I thought I had a classic fear of commitment, but it’s more complicated than that.
I broke up with my boyfriend of five years during quarantine, but not because we had fallen out of love.
I sent him an email with the subject line, “My Terms,” and proceeded to outline why I wanted to be single. In an effort to impose order on my decision, I included subheadings like “Why I Need This,” “What This Change Means For You” and “What We’ll Say To the Outside World,” followed by a trail of bullet points.
Under the subheading, “What This Doesn’t Mean,” I wrote: “That I don’t love you anymore.”
We were three months into the pandemic, and most of us couldn’t fathom the devastation to come. By then, though, we could begin to see our loneliness stretching into the future with no end point. Singles stared absently into the eyes of strangers on Zoom, longing to be touched.
And here I was, alone and equally desperate for connection, breaking up with my boyfriend of five years, even though nothing between us had broken.
For months afterward, I struggled to understand why. It was only when I looked back on flash points throughout the relationship that I realized my singleness was inevitable; I was simply building the vocabulary to explain it to myself.
I had met Malcolm my freshman year of college at a luncheon for honor students. He was wearing a blue plaid button-down and his voice was a startling baritone. Everyone compared him to Barack Obama, and the comparison was fitting — he was similarly warm, what some might call magnetic. He seemed like a reasonable person to trust with your life or your love.
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My friend and I had been talking idly about starting a dating service on campus, but first we needed to create a database. I walked up to him and asked if he wanted to be our first client.
He laughed. “OK, sure. How does it work?”
I pulled out my phone. “First, I have to take your picture so girls can know what you look like.”
I positioned him before a wall and gave him unhelpful guidance on how to look appealing. The picture came out awkward and blurry. Still, I sent it to my mother, giddy about the cute guy with the deep voice who looked like Obama.
After the luncheon, he and I circled each other for two years until one night I called to see if he wanted to hang out. What followed was a relationship plucked from romantic folklore. He sent me flowers with handwritten letters and arranged for my favorite ice cream to be delivered to my hotel room while I was at a conference in New York.
After four months, he followed me to France, where I was studying abroad my junior year. That’s where our relationship became official. On a call several weeks before he arrived, I said, “I guess we should get together or something.”
He said, “We’re kind of already together, aren’t we?”
“I know. But I should probably be your girlfriend, right?”
He laughed. “OK.”
Our exchange felt like a conversation between two third graders in the playground. I understood that I was supposed to care about this milestone — he was my first boyfriend. Yet when I grasped for the significance of it, I came up empty.
When he left France several weeks before I did, I was surprised to feel relieved. I longed — not to be alone, not to be without love, but for freedom and autonomy. Since we had gotten together, I had felt our identities weaving into a beautiful quilt, and I didn’t see how to disentangle myself without alienating the man I loved.
I was somebody without him. I knew this, but others didn’t seem to. Even when I was by myself, people always asked me about him, their remarks dropping me into a future — of marriage, children and muted desires — that I had not signed up for. I wanted my identity back. I wanted to unravel.
As soon as I got back, I suggested an open relationship, something I had wanted from the beginning. I saw it as a step toward establishing myself as a romantic and sexual entity outside of my relationship.
The following year, after leaving college in Atlanta, we moved 2,000 miles apart — Malcolm home to California, me home to D.C. — with no plans of either of us moving to be with the other anytime soon. We saw each other several times a year.
By the time the pandemic hit, we had been long-distance for three years, and I saw no problem with it. When the travel restrictions began, co-workers said, “It must be hard not being able to fly to see your boyfriend.” To which I replied, “I actually like the distance.”
Many times, I thought I had a classic fear of commitment, but I knew it was more complicated. I was resisting something greater than our individual relationship, and my resistance was political.
A day before I sent Malcolm the email saying I wanted to break up, I came across a term online: solo polyamory. It described a person who is romantically involved with many people but is not seeking a committed relationship with anyone. What makes this different from casual dating is that they’re not looking for a partner, and the relationship isn’t expected to escalate to to long-term commitments, like marriage or children. More important, the relationship isn’t seen as wasted time or lacking significance because it doesn’t lead to those things.
I wasn’t comfortable identifying as polyamorous then. My desire for something nontraditional was a source of shame and questioning. But for once, in the vast literature on love, I felt seen. I liked how solo polyamory cherished and prioritized autonomy and the preservation of self, and I found its rejection of traditional models of romantic love freeing.
When Malcolm and I first told friends and family about our open relationship, we were met with verbal lashings and gross generalizations, including that this was “not something Black people did.” Much later, I realized they viewed our arrangement as a personal attack on an institution they wanted to believe in. In some ways, this attack was the rebellion I had been seeking.
My entire girlhood had been consumed by fantasies that were force-fed to me. Love and relationships were presented as binary, and in this binary, the woman must get married or be lonely (or, in classic novels, die). The path to freedom and happiness was narrower still for Black women. Even in our extremely loving relationship, I had felt confined.
I knew my mother would be devastated by the breakup. A divorcée of 20-plus years, she often warned against “ending up like me,” a woman untethered to a man.
I waited nearly six months to tell her. When I did, she said, “What if he finds someone else?”
“He could’ve found someone else when we were together,” I said, puzzled.
But relationships do give the illusion that we exist in a bubble with another person, insulated from the rest of the world — that’s part of what makes them feel so intimate. But if this year has taught us anything, it’s that none of us are insulated from each other, even in isolation, and that, at any moment, our bubble could burst. I no longer see this rupture as a bad thing.
After I sent Malcolm my breakup email, he and I spoke on the phone.
“I have to be honest,” he said, “I was a little sad when I read it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It just seemed more final in an email.”
“You know, we can change the terms whenever we want,” I said.
“I know.”
“You’re still my best friend,” I said.
He made a joke about being friend-zoned, then said, “Yeah, you’re my best friend too.”
I recently listened to a conversation about polyamory on Clubhouse — a new voice-based social media platform. All the faces in the chat were Black.
“You have to own your choice,” one guy said. “You have to remember you chose this for a reason.”
I thought of my choice to be single and not looking but still very much loving.
What I want are relationships that operate with a spirit of possibility rather than constraint. Shedding the identity of “girlfriend” has allowed me to experience the expansiveness of love. It has challenged me to stretch the limits of my relationships to see what they can be when relieved of social pressure.
As humans, we’re always going to reach for certainty using the few tools we have, and sometimes that tool will be a label like “girlfriend.” But in a year of crippling loss, canceled trips, delayed milestones and a charged election, I have found strange consolation in knowing that nothing in our lives has ever been certain. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I am just here to enjoy this, whatever this is, for however long it lasts.
Haili Blassingame is a producer of the 1A show at WAMU in Washington, D.C.
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
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