It was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Which is a bold claim about a breakup with someone I’d known for all of 18 months. I can be a little dramatic sometimes. But honestly? Not about this. I have never known agony like it. An older pain, the kind caused by far more shocking blows dealt to me in the past, seemed to lie dormant in my bones until the anguish of heartbreak reanimated it. I felt all of it – the old pain and the new – erupt at once. My body was burnt up by it.
In part, the devastation was caused by the rupture catching me unaware, like a natural disaster no one sees coming. It had been my private little earthquake, and it razed me to the ground. Many of us have experienced this kind of breakup. The kind that nothing prepares you for. The kind that leaves you existentially unstable. The kind where the only reasonable response to the first note of an Adele song on BBC Radio 2 is to wrench the car radio out by brute force and toss it out of the window.
The memory of my Google search history from that time still makes me wince: “Breakup. Am I dying?” “How long to get over ex?” “Getting back with ex.” “Why is love not enough?” Every unoccupied moment was spent dividing my entire life story into before and after, obsessively replaying the sweet times, trying to find the pivotal moments I wished I could reach back to and change, surveying the extent of what I had lost, the wrecked landscape of my new reality.
Growing up with dysphoria about my body and an inquisitive mind had stunted my emotional growth in early adulthood. It created a dissonance whereby I often felt I understood things long before I experienced them. I regularly mistook intellectual understanding for true knowledge of my emotions, so the full experience of shattering heartbreak was shocking. The smashing of my delusion – my previous belief that I understood what loss felt like – was brutal and shameful. I had just entered my 30s and was only now experiencing the devastation of a teenager, sobbing in her room because her world is ending. So embarrassing.
“I’m just sorry for everyone who has ever gone through a breakup and tried to talk to me about it before now,” I said on the phone to one friend. “I didn’t know it was like this.” That’s to say, I had not, until this moment in my life, fully understood that love, even mutual love shared passionately by both parties, was insufficient to sustain a romantic partnership.
My ex-boyfriend, B, and I had not expected to fall in love in the first place. We’d met on a dating app when he was barely out of a previous relationship of several years, and I was in a phase of booking and turning up to as many dates with men as I could manage. Neither of us, then, were coming to that first date with the healthiest of intentions. But he surprised me and so I put wisdom aside. I suggested he come and meet me at the Barbican’s lakeside terrace, where I had already sat smoking cigarettes all afternoon with a friend, on a late summer evening. I had told B that I had a small window before catching a late train home. “If you still want to meet after you’ve finished work, I’ll see you here,” I wrote, only half expecting a reply, as lots of men use dating apps with little intention of actually meeting anyone. “Yep. See you there then,” came the prompt reply, to my mild surprise.
“He knows I’m trans,” I’d told my friend as we sat at the heart of the Barbican’s brutalist landscape, colossal pillars of poured concrete shielding us from the afternoon heat. “I always tell them. I don’t want someone turning up and being like, well, you didn’t say anything about being a dude.” She didn’t laugh – my friends never do when I make these kinds of jokes about myself, and then: “Just remember you have the power. He’s not deciding on whether you’re good enough to date, you’re deciding on him.”
It sounded good, but I didn’t really buy it. As afternoon lengthened into evening, and the time approached for B and I to meet, I walked my friend towards one of the Barbican’s exits, then doubled back to the same fountain I’d lounged next to with her, as it seemed like a useful landmark for me and my date. Before I’d reached it, B’s name flashed across my phone. As I walked towards the fountain, I recognised him immediately from the pictures he’d sent me. Carrying a canvas tote bag and wearing Air Max, he looked like the kind of early-30s guy who hadn’t changed how he dressed since his mid-20s, whose transition to a new stage of adulthood was incomplete.
When he looked up and saw me, I studied his face looking for a specific reaction. The reaction I always looked for, back then, when someone met me for the first time or learned I’m trans. A scan of my face so rapid you could easily miss it, but whose aim was always the same: scrutinising the harmony of my features and structure for any evidence of the “man within”. People use their mind’s eye to try to strip femininity away from you like meat from a carcass. I recognise it in others because I spent years doing it to myself, in mirrors. They can’t help it, I suppose. It always felt like an examination I must pass or fail.
With straight men, I assumed the scan came with a subconscious anxiety about their own sexuality: would my friends think this is a woman? If B submitted me to this test, he did a better job at hiding it than most, for I didn’t feel the usual stomach-churning moment of being appraised. He greeted me shyly and immediately suggested getting some beers from a nearby shop, which we did. Alcohol was to become an unstable accelerant in our courtship. He was more charming than I had expected, bringing a levity and ease as we scrambled to find common conversational ground. We sat talking on the terrace until after sunset, then walked through the eerily quiet Barbican centre to a nearby pub.
Time skipped past us so fast that I missed one train, then another and another. Finally, I frantically flagged down a taxi, shoved my bags in the back seat and begged the driver to get me across London for the last train home. As I turned to say a rushed goodbye, he leant down and kissed me. And so began an irreversible alteration in how I would perceive my own life.
In the weeks and months that followed my first date with B, I was disabused, permanently, of the idea that I could never be the beloved object of another person’s care and affection. It wasn’t that the relationship was always good: though we both could be kind and loving, in our different ways we also had a capacity for selfishness and emotional immaturity that precluded the good communication necessary for true intimacy.
I spent half the relationship pre-empting how I would cope with an abandonment that had not yet occurred. (Years later, I’d realise he tried to show his love for me in the ways he knew, but he did not know how to calm the vast lake of fear beneath my surface.) And, as I watched B fall in love with me gradually, his love generated difficult conversations with friends and family about my past, and about the shape of his own desires.
Some voices around him said cruel and stigmatising things about him choosing a trans woman. He was unpractised in the kind of courage it takes to refuse shame; the kind of courage that I’d had to develop when still a child. I grew resentful about this. But I stuck at the relationship because, as his love grew, I was engaged in my own malpractice of loving. Instead of seeing things as they were in the present, I eagerly wrote a romantic fantasy for myself that helped me cope with the fear and vulnerability involved in giving myself to him. I told myself that we were overcoming these challenges together and that, in the end, the rewards would be worth the striving. He would become ever more practised in the art of loving me as I needed to be loved without hesitation; I, transfigured by his love, would be released from my fear of desertion, and the constant inner chorus that sang to me about my unworthiness. Naturally, this didn’t fucking happen.
I was convinced that, to sustain the romantic fantasy I’d created, I needed to hide my own flaws. If love was something B could afford to give me – despite my apparent inferiority to other women he might choose – I needed to justify it by being perfect to him. At first, I took enthusiastically to the diminishment and appeasements that come with loving someone else, a man, above myself. I fought for conquest over every fault that conflicted with what he needed and wanted from me. Always good humoured, unconditionally accepting: there was perhaps something of the Stepford wife about it. So many important discussions and conflicts were deferred and suppressed by my capitulation. In my keenness to show to myself and the world that I had been chosen, I started to press myself into a shape I did not recognise. Looking back, the humiliation of it all was how oblivious he was to my striving for perfection. All the while I felt more lonely, more isolated, more removed from him by the day. Later, when our time together was over, and I finally admitted defeat, the loneliness would pour out of me as rage and despair.
There had been another problem, an elephant in the room: B wanted children. When you can’t have children naturally, and don’t want them by any other means, your partner’s desire becomes a nightmare. When my friends, seeing how happy I was in the early days of our relationship, excitedly asked, “How’s it all going with … you know?!” my flat response, “He wants children” was enough to snuff out the light in their eager expressions.
“What, like, biological children?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
He had told me on our first holiday together, a weekend trip to Seville, as we stumbled back from dinner along cobbled streets to our apartment. “Do you want children?” he asked me bluntly, emboldened by red wine. “No,” I replied. “I had to think about it when I transitioned, and I don’t think that I ever have really.” His reply was awkward and muted, but clear: “I do.” In that moment, a virus entered our bloodstream. Its multiplying attacks on all the hopes, reassurances and dreams I had invested in him corroded the vital organs of any future life. You don’t tend to acknowledge these things as they happen, though. For nine months, we pretended that the conversation had never taken place.
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The eventual, agonising disintegration of our relationship happened so abruptly, it didn’t feel real. One minute you’re rushing around Harrods to buy his family fancy biscuits that carry the subliminal message, “So sorry again that this man you all love so much is dating me, a barren transsexual.” The next minute you’re sat with him on a grey polyester couch in the bar of an Ibis, locked in an existential summit meeting about the fundamental incompatibility of your lives. The inconvenience of reproductive biology could perhaps have been circumvented by medical technology – if, that was, we were both willing to go to any length to completely merge our lives. The problem was, we were not. The desperate negotiations we held, in order to try to save a relationship we both wanted to work, revealed a much deeper chasm: we both had wildly different expectations of what love looks like, what its purpose is and what it should provide. As it turned out, the deeply personal had been knocked off balance, irreconcilably so, by the political. My queerness and his straightness were dancing together, but to different beats.
What do I mean by this? B was more to me than just a man. More than just my lover. He also represented hope, and another kind of life. A kinder life, a less difficult life. Growing up, he’d been sustained by two happily married parents who lived in a nice house. Like me, he had gone to an all-boys school – but he had actually enjoyed it. He walked down the street unafraid, unhaunted by threats of violence. He had never gone under general anaesthetic, alone in a strange place, praying as the drugs took him under that the altered body he’d wake up with would be more palatable to himself and to the world. In fact, as he once told me, he was “proud” of his body. He was a serial monogamist who always found it easy to meet women he liked. He drank, but doing so hadn’t ruined his life. I used to ask him in detail about his life before we met with a mixture of curiosity and resentment. It was the kind of life filled with plus ones to other people’s weddings, joint Christmas cards, Sunday walks holding hands. In short, his was a life that was more normal, straighter, less punishing than the one I had led to this point. If I could share such a life with him, I felt, I could be redeemed. I would be, for the first time in my adult life, more readily legible to the world beyond a few queer bars in east London.
My adult life, particularly since embarking on a more public career, diverges sharply from B’s in almost every way. It has been one of almost continuous surveillance, verbal abuse, threats and harassment, in one form or another. It’s a continuation, an evolution of a threatening atmosphere in which I have lived since I was about 11 years of age. Anything I’ve achieved, professionally or personally, has required a hardened exterior to weather the storm of scrutiny, belittlement and hostility accorded to trans women who dare take up space in the public realm. So you can see why dissolving the walls that distinguish myself from another, especially someone like B, might seem like a highly comforting prospect. If I just took on all his interests, did whatever he liked doing at the weekend, found humour in whatever he found funny, I could be rewarded with love and security and, perhaps, immunity against the brutality of the world.
It was all very tempting, until it wasn’t. The question of children focused my attention on the fact that I found the script B had for himself and how his life should go from here too confining and antagonistic to the person that, deep down, I knew myself to be. There was too much space between us. I’d tried, vainly, to close that gap, but the children question forced me to recognise what I already knew: I was oriented away from the future he was striving for. By the end, I realised I was trying so hard to find security, I was not being honest with B or with myself. This was where I learned the true difference between love as a feeling and love as an action.
B and I worked in different cities and mostly saw each other at weekends. When we were apart, I would long for him. At the height of my infatuation, I would think about how I would sooner die myself than see B die. My impulses to love were undeniably strong, but they were also riddled with a paralysing fear of the truth: that ahead of us lay only unfulfilled expectation, disappointment and resentment. My feelings and my will were in conflict. I realised that, together, neither of us would nurture anything worth having. So my will won: in order to truly practise my love for B, I would have to let him go.
The night before I left him, I clambered into bed next to him and pulled the duvet gathered around him taut and then over myself. Knowing this would be the last time I slept beside him, I was tempted to pull his body across me, too. His body was sufficiently heavier and larger than mine for me often to marvel at the disparity in the proportions of our limbs when we lay together, or, on crowded tube platforms, to feel mildly elated by having always to look up to speak to him. For a trans woman, whose task is so often to shrink herself into the acceptable, unmannish form that society demands, a taller and broader bedfellow is deeply reassuring: a way to feel as if you have finally achieved this much-coveted diminution. But that night I didn’t drape him over me. I knew to do so would be an act of cruel self-deception; I knew his body was a reassurance I was about to lose.
We both woke around nine. He was instantly preoccupied with a forthcoming trip he was organising and we chatted inanely for a while about his travel arrangements, as couples do. Then there was a brief silence. The mood in the room seemed imperceptibly to shift. His eyes burned into me. I had spent many hours looking into those eyes for reflections of myself. At times, I caught a glimpse of someone greater than I was. She was calm and kind and sane and sexy – but then she’d disappear again, and I would be saddened by her absence. Now, I knew she was gone for ever and wouldn’t be returning. “I’m so sorry,” I said, over and over. Before leaving, I lay against him for a few minutes. The agony of all this was so acute, I hazarded that a brief moment in one another’s arms was unlikely to make it any worse. In films, romantic endings receive the grace of the cinematic: no admin, no clumsiness, perfect script. This being real life, I still had to pack my silly little rose gold suitcase with clothes and belongings scattered around his flat. After squashing everything in, I wrestled with the jammed telescopic handle of the case for what felt like an eternity and then, finally, noisily trundled off down the hallway.
When I reached the end of the street, B’s name flashed across my phone: a text message that said simply, “I love you.” I didn’t answer and I never saw him again. I love you, but nothing. I love you, goodbye for ever. Love with no one left to love.
Until that day, so much of my life and work had centred on the ways I was different from those around me. My energies had been spent making my experiences, desires and motivations legible to a society intent on rendering me an oddity. The banal universality of heartbreak came as a unique relief. I didn’t have to explain the simple and total state of desolation, I realised: people already understood. For once, there was no “diversity and inclusion” training needed for people to empathise with me: all I had to say was “bad breakup” and there would come nods of sympathetic recognition.
But the bare realities of why my relationship had ended were rooted in my specific experience. In the months that followed our separation, I came to another, more disturbing, realisation about the sudden loss of love from my life. The sad truth is that my breakup was as powerfully affirmative as it was painful. It ratified so many secret beliefs I held about myself: that I was especially complicated to love, was doomed to be abandoned, would always be found wanting and would always be alone in the world. I was right to be suspicious. It was too good to be true.
This deep-seated conviction, never far from the surface, came back to torture me in the months that followed my breakup with B: I was a failed girlfriend, which also meant I was a failed heterosexual, which was because I was a failed woman. As I rebuilt myself after the end of that relationship, I had to confront the ways in which I had laboured under a false idea of love’s power. During the relationship, so strong was my sense of being beyond love’s reach that B telling me he loved me only reinforced my distrust: I unconsciously concluded that he must be lying to me. Seeing romantic love as a cure for one’s ills is a sure-fire route to treating it like a resource to be extracted from others. It soon leads to self-deception, manipulation, secrecy and fear in matters that are supposed to be shaped by generosity, honesty and trust.
The truth is, though, that in the years since I last saw B, I realised that I did not just have to get over our relationship. I also had to grieve the loss of a life I thought I wanted, a life that involved a capitulation to norms around love, norms that confine and curtail us all. In the intervening years, I have become much more critical of the ways in which we are all made to feel like failures in romantic love – or, at least, to harbour secret fears that we are doing it incorrectly and that those others, over there, are doing it better. Perhaps, I began to think in those lonely months of heartbreak, the problem was not me but our perception of love itself. For my part, I needed to start again, to imagine another way to give and receive love. I needed a blueprint. I needed to understand what was wrong with what I’d been taught about love and, in doing so, to start anew.
