Memoir installment #14

That time a follower started dating my ex

My ex boyfriend Nate and I made each other's acquaintance on Tinder, and, true to that app’s rep, fooled around the night we met, late one frigid evening at a wine bar not far from my place on the Lower East Side. He was an independent film producer, and I thought he was intense, good-looking, smart, and very funny.  He was also a bit shorter than me, and I—who’d always had been hung up on tall men—found that his height was somehow appealing, even sexy.

After that, it was a slow burn of occasional assignations that eventually turned—as these things sometimes do—into a relationship. Two tumultuous years later, I booked a trip to Los Angeles to see friends without him, and he—hurt and annoyed, as we’d talked about going together—broke up with me, which is maybe what I wanted to have happen in the first place. This was just weeks before Covid forced the world into shutdown, and I—alone in my apartment with just my two dogs for company in the following weeks and months—realized that I was happier than I’d been in quite some time. He was a fighter to my lover, and all that contention had worn me down. 

We didn’t speak until he reached out after seeing on Instagram that one of my dogs had died, and a few weeks later, in June, we got together for a walk, which turned into dinner, and then—perhaps inevitably—into the breakup sex we’d never had. Over the summer, we were in intermittent touch: one of us would send the other an amusing article, or a snapshot of a restaurant we used to frequent on special occasions. I have a bad track record of being on good terms with my exes, and I was pleased that we seemed perhaps able to be friends.

I spent the summer on Long Island, and when I returned for a week after Labor Day to the city, we arranged to meet for lunch, at a Greek place we’d gone to before in Astoria. We caught one another up on our lives, and I asked if Virginia was his girlfriend yet. Virginia was a friend of his I’d always thought he had a thing for. He replied that no, she wasn’t, but that he did have a girlfriend. 

“How’d you meet?” I asked.

“She got in touch about my work,” he replied, adding that she read my blog.

I felt a churning in the pit of my stomach. “Wait, is that how you met? Because of the blog?”

He looked away and changed the subject. I, not wanting to appear as though I cared too much, let him.