Amy and I soldiered on, decamping to the bar’s patio and switching, ill-advisedly, to cocktails as we compared breakup stories. Amy’s family had been handling it badly—they loved her ex. Her mother was even occasionally still in touch! Mine were being as supportive as they could from Kingston. “I feel like they don’t really know what to say,” I said. I had recently asked my mother whether any of my family had seen this coming, and she had texted back: define “seen.”
Amy’s parents were still together, which meant, she felt, that they saw her as a failure. More than thirty years of marriage they’d managed, and their daughter couldn’t hold it together for three. My parents separated when I was a child but did not formally divorce until we were adults, leaving my sister and me to grow up in a limbo state I’m sure had no ramifications for our adult approaches to intimacy.
For her divorce, Amy had gone out in a blaze of glory, not quite keying his car （“I was tempted, because of Carrie Underwood”）， but definitely not being careful as she lugged her things down the driveway past his souped up Toyota Yaris. Their condo had been everything to her, she told me. The day she left it was her “personal 9/11.”
Still, Amy’s lawyer was sure she would be vindicated.
“We’re going to take that fucker to court, and he’ll have to go live with his mother in Orangeville,” she cackled. “Orangeville! Can you even?”
I said Jon and I were hoping to avoid lawyers for anything more than paperwork purposes; we’d already divided up almost everything, so there wasn’t much to fight about. I explained that taking the high road felt important, that we owed it to our younger selves to be kind. Amy drained her martini and puffed her cigarette, looking more divorced than anyone in history: “Good luck.”
The night carried on. I felt myself cross the threshold between fun drunk and “about to quote a song lyric from my past,” but there was nothing to be done except drink through it. I told Amy everything I posted online felt like a PR exercise, like I was trying to broadcast to friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and a few friends’ dogs that I was doing well, possibly even thriving. I had found myself putting on makeup before watching a movie, then posting a few front-facing camera videos to Instagram, cracking dumb jokes about the films. Always, I chose movies Jon had loved （still loved, presumably）。 Always, I deleted the videos in the morning.
Amy said the pursuit of a glow-up was only natural. I should come to spin with her if I really wanted to get the word out. Her studio had a mirror that said strong as a woman on it, and she loved the way it made her butt look in selfies.
“There’s only one winner of a breakup,” Amy said. “Why shouldn’t everyone know it’s you?”
I had to admit that it did have the air of a competition, all this being observed. The experience of my marriage ending felt like the closest I would ever come to a kind of grim local celebrity: I imagined our wider circle tracking my movements, studying my posts, wondering in groups about my dating life. I felt super visible—supervised, even. If everyone was going to look, why shouldn’t I have, like, a six-pack when they did?
I told Amy I would try cycling, but would not attempt to “win” the breakup. Amy, one false eyelash starting to peel away from the corner of her eye, looked at me like I was the dumbest idiot alive.
“Why do you think they make you wait a year?” she asked, slurring only slightly. “So you have time to look amazing at the mediation. I bought this top that’s going to kill him.” She smiled, and I saw a tear building in her left eye.
By the time the bar closed, Amy and I had each cried twice. We stood outside waiting for her Uber, and I couldn’t believe how pretty she still looked, with her dainty features and long, shiny hair and her flippy wrap dress with the ruffle down the front. I had caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror during a trip to the bathroom and could not say the same for me. Why didn’t she have wine teeth? How did she keep her hair like that? She exhaled the last of her cigarette and said, “I hate being someone’s ex-wife. It’s so random.”
I said it did feel pretty unexpected.
Amy laughed bitterly, the first time she’d sounded rueful all night. “When did you ever hear a good story about an ex-wife? They’re horrible, all of them. This chain around a man’s neck. But he made me one. If he didn’t want to deal with an ex-wife, he shouldn’t have fucking made me one.”
Amy looked at me and smiled shyly before throwing up a little into her hand. Her car arrived and she threw up again, properly this time, before climbing inside. I heard her telling the driver not to worry about it, though he did seem very worried, and fair enough. I walked home, listening to breakup songs and feeling like a loser for relating to them all. Losing love is like a window in your heart, I thought. I tweeted, everybody sees you’re blown apart, then deleted it, then found the lyric on a Paul Simon fan account and retweeted it from there. As I walked, I opened Tinder and swiped right on everyone, feeling an unbelievable rush of self-esteem or something like it when matches came up, not speaking to any of them. No harm in looking. I could delete it in the morning.
Clicking “show men and women” was exciting. My bisexuality until now had been largely theoretical, based on one university hookup and a few drunken kisses. I’d had a number of charged same-sex “friendships,” one spectacularly botched threesome, and my preferred genre of porn was some variation on one or many women bullying another in a sexual way, but none of this felt substantial enough for me to proclaim it part of my identity. Though I’d always felt at least 35 percent gay, whenever my orientation came up in conversation, I felt inexperienced and sheepish. Now if I told someone I liked women, I could back it up with supporting evidence. I scrolled through some profiles, drawn to ones with pithy, lowercase bios: pile of human garbage seeks same; looking for a partner in crime （i plan to commit many crimes）; run. The women’s profiles were on the whole more subdued than the men’s, except when they were many times more intense—badly lit close-up selfies in the bathroom of those clubs where there is a pool and you wear a bikini, bios seeking someone who was willing to get real and NOT about drama.
It was nice to feel my phone vibrate, to see the looping, exclamatory cursive, like a wedding invitation: It’s a Match! I swiped on tall women and short men, women with nose rings and men with tattoos, men in large, anonymous groups or standing alone on top of mountains, gesturing vaguely to the outdoors like, get a load of this. There were men holding babies （don’t worry, she’s not mine!） and women at house parties with their tongues out and men next to big, sedated jungle cats. Women who were too into having a bicycle, men in suits who were looking for no-strings fun, sepia-toned shots of attractive androgynous people with half their faces obscured, winking from behind a dog filter or in heavy makeup. Nobody was terribly appealing. I kept swiping for hours.
The next day I had a hangover and forty-seven new matches. I was scrolling through my options when Amy texted:
such a fun night, babe!!!
main thing to know about the apps is
nobody actually likes anyone else on there