I Adored My Boyfriend’s Family And Friends. Then We Broke Up – And Things Got Weird

Jake and I rustled under the covers in our plush, king-sized bed. Rain lashed against the windows. Despite the hangover curdling my stomach, I felt content knowing I’d held my own as his plus-one at the prior night’s wedding.As I untangled myself from the bedsheets, he whispered, “I hope you don’t plan to steal all my friends when we break up.” This wasn’t the first time we had spoken about the dissolution of our relationship, but it was the first time Jake had brought other people into bed with us. I felt a lightning bolt crack through the wall, directly into my nervous system. Still, I didn’t hesitate before smiling sweetly back up at him and lying: “Oh, of course not.”I hadn’t planned to date seriously when Jake and I met. Instead, I spent my 20s romantically unattached, organising book clubs and weekly dinners for the friends I propagated like pothos clippings.I imagined sowing each of these cuttings into a garden, and attentively tending to these sprouting relationships as they nourished, sheltered, and supported me. I didn’t see any need for romance with a garden already so full.My best friend, Katie – madly in love with her own boyfriend – didn’t understand this set of priorities. We squabbled about it endlessly until she responded with an OkCupid profile using my name, photos, and a description of me so insightful that I burst into tears after reading it.I agreed to consider anyone she vetted through the app’s DMs. Eventually, Katie sent me a profile: a lanky boy with two left ear piercings, crouched in a cornfield. My born-and-bred Midwestern heart sang. Suddenly, Jake became my first boyfriend. I pictured him in a place of honour in my garden.We bonded over chaotic work schedules and eccentric hobbies (him: fire juggling; me: collecting National Park junior ranger badges). Yet we repeatedly danced on the edge of breakup. Over brunches, during long car rides, on a rooftop at sunset, we battled over Jake’s fear of making a “wrong choice” while pretending I wasn’t, in fact, one of those “choices” open for discussion.But there was always something to hold off the death blow: a global pandemic or a downstairs neighbour’s sudden, inharmonious, a cappella rendition of Landslide in the middle of a mounting argument.I decided that if we weren’t going to break up, I would treat this like all the other relationships I maintained: if I was going to commit, I was going to commit. I began to relish having a boyfriend – someone who could finally reach the top of my cabinets, a default plus-one for parties, and send me daily texts wishing me a good morning.I had stumbled headfirst into love (my first love!), and it was easy enough to convince myself that when Jake asked for my patience, it meant he saw a future for us. After a few months of dating, Jake introduced me to his friends. They hung out frequently and overcommitted to themed activities monthly, often hosted by his brother and sister-in-law, Emily. There were trolley trips to Medieval Times, Formula 1 watch parties, and the social event of the year: an all-day marathon of The Lord of the Rings films.I beamed any time Emily added me to a new text thread for an upcoming party or a more intimate “girls only” event. It felt natural to incorporate the group into my garden, and by the time I was Jake’s wedding plus-one, I knew I’d earned the invitation in my own right.Meanwhile, I feigned ignorance of how these friendships felt like a protective layer of roots stabilising my rocky romance, preventing its further erosion.The author planning a Ruth Reichl-themed dinner party for friends in 2017.Four years into our relationship, Jake told me that he was going to move to Los Angeles for work. Whenever I tried to steer conversations toward our future, he folded into himself. I wondered if, all along, I’d refused to listen when Jake said he’d never been able to commit to anything.Using our friends to shield myself from the reality of our relationship was no longer sustainable. On Jake’s first trip home over our anniversary, I told him I was done feeling optional. Suddenly, Jake became my first ex-boyfriend. I felt numb – devastated that my love hadn’t been enough to convince Jake to commit after all.After he silently packed his belongings, we counted back from three to send simultaneous texts: Jake, to his brother to pick him up; me, to the select group of women I used to call “Jake’s friends”. I wanted them to hear about the breakup from me.My pre-existing community, Katie-led, filled my Google Calendar with plans for the next month and a half. I received the same support from the friendships I had cultivated through Jake, along with the promise that I was unequivocally stuck with them. With each, “Ummm, you aren’t getting rid of us,” I let out a little choking sob as my cat stared up at me in bewilderment.I thought about my garden of relationships. Fixated as I was on my withering romance with Jake, I’d underestimated how my nurturing had spread to the plants that came into my garden with him.I began to imagine all of the blossoms around me, both old and new – the blue hyacinth who coached me into finally eating something that wasn’t microwaved chips topped with cheddar; the clump of yellow gladiolus who distracted me with friendship bracelets dedicated to our senior cats; and the pink iris who styled my fried curls after I accidentally bleached them half-blonde. I stepped back in amazement. Some of the blooms looked fragile, but they were too beautiful to let wilt and die. I thought, “It can’t be that complicated to keep all these plants alive, right?”I tried to freeze my garden in time, a frost of determination keeping my precious tendrils and leaves in stasis while I adjusted back to single life.At a sleepover Emily hosted after the breakup, one of the women commented on how impressed she was that I hadn’t mentioned Jake. I waved her off while my heart raced, thinking, Of course not, how can I speak poorly of Jake in his brother’s home among the friends I met through him?In the morning, I scoured r/divorce on Reddit for hours.The instructions for handling Jake post-breakup were clear: mute him on social media, text my coworker-turned-breakup-coach anytime I was overcome with the urge to reach out, look ethereally hot in everything posted online – but I couldn’t find any guidelines on friendships.I was wracked with guilt whenever I brought the topic up to my pre-Jake friends, wondering if they were secretly frustrated watching me agonise over another, newer group of women. When I shared this anguish with my college friend, Mary, she rolled her eyes.“Of course it’s not an issue, and, honestly, I get it,” she assured me. “I remember when my brother and his girlfriend broke up. It felt…” she paused. “...It felt like a death.”I nodded in appreciation, sipped my Diet Coke, and promptly refused to accept that as my reality. I still experienced the closeness I’d always valued with Emily and the other women I had met through Jake. So what if that closeness was tempered by my conviction that I couldn’t share how the breakup caused every emotion I could name to flood my body during every moment of my existence?The author (right) with Katie in 2018.I dyed my hair fluorescent pink and meticulously crafted jokes so people would know that even if I was sad, I was, like, cool about it. And I was sad for a long while, forced to face that all my patience had been for naught. There was no longer the possibility of a payoff where Jake chose a future with me. His sprout in my garden was dead, regardless of how many hours I had spent toiling at his plot.I found myself blushing at random moments, eyes hot with tears, as I realised I was no better than anybody else when it came to my first heartbreak: I was just really devastatingly miserable.As with all things, time helped. My jokes eventually started to feel less like a mask and more like the truth. I dove headfirst into online dating – this time with a profile written exclusively by me – and resurfaced with my now-boyfriend, Nate.Things with Nate are easy in a way I’ve never experienced. It turns out the forward trajectory of a relationship is the most obvious thing in the world when liking the same stuff (this time: escape rooms, peculiar-looking cats) is balanced atop a foundation of mutual respect and dedication to a future together.When I told Nate I met some of my friends through my ex, he shrugged, saying he wasn’t particularly bothered as long as they treated me well. And when Jake reached out asking to talk while he was in town – something I welcomed to brick off any ghosts haunting my nascent relationship – Nate just held my hand tighter, and said he trusted me.The meetup with Jake was like most people’s fantasy: your ex takes full ownership of everything they did while you gently nod with your freshly dyed hair. I finally took a breath and basked in the glory of having “figured it all out the way no woman has before”, maintaining willful ignorance that, without my concentrated grip on its temperature, my garden of relationships was thawing into disarray. Not all of it – the hyacinth was brighter than ever, and a patch of white chrysanthemums had been quietly budding this whole time. But I couldn’t miss the gladiolus blooms fading to a rotten-looking tan, falling off their stems one by one.It goes like this: one day you get an itch in the back of your brain and start to wonder... was your friend a little shorter with you than everybody else at the girls’ night dinner? Should you be worried she didn’t invite you to that one party, and all your mutuals have been given a different reason why? Is your group chat a little quieter? Do you feel an appropriate level of insane because, over a shared pitcher of sangria, Emily told you it didn’t matter that she was your ex’s in-law; she was still hurt to hear about your new boyfriend secondhand and promised you could still tell her anything ≠ but now, inexplicably, she can’t seem to stand having you and said new boyfriend in her home?Sometimes I’d think about how Emily and I used to sneak away from the myriad festivities she hosted to lie on her bedroom carpet, and how she attentively listened as I told her in so many stilted words that Jake wasn’t prioritising me. I’d remember how she encouraged me to end things, and how the first time I saw her after the breakup, she grasped my arm and said, “It’s OK, we’ll still be sisters.”I didn’t have the courage to force a confrontation. Instead, I spent months tirelessly analysing every interaction I had around her, scrutinising for signs of spread, afraid that if she didn’t have a place for me in her life, her sentiments would fester, and the rest of my friends would fall one after another.The author with her boyfriend Nate at Katie's wedding in 2024.Of course, that’s caving to cliche; it’s simply not what happened. My mutual friends with Emily – free from that familial association to Jake – continue to bring bright bursts of colour into my garden.We organise writing clubs and metalsmithing classes and have hours-long romantasy book discussions. It turns out we have plenty in common (vet bills, fondness for horror in women’s literature, and a misunderstanding of how to style crew socks) beyond my ex. I want to tell you that Emily and I are friends, too, but that would mean lying about the raw edge of tension I feel between us. Maybe it’s because I’m never certain if she’ll show up to dinner as a supportive girlfriend or a staunch family protector. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how to reconcile how I’ve made peace with the first boy to break my heart, but not the friend who I thought would see me through it. Or maybe it’s because of a secret, third thing neither I or Emily understand as we try to find a friendship that serves both of us. I think the whole truth is that we are friendly acquaintances with many mutual connections, which means Emily and I still wave to each other at parties and occasionally text. But it’s been months since I felt the gentle cushion of her bedroom flooring under my palms.It does us all a disservice to pretend that losing the platonic relationships we’ve made through our romantic partners won’t crack open our chest cavities just a little bit. Those friendships are built honestly – not stolen – but they also aren’t friendships created in a vacuum.Sometimes I remember Emily’s hand on my arm, and I think maybe it was a form of love, helping me leave even when, deep down, she must have known it might change things in a way she would be unable to integrate with her loyalty to her family.I know I don’t like to let go of people. I dated Jake for years longer than I should have, and I’m still fixated on our breakup’s collateral damage to my friendship with his sister-in-law. Though I suppose this also makes sense; I’ve always cared more about my girls than my men.I’ve learned a little while tending to the garden that contains them all, too. A garden isn’t static; the needs of the flowers within vary by species and change with the seasons. And when a plant succumbs to frost, the roots under the damp, fertile ground can live on. Even if the leaves are wilting, it’s worth another look. Some names and identifying details in this essay were changed to protect the privacy of the individuals who appear in it.Ellen Gordon is a paediatric haematology nurse and self-proclaimed hobby hoarder from Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MSN degree from Elmhurst University and a post-baccalaureate certificate in creative writing from Northwestern University. She recently learned how to ride a bicycle.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected] Had A Painful Secret. I Was Shocked When I Discovered My Friends Had The Same OneI Was Everyone's Unpaid 'Therapist Friend' – Then I Learned This Hard Truth About Friendship'I Ended A Years-Long Friendship Over A Sunscreen Argument. Was I Wrong?'

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