Amirah set me up for a commiseration evening with a colleague of hers who had recently been involved in what she called a “category five divorce.” People in general were very keen to suggest I hang out with other people they knew who’d divorced before they’d gotten gray hair. Sometimes it felt like a gesture of support, and sometimes it felt like loading all the corpses on the same cart so the rest of the village didn’t get the plague.
My summer had been peppered with these arranged evenings, which always involved alcohol and usually involved crying, and each was odd in a different way. Being united only by one grim fact of your life left a lot of other points upon which two people could be incompatible. It was like constantly going for drinks with someone who had also lost an uncle, or whose roommate moved out unexpectedly, or who’d recently ripped a cherished pair of jeans. This woman’s name was Amy.
Amy had been with her husband for four years. They were married for three. I did not tell her that I thought it was objectively stupid to marry someone you’d known for one year, age twenty-seven, even though that is how I felt. Amy was beautiful and small and very, very mad. Her fury radiated off her in nearly visible lines, like bad smells in cartoons.
“It’s fucking ridiculous,” she said. “He’s such a fucking loser.”
Amy’s husband had left her for a younger woman, which was the kind of thing she thought didn’t happen until you were, like, actually old. His new girlfriend was twenty-one, and taught Pilates with one of those machines that look like they’re for sex but are really for thin women to pulse on. Amy had considered taking one of her classes but assumed her ex’s new girlfriend knew what she looked like, because of social media and because of Toronto. Instead she had started going to a different Pilates studio, waking up at five to take the six and seven a.m. classes back-to-back.
“You sort of need to do two hours to feel any impact,” she said, which I suspected would not be true in my case. Amy felt washed up now, at thirty.
I envied the clarity of Amy’s anger. Deciding your ex was a villain seemed like an easier way to go through a breakup. I flip-flopped hourly between hating Jon and wanting to go easy on him. After all, he had not done anything terrifically wrong; his major crime was not fighting me when I suggested the marriage was not working, and I couldn’t blame him for that ( . . . could I?).
“I think he freaked out because we got married and he realized that was it, no new puss till he died,” Amy said. “He got weird as soon as we got back from our honeymoon. I don’t get it. Being married didn’t feel any different to me.”
The night before our wedding, Jon had wondered aloud whether something would change, if we would feel different as man and wife. After the ceremony, I asked him if he did.
“Not really,” he said. “Still love you a lot like normal.”
Then he said, “my waiiiife,” in the Borat voice and ran off after a server holding a tray of chicken sliders. I felt different, though: calmer, safer. Buckled in.
Amy said she would not go back to her husband in “more than a billion years.” She said my ex was a definite idiot with a probable small penis. She suggested I put on a sexy dress, go somewhere I knew he would be, and “show him what he’s missing.”
Jon and I had been together almost ten years, I told her. He could draw what he was missing from memory. Plus, he didn’t seem to be missing it that much. I confessed that he hadn’t responded to my text messages in nearly a month.
“That’s actually so toxic. It’s harassment,” said Amy, pouring us another glass each of natural wine.
I felt like a persistent lack of contact was, if anything, the opposite of harassment, but stayed quiet and sipped my drink, the sourness of it stinging my throat. When the server first dropped off the wine list, Amy had asked him to “challenge her.” I told her that Jon had once told me he considered all wine bourgeois. Amy’s mouth dropped open: “So he’s a fucking asshole.” She loved it.
Amy was fun. She swore a lot and went to the corner store to buy cigarettes after we finished our first bottle of challenging wine. Amy talked such merciless shit on her ex-husband I felt free to think about how annoying Jon was during election seasons, how he acted like it was reasonable to spend nine hours on the toilet (an approximate figure, but still), how he sometimes acted like working in advertising was a noble higher calling. Hadn’t I chosen to cut him loose? I felt again the euphoric freedom that washed over me when Calvin had laughed and said, “That guy is never coming back.” Maybe this was not a life-defining tragedy. Maybe I was a smart woman who knew her worth, or at least knew she deserved more than being shredded to death by a junior executive’s gnarled toenails every night. Amy said she’d never felt better, on days when she didn’t feel the worst she ever had.
Still, she couldn’t get over the fact that one day her ex-husband would die, and she would have no idea. “I was supposed to be at that funeral,” she said with a hiccup. “Or I guess also dead, but like, nearby.”
I thought about Jon dying one day, an old man with millions of newly accumulated experiences, none of which would have anything to do with me, darkly sweet death prank long forgotten. In the scope of his life, the near decade we’d spent together wasn’t much. I’d occupy a space in his mind similar to elementary school: a thing that happened, from which few memories remained. What would stay? Would he remember our first apartment, the shower you couldn’t stand up in, the vintage posters we were weirdly proud of, the time we got locked out in the dead of winter, the look on the landlord’s son’s face when he came to rescue us at two a.m.? Would he remember that we’d loved each other, changed each other; how we’d compromised on bedroom decor and gone halfsies on a mattress that was cooling for his night sweats and rock hard for my back problems? He’d learned to handle a kitchen knife at a cooking class I’d bought him for our anniversary. Would he think of me when he chopped garlic, at least?
“This is bumming me out,” Amy said. “Let’s get nachos.”
We moved bars and ate melted processed cheese under a neon tiger as Amy told me about her dating life. She was seeing three different people, all of whom she had met “on the apps.” The most exciting was a twenty-four-year-old aspiring actor who was already famous in certain corners of the internet for stunt videos where he climbed improbably tall, out-of-the-way buildings. We watched a few. They were stressful and impressive. Amy said he was amazing in bed and that he “specialized in divorcées,” because he traveled a lot and didn’t have time to settle down. Also, because he was mature for his age.
Amy said that lots of men were into divorced women: “The damage makes you kind of sexy, so they’re more likely to stick around instead of ghosting or having sex with your friend to prove it’s casual.”
I countered that Amy’s great bod and fun attitude were probably what made her appealing to men.
She grabbed my phone, held it up to my face to unlock it, and said, “No, it’s divorce,” while downloading Tinder.
I told her about the incident with Calvin, how I didn’t feel ready to meet anyone yet.
Amy clicked her tongue: “You don’t have to marry the guy. Plus, it’s so cool that you fucked his friend, like . . . burn.”
I tried to explain that we hadn’t fucked, just platonically shared a bed in which my boob had slipped out of my sleeping tank only once, but she was no longer listening. As she swiped through my photos, not even blinking at the dozens of mortifying sadness selfies I’d amassed, I felt pleasantly powerless.
Amy settled on a three-year-old picture of me smiling with friends on a patio in Collingwood, before saying, without malice, “You should maybe grow out your bangs.” She paused for a moment, then cropped a conspicuously attractive friend out of the picture and made it my profile image.
“You’ll like dating,” she said. “Everyone eats ass now.”
Amy and I workshopped opening lines as couples started to pack it in around us, established pairs walking out holding hands, newer ones politely hugging and heading in separate directions or exchanging too much eye contact before coyly agreeing to share a cab. I looked them over: how many of these people were happy, how many were unhappy and didn’t know it, how many were pretending to be happy even though they knew damn well they were miserable . . . and when would they be single, if so? I tried to imagine myself joining them. The last time I had been available, dating meant putting on a Going-Out Top and sneaking Smirnoff Ices into a movie theater. I thought about the jolt of one knee purposefully touching another, lingering in the street after last call, two bodies making excuses to move closer. I probably still had one of those tops somewhere.
Amy and I soldiered on, decamping to the bar’s patio and switching, ill-advisedly, to cocktails as we compared breakup stories. Amy’s family had been handling it badly—they loved her ex. Her mother was even occasionally still in touch! Mine were being as supportive as they could from Kingston. “I feel like they don’t really know what to say,” I said. I had recently asked my mother whether any of my family had seen this coming, and she had texted back: define “seen.”
Amy’s parents were still together, which meant, she felt, that they saw her as a failure. More than thirty years of marriage they’d managed, and their daughter couldn’t hold it together for three. My parents separated when I was a child but did not formally divorce until we were adults, leaving my sister and me to grow up in a limbo state I’m sure had no ramifications for our adult approaches to intimacy.
For her divorce, Amy had gone out in a blaze of glory, not quite keying his car (“I was tempted, because of Carrie Underwood”), but definitely not being careful as she lugged her things down the driveway past his souped up Toyota Yaris. Their condo had been everything to her, she told me. The day she left it was her “personal 9/11.”
Still, Amy’s lawyer was sure she would be vindicated.
“We’re going to take that fucker to court, and he’ll have to go live with his mother in Orangeville,” she cackled. “Orangeville! Can you even?”
I said Jon and I were hoping to avoid lawyers for anything more than paperwork purposes; we’d already divided up almost everything, so there wasn’t much to fight about. I explained that taking the high road felt important, that we owed it to our younger selves to be kind. Amy drained her martini and puffed her cigarette, looking more divorced than anyone in history: “Good luck.”
The night carried on. I felt myself cross the threshold between fun drunk and “about to quote a song lyric from my past,” but there was nothing to be done except drink through it. I told Amy everything I posted online felt like a PR exercise, like I was trying to broadcast to friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and a few friends’ dogs that I was doing well, possibly even thriving. I had found myself putting on makeup before watching a movie, then posting a few front-facing camera videos to Instagram, cracking dumb jokes about the films. Always, I chose movies Jon had loved (still loved, presumably). Always, I deleted the videos in the morning.
Amy said the pursuit of a glow-up was only natural. I should come to spin with her if I really wanted to get the word out. Her studio had a mirror that said strong as a woman on it, and she loved the way it made her butt look in selfies.
“There’s only one winner of a breakup,” Amy said. “Why shouldn’t everyone know it’s you?”
I had to admit that it did have the air of a competition, all this being observed. The experience of my marriage ending felt like the closest I would ever come to a kind of grim local celebrity: I imagined our wider circle tracking my movements, studying my posts, wondering in groups about my dating life. I felt super visible—supervised, even. If everyone was going to look, why shouldn’t I have, like, a six-pack when they did?
I told Amy I would try cycling, but would not attempt to “win” the breakup. Amy, one false eyelash starting to peel away from the corner of her eye, looked at me like I was the dumbest idiot alive.
“Why do you think they make you wait a year?” she asked, slurring only slightly. “So you have time to look amazing at the mediation. I bought this top that’s going to kill him.” She smiled, and I saw a tear building in her left eye.
By the time the bar closed, Amy and I had each cried twice. We stood outside waiting for her Uber, and I couldn’t believe how pretty she still looked, with her dainty features and long, shiny hair and her flippy wrap dress with the ruffle down the front. I had caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror during a trip to the bathroom and could not say the same for me. Why didn’t she have wine teeth? How did she keep her hair like that? She exhaled the last of her cigarette and said, “I hate being someone’s ex-wife. It’s so random.”
I said it did feel pretty unexpected.
Amy laughed bitterly, the first time she’d sounded rueful all night. “When did you ever hear a good story about an ex-wife? They’re horrible, all of them. This chain around a man’s neck. But he made me one. If he didn’t want to deal with an ex-wife, he shouldn’t have fucking made me one.”
Amy looked at me and smiled shyly before throwing up a little into her hand. Her car arrived and she threw up again, properly this time, before climbing inside. I heard her telling the driver not to worry about it, though he did seem very worried, and fair enough. I walked home, listening to breakup songs and feeling like a loser for relating to them all. Losing love is like a window in your heart, I thought. I tweeted, everybody sees you’re blown apart, then deleted it, then found the lyric on a Paul Simon fan account and retweeted it from there. As I walked, I opened Tinder and swiped right on everyone, feeling an unbelievable rush of self-esteem or something like it when matches came up, not speaking to any of them. No harm in looking. I could delete it in the morning.
Clicking “show men and women” was exciting. My bisexuality until now had been largely theoretical, based on one university hookup and a few drunken kisses. I’d had a number of charged same-sex “friendships,” one spectacularly botched threesome, and my preferred genre of porn was some variation on one or many women bullying another in a sexual way, but none of this felt substantial enough for me to proclaim it part of my identity. Though I’d always felt at least 35 percent gay, whenever my orientation came up in conversation, I felt inexperienced and sheepish. Now if I told someone I liked women, I could back it up with supporting evidence. I scrolled through some profiles, drawn to ones with pithy, lowercase bios: pile of human garbage seeks same; looking for a partner in crime (i plan to commit many crimes); run. The women’s profiles were on the whole more subdued than the men’s, except when they were many times more intense—badly lit close-up selfies in the bathroom of those clubs where there is a pool and you wear a bikini, bios seeking someone who was willing to get real and NOT about drama.
It was nice to feel my phone vibrate, to see the looping, exclamatory cursive, like a wedding invitation: It’s a Match! I swiped on tall women and short men, women with nose rings and men with tattoos, men in large, anonymous groups or standing alone on top of mountains, gesturing vaguely to the outdoors like, get a load of this. There were men holding babies (don’t worry, she’s not mine!) and women at house parties with their tongues out and men next to big, sedated jungle cats. Women who were too into having a bicycle, men in suits who were looking for no-strings fun, sepia-toned shots of attractive androgynous people with half their faces obscured, winking from behind a dog filter or in heavy makeup. Nobody was terribly appealing. I kept swiping for hours.
The next day I had a hangover and forty-seven new matches. I was scrolling through my options when Amy texted:
such a fun night, babe!!!
main thing to know about the apps is
nobody actually likes anyone else on there
just breathe and remember:
hakuna matata :)