We looked at engagement rings. Over pizza and red wine in the backyard of a Greenpoint pizzeria, we talked about who we’d invite to our wedding. We were about to open a joint bank account so we could save for our own house. We were not trying to not have a baby, and as any contraceptive-taking or wearing person knows, that is a Big Deal in the ecosystem of Coupledom. We were seemingly on the same page and moving mundanely along, and
CUT TO:
INT. BASEMENT APARTMENT - DAY
In a large open living room, ERIN, 36, stands at the bottom of a staircase, as though paralyzed. In one hand she holds a pair of underwear. (They are clean.) In the other she holds a small overnight bag. FUCKFACE, 39, sits on the back frame of their Ikea couch. He tells her that he doesn’t want to be with her anymore. He doesn’t want to marry her. He doesn’t love her like that. She says nothing. He holds his head in his hands and cries. She yells at him for crying.
END SCENE.
The Saturday had begun like most Saturdays: me going to CrossFit and The FF, a real estate broker (agent? what’s the difference? do we care?), going to work. The plan had been that we would spend the rest of our lives together go out to an early dinner with my parents on Staten Island and stay over there for the night. As I was running around, throwing together an overnight bag, he came home and just stood in the living room, not taking his jacket off. He told me that he wasn’t going to come with me because he didn’t feel well.
But, he was nervous and hesitant, and just acting weird. So, I pushed him and he said, “I think maybe we shouldn’t do this anymore.”
Do what? Eat Italian food with my parents once a month? Tempt fate by sitting on the ill-constructed structure of an Ikea couch? Live in the same duplex as your horrible parents? What? WHAT shouldn’t we do anymore?
But, I knew. You always know.
The FF was not good at/extremely awkward about expressing his feelings or being vocal about what he wanted. When I was his girlfriend, I was a compassionate person who harnessed my superhuman teacher-patience and coached him through those conversations. As I was now clearly about to be drop-kicked from his life, I said nothing, helped not at all. If he was going to blow up our life, well, he’d have to use his words.
Anticlimactic doesn’t even begin to cover it.
There were a lot of Ums, false starts, wavery-voiced, “I just don’t thinks…” In the end my superhuman teacher-impatience overcame me and I simply interrogated him: Are you breaking up with me? You don’t want to be together anymore? You don’t want to marry me?
He nodded, eeking out strangled Yesses.
My last attempt to shake him out of whatever zombie-induced-emotion-coma he was in, was to invoke the movie classic: Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t love me anymore.
And, he did.
While he proceeded to sit there and cry, I yelled at him for crying and told him he didn’t get to cry because this was his doing. I called my parents to tell them I’d be a little late because SOMETHING had come up, packed a bigger bag of stuff, massaged the place on my chest where he’d stomped it in with a steel-toed boot, and left the apartment that I had made a home.
He didn’t ever use his words to tell me why he had out-of-the-blue broken our relationship, but in the background of my grief, I knew the reason.
So, fine, let’s back up.
The FF and I met on OK Cupid. His profile was a little nerdy with moments of subtle humor. He talked about almost polishing off a bottle of Bailey’s just to get through the process of writing it, which I found quirky and endearing. He had had a friend take a series of five pictures of him holding up handwritten letters spelling out HELLO. This, I talked myself into believing, was sofuckingdorky cute, was something different, showed he was putting effort in. As my Best Friend put it recently, my relationship with The FF was a case-study in Beige Flags.
Our first date was a coffee date and I can probably count on one hand the number of first dates I’ve had where at least a splash of alcohol wasn’t involved. I was intrigued by and all for a stone sobeski first date, but I was also terrified, because you’ve, like, heard about first dates right? However, I shelved any nervousness that may have been brewing because when he walked into Troost, a tiny dimly lit coffee shop/wine bar on Manhattan Avenue, sat down, and proceeded to be SO nervous and awkward, I knew at least one of us had to be calm and aloof in order to restore the dating space-time continuum.
I got the sense that he would rather be eating glass than putting himself out there and forced to talk about himself, but was doing so all the same, which honestly made me like him more. Because, by this point I was so OVER any sort of grand gesture and completely wary of any first date that made me want to run to Atlantic City to get married. So as we sat there swapping stories and interests, I sipped my tea and thought ok, you eastern European nerd you, show me what you got. That date led to a second, this time at Black Rabbit where we had wine and told more stories. While he was still awkward, he was less nervous and, for me, something about his I-don’t-know-how-to-do-this earnestness felt safe and easy.
It was December. Back in March, Connecticut and I, and her magical rescue dog Bosco, had moved into a cute, if a little ramshackle, two bedroom apartment in a walk-up at the northernmost part of Greenpoint that was still habitable. Our morning alarm was the rattling, clanging, and hauling of Lauro, our neighbor who seemingly paid the rent with a rape-van full of bottles he’d collected. But, hey, we were a teacher and a social worker living in an apartment with exposed brick in a neighborhood that was rapidly becoming way too cool, so basically we were living the dream. To celebrate, we decided to host a holiday brunch, inviting all our people, including my parents.
After my second non-offensive date with The FF, I took a chance and invited him to our party. In the timeline of my dating life, when I met The FF, I was done being coy or playing games. The way I saw it, you were either in or out. So if the idea of saying hello to my parents or my friends at a casual, chaotic house party was TOO SOON, then whatever byeee. But, to his credit, he showed — nerves and all. When he left, I walked him out and he kissed me in the hallway. And that was it. Quickly we became a couple, and for once in my life, I felt like I was in just a plain old, vanilla relationship that was calm and easy-going, and not filled with any sort of drama.
Enter: His Parents.
Born in Poland, The FF and his parents had moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn in the early 80s, when he was around five. At that time Greenpoint was a maze of redlines and warehouses, but his parents, being shrewd, snapped up a few buildings and became real estate brokers, eventually owning properties in now sought-after north Brooklyn, the Hamptons, and Florida. They divided their time between those places, with his mother mostly staying in Brooklyn to run the business and his father staying mostly wherever she wasn’t. They had worked decently hard to get where they were, and by the time I met them, they were decently well off.
And, they sucked. Big time.
At best, they tolerated me. Anything they didn’t do — drink alcohol, eat non-Polish food, drink caffeine, have fun, drink cold drinks, speak English even though they were fluent in English, go to restaurants, be nice, you know the usual — they ruthlessly judged others for. So, seeing as how I liked to do all those things, and refused to be parented by people who were not my parents, we were clearly primed for healthy interactions. While this wouldn’t have been an issue with any well-adjusted parent-son relationship, this ended up being a major major influence on my relationship with The FF. Because, well, THEY WERE ALWAYS FUCKING THERE.
Whether it was sending weird oily meat soups downstairs for me to throw out us to eat, beckoning him to their apartment alone to talk about something business related, or demanding The FF help out with some ridiculous task they could very easily do on their own, they made sure their presence was always known.
However, for a long time — years, really — this was all in the background. It was an annoyance, something to roll my eyes at. Even when we moved in together and I moved into “his” apartment, which was not really his apartment but the downstairs apartment in the two-family house that they owned and also lived in — so, yes, they were quite literally living on top of us. Even then it wasn’t SO bad. The FF knew that his parents were demanding and was often frustrated by them, but being the only child and having been psychologically terrorized by his mother, he rarely said no to them. I tried as much as possible to keep Our Life separate.
And, for a while, it worked. We carved out a nice little North Brooklyn existence for ourselves. We spent a lot of time in the Hamptons (off season in the pitch black dead of winter because his parents camped out there in the summer, obvs) and took trips to Florida (off season in the satan’s grundle humidity of summer because his parents camped out there in the winter, obvs) and watched a lot of British quiz shows. I got him to join CrossFit, we started running together, we redecorated the apartment to be more 30-Something Brooklyn instead of Early Ostentatious Eastern European Garage Sale. In short, we built a life.
We rarely fought — something I took as a sign we were clicking, but, in reality, ended up being the oatmeal ecru bunting suffocating our relationship, and foreshadowing his inability/unwillingness to fight for us in the end. (Because there is such a thing as TOO boring uneventful.) In all it was: nice. Was it epic or adventurous or revelatory? No. But, I was happy, we were happy. Until his parents weren’t we weren’t.
The beginning of The End was a trip to Florida. I had just started a new full-time teaching position at a school that had a treasured October break. Seemed like the perfect week to drink daiquiris on the beach and so we cleared it with his parents that we’d use their house in St. Petersburg. As the trip neared, we found out that his father, who essentially lived full-time at the Florida house, had gone out one day, bought a boat, and was now obsessed with said boat. So the plan changed a bit. Now we’d go down there, his father would stay to show us the boat, and then would fly back to New York, leaving us in peace for a week. Lolz.
TL;DR: His father never left and the entire vacation was spent with him forcibly enlisting The FF to help him work on the boat — speaking exclusively in Polish the entire time. What’s super cool about that is the whole his father knowing how to speak English part of it. So I spent the week in the backseat, in some Deliverance-esque dry dock, or on my own wandering around.
One day, during a precious afternoon with just the two of us, over tacos at a beachside restaurant, the weight of years of things unsaid, things I didn’t know I needed to say, threatened to sink me. I asked him if we were, in fact, on the same page. Did he want to get married like he said he did? Did he want us to build a life together? Was there room for me? He said: Yes, of course. To all of it.
But, something had broken. The next day as we got in a couple of hours at the beach before our flight back to New York, his mom called and kept him on the phone for an hour. When I told him this was exactly my concern, he said, with a slight edge to his voice, he knew it was annoying but this was the deal and we’d figure it out.
Two weeks later, he broke up with me in our living room.
I knew something had changed on that trip, but never did I think he’d simply walk away without a fight. To watch his all-consuming fear of defying/upsetting his parents so drastically alter the trajectory of my life, without him saying a damn thing, was infuriating. Maybe I was naive to think that it would work out and that we’d be able to be together on our terms. But I had never encountered parents like his: people who gave barely a half a shit about the happiness of their child, but saw him existing only to help them, so I truly didn’t understand the extent to which it would undo us.
He tried to be friends with me afterwards, but like wow, NO THANK YOU. I have no idea what he’s doing these days, but I assume it’s doing exactly the same thing. One thing I do know is that as much as it hurt at the time, I dodged a huge bullet because a. having zero backbone is très unsexy and b. that woman surely would have stolen my baby and force fed it pork products as soon as it was born.
Oh, and fun fact: the reason I started the OG Ugh. Anway blog back in 2019 was because I nearly lost my mind one day at work upon opening Bumble to find that, three years after he broke up with me, The FF had SWIPED RIGHT. On me. On a dating app. What a FuckFace.
I love that you named him The F*ckFace. Mine was called The Douchebag. Should be friends lol
Woof. Bawling and exhaling deeply after that. Hope this feels like the much needed closure you deserve. Beyond proud of you sharing this journey with the world. LYSM 💛