RELATIONSHIPS
My Boyfriend Ghosted Me
After 15 years together. Do I care? Meh.
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Look, I’ll be the first to admit that if I were me, I wouldn’t want to be friends with me. You could be literally on fire and I’d think, “This is going to ruin my day.”
I’m like an opera singer going through their warm-ups.
It’s all me-me-me.
But it’s also my responsibilities.
My second husband and I divorced (I say this like it was a team effort, but obviously, it was not) in large part because the 20-year age difference meant he was ready to retire and move out west, while I was still tethered to a job and to my mom.
I’m still tethered to my mom, only more so.
Since the pandemic, I won’t go to a restaurant. I won’t go to the movies. I flit around the office like a squirrel on crack because I don’t want to inhale other people’s germs and I still got sick.
Yes, after four years of vigilance, something got me.
Short of living in a cave and never coming out, it’s inevitable that I sometimes catch something. But my prime directive is to not give it to my mom. Which is difficult considering I’m her only source of things like, I dunno, food.
So right now I’m less than perky, but the COVID strip that my brain insists is a repurposed pregnancy test says it’s not COVID, which I only half believe. Whatever it is, I still don’t want my 94-year-old mom to get sick.
Nobody else cares about my prime directive. Not my co-workers and not my “boyfriend” who, to paraphrase Cindy Lauper, just wants to have fun doing whatever it is he does.
Fine, whatever.
The first sign is when they unfollow you.
The second sign is when they never initiate a conversation.
The third sign is when they go on vacation and don’t tell you, and you have to ask multiple times to find out where they went.
I don’t care where you went. I don’t care who you went with.
I am tired of the weird.
