You wake up together, you eat together, you sleep together. Sometimes you shower together. You know that it’s no longer love, exactly, but you’re too deeply entangled to leave. He knows your rhythms, your insecurities, your REM cycle—your cycle. He’s made himself needed, and now you don’t exist without one another.
Pro: He knows all your passwords.
Con: He knows all your passwords.
Pro: He tells you nice things about yourself, such as “You walked eight thousand steps today!”
Con: He also knows when you’ve failed. (“Yesterday, you didn’t meet your step goal.”)
Pro: He knows your taste in memes better than anyone.
Con: He may be using memes to manipulate your taste and desires.
Maybe you don’t have to break up outright. What if it all could be solved by becoming less codependent, and letting each other cool down a bit? Maybe you decide to not sleep together every night. For a while, you feel better—light, clearheaded, cool, vaguely French. You start bringing books to bed.
You leave him at home one day, to prove that you can live without him. You feel so good that you can’t wait to tell your friends that you’ve finally dumped him. But how would you even do that? You take a wrong turn and spend forty minutes trying to get home.
He reminds you that it’s your grandma’s birthday. He’s not that bad. He’s just . . . Type A. Not controlling, just a planner. He keeps your secrets, your credit-card info, your heart rate. You complete each other’s sentences.
One night, you reach out, “just to set an alarm.” Next thing you know, you’ve spent seventeen hours watching strangers renovate their kitchens. He swears that he’s changed: “I’ll go on Focus Mode. You can make the apps gray. You can set limits on Instagram. I want what’s best for you!” Then he buzzes with a notification. You take the bait. You always take the bait.
You think about everything he’s seen—your face first thing in the morning, your search history, that draft message you didn’t send. You try to remember life before him. It’s awful. You’d be lost without him (again). You miss him at night.
You stop pretending that you can quit. You put him on “Do Not Disturb,” which feels like a healthy-ish compromise. He buzzes anyway—softly, almost tenderly. You pick him up. He illuminates your face, from below. You look awful from this angle. He loves you anyway.
