I first met Mary during a class project in college in 2008. I thought she was cute and bold; she shook my hand and said she knew me from a play I had acted in a year back. She thought my face looked interesting. Not handsome, just interesting. I played a meth addict.
We texted incessantly for a month and went on our first date to an ice cream festival called The Scooper Bowl. I missed the train, and we kissed. We began a summer fling where we’d walk around Boston holding hands, eating pizza, and watching TV cuddled up on her couch. She made that summer in Boston perfect. It was only two months, but it was unfiltered romance.
Throughout our courtship, I was utterly under the control of my ex-girlfriend. I let her walk all over me. She would call me at 4 A.M. and only stop calling when I answered. Being in college, I decided to drive down south where she lived to see if our relationship could work. I asked Mary to wait for me while I figured it out. She didn’t want to. Obviously.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Okay.” We hung up. Not even a minute later she called me back and let me have it.
“What the fuck, Jeremy?! You’re ending this because of her? She treats you like shit. Fuck you. Don’t ever talk to me again.”
She told me I broke her heart, blocked me on Facebook, and said we would never (ever, everrrr) get back together.
I’m a writer, not a talker, so when I broke down one night reeling from the gravity of my mistake, I actually wrote Mary a letter.
I assume it opened with “Mary, I’m an idiot...” She now says it was tear-stained. Regardless, it worked. She texted me to say she had gotten the letter, which led to hanging out as friends, which led to drinking as friends and eventually a relationship.
It was good, but the toxic feelings from the first breakup followed us wherever we went. Mary had let go of that fun-in-the-sun, summer-fling, freewheelin’ attitude I had desperately tried and failed to bring to our last relationship. She had made new friends and learned valuable lessons since our breakup, the biggest one being that guys who try to hold on to their high school ex-girlfriends are as dumb as they are stupid.
She’d get mad at me for forgetting to text, breaking plans, and generally being a croissant-level flake. In turn, I’d get mad at her for getting mad at me; she was the only girl I’ve ever had a full-on screaming match with in public. We weren’t those people, but we were turning into that couple.
As Mary eloquently puts it nowadays, “You were a real piece of shit back then.” I was a perfect storm of idiocy. I was always angry at myself for letting her go, angry that we didn’t act like a normal couple, and angry that we were constantly fighting.
On top of that, I was embarrassed. I was always letting her go, and that made me feel like a bad dude. My go-to move was letting it go down the pisser. I never even made an attempt to remember to call her back, to be affectionate, or to even feign interest in her hobbies.
I remember the exact words we exchanged when she called me to end things.
“I want someone who’s going to love me,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s something I can do,” I responded.
Our third attempt—and, you guessed it, the ensuing breakup—was kind of a glitch in the space-time continuum. It was 2009, and at this point I’d realized Mary was not an easy person to please. I coasted through the relationship, and she called me out where other girls I’d been with brushed off my repeated bad behavior. Our second breakup had reinforced the notion that no relationship comes easy and you have to put in the work, but I still sucked.
I’d had this bullshit faux-aha moment after a chat with a friend who’d suggested I grow the fuck up and treat Mary right. So I called her one night, a week or two after our second breakup, and repented, asking her to be my official girlfriend. We decided to give it one more go.
That relationship lasted about 25 hours total. I had, more or less, had a fling with another girl during the first and second breakup. Mary was upset when she found out and dumped me faster than you can say, “Jeremy Glass is a garbage island covered in radioactive waste.”
Then we were completely out of each other’s lives. I stopped thinking about her entirely—save for those random moments I’d spot short brunettes reading on library stairs. I spent the next four years dating other people, with some hits and many misses. One woman stole a couple hundred dollars out of my checking account and got engaged to another guy while we were living together.
In 2012, my little brother Adam died. My life shattered, and I spent the next month drunk in bed. It had been four years since Mary and I had spoken, but it spoke volumes to me that she came out of the woodwork to send me a handwritten note expressing her sorrow for Adam’s death. Through everything—the fights, the skipped plans, the immaturity—she found it in herself to reach out to me. I was blown away, and she was back in my life. We learned that we only lived a few blocks away from each other, and that is how we started dating for the fourth and final time. Once again we started seeing each other as friends. We always met up at this one café in the Lower East Side. I’d get a coffee, and she’d get a bagel.
This is when I felt like I really met Mary. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t jealous, and I wasn’t distracted—I had a clear mind, and I loved her. She was the kind of girl I’d always call back, and always take out for dates, and always hold hands with. She’s the kind of girl I never want to be away from. I’d seen what life looked like without Mary (cue damp Jimmy Stewart shouting “Mahhhhrrrrrryyyyy, don’t you remember me Mary?” in It’s a Wonderful Life), and I had a new appreciation for her. I loved the person she had turned into: She had built a life for herself in New York and was the person I know she always wanted to be—she grew her bangs out, too, which I guess is a big thing for women?
One night in 2013, she asked if she could stay over, and I more or less spilled my guts to her and admitted my intense feelings. She said she didn’t reciprocate. It would take about nine months of hardcore wooing before Mary finally said she had feelings for me. In 2016, three years after that night and almost ten years after our first date, I asked her to marry me and she said yes.
There was no “trick” to getting Mary back for good. Going through a tragedy had changed me. It was terrible, but it helped me grow the hell up, and by the time Mary and I crossed paths again, I was ready to be the kind of person who texts back and keeps plans and buys presents for no apparent reason. We don’t yell at each other in the street anymore, and that’s pretty cool.
It's miraculous that Mary ended up giving me so many chances, but she always tells me that I was the same person as I was back in 2008—just way less shitty. She always loved 2008-era me; I just needed to get my head on straight. I hope that part makes it into her vows.
