Chris and I had been together for four months when he dumped me because I laughed during “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Chris is Italian, not Greek, but he considered the movie ridiculous and rife with stereotypes. So he sat stone-faced beside me in the East Village theater, and each time I chuckled, I could see his look of disdain in my peripheral vision.
By the time the audience, including me, roared at the scene featuring the groom’s parents sitting on the Greek family’s couch covered in squeaky protective plastic, Chris was done with the movie and with us.
He ghosted me before ghosting was even a thing. To be fair, I was surprised we had even lasted four months, considering our relationship began with him telling me we weren’t going to be more than a one-night stand.
We met the first New Year’s Eve after 9/11 at a Tribeca loft party filled with gay men. I was wearing a red-and-white paisley button-down shirt that said, “Look at me!” Chris stood near one of the large windows that provided a view of the city’s skyline, occasionally adjusting his black sweater just enough to reveal the bottom of his cut abs. He had a square jaw, smooth skin and black hair that reminded me of Christopher Reeve. I stared at him with a gaze that also said, “Look at me!”
It worked. We met in the center of the room and had our first kiss within minutes of introducing ourselves. But after a hearty make-out session, Chris pulled back, locked eyes with me and recited a passage from Walt Whitman: “I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone.” He meant that by morning we would be strangers again.
At the time, I was in my mid-20s and had spent most of my dating years guarding against getting hurt, which meant dumping guys before they had the chance to dump me. And putting my hands over my ears anytime a boyfriend said he loved me.
These habits were the legacy of my parents’ divorce. I was 11 when they told me they were splitting up, and within two weeks my mother moved out to live with my future stepfather. My takeaway was that relationships are like time bombs: You must defuse them or they will explode on you.
Chris’s unusual promise of unavailability freed me from my vigilance. It also deepened the intrigue. I thought, “This is hot.” I kissed Chris some more, and he gripped my forearms. We only stopped kissing when we heard other voices in the room counting down the ball drop in Times Square.
We couldn’t have a proper one-night stand that evening because Chris was hosting a friend from out of town and needed to leave with him. I managed to get his phone number, though, and we had our one-night stand a week later at his apartment. The sex was electric. But when I left in the morning — after the fluorescent grow lights for his plants flicked on at 6 a.m., jolting me awake — I was already thinking of a next time.
Beyond his good looks, I liked Chris’s back story. He had grown up in Scranton, Pa., the second of four sons, his father a welder who never went to college and his mother a kindergarten teacher who had lived nearly her entire life within the same 10-mile radius. Chris studied biology at Harvard as an undergrad and then attended Yale Law School. He sang baritone in the church choir.
But even if I could convince Chris into a proper date, there was another obstacle. Less than a year earlier, he had been studying to become a Jesuit priest, and he didn’t know if his future involved a law firm or the priesthood. I had just come out to my parents; navigating a vow of celibacy was not part of my plan.
Nevertheless, I emailed Chris to say I had a great time and to ask if he wanted to get together again for dinner. To my surprise, he said yes. That led to a second date, and soon enough we settled into a routine of seeing each other twice a week. I let down my defenses and fell hard. A part of me believed he had fallen for me too.
Then came “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” After the movie, Chris ignored my calls and emails. His sudden departure confirmed all my worst fears about relationships. People leave. That’s just what they do.
Two years later, after a string of brief relationships with other guys, I was eating dinner alone when my phone buzzed. It was Chris. Why was he calling me? I put the phone down on the table to let it go to voice mail, a small measure of reverse-ghosting justice. But then I changed my mind and answered.
“Oh, hi Brad,” he said. “This is Chris. Do you remember me?”
Yes. I remember you breaking my heart. I remember you ghosting me after I laughed at a romantic comedy that grossed more than $350 million worldwide and got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
“Yeah,” I said breezily. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering how you’ve been,” he said.
Chris clearly hadn’t worked through his script, so I decided to help. “I’ve been good,” I said. “Are you looking to hang out again?”
A week later, almost three years after we first met, we had dinner at an Alphabet City restaurant featuring board games and a dozen variations on mac and cheese. Chris remained deeply religious but had left the seminary. I had graduated law school and started my legal career. Our banter was easy, the mutual attraction familiar.
We didn’t talk about our previous dating or his sudden phone call. I didn’t learn then that Chris’s conflicted feelings about his future had sent him on a search for reasons to dismiss me. I didn’t know that a friend who had tired of hearing Chris’s regret about our breakup demanded Chris’s phone, found my contact and pressed the call button. That evening, under the table, Chris placed his hand on my knee, and we resumed spending a couple of nights a week together.
A year later, Chris moved in with me. But I still worried he would desert me, so I started snooping on him. If he left his computer’s web browser open, I would search his history, expecting to discover a secret life. But all I found were classical music reviews and Equinox’s operating hours.
I’m ashamed to say I would also occasionally glance at his journal, where I found entries detailing sweet moments we shared, his love for his parents and passages of scripture that resonated with him. Yet I could still seize on anything as proof that we weren’t meant to be. Like when he wanted to go to sleep rather than talk things through after a fight, which would send me spiraling into self-doubt. Or if I wanted to have sex and Chris wasn’t in the mood, I’d treat it as a rejection of us as a couple. Breaking up was all I knew.
Sometimes, while running the reservoir loop in Central Park, I would work up a scenario of how I would end things. It would be sudden, the way my parents’ divorce felt for me as a boy and the way Chris’s disappearance felt. I rehearsed the words I would use: “We are just too different,” I would say.
But I never followed through. Instead, in therapy, I would say, “I just think he’s eventually going to leave me.”
“What was true for your parents,” my therapist said, “doesn’t have to be true for you and Chris.” She pointed out that Chris had already left and come back.
I stayed in the relationship. I kept staying, which felt like the hardest thing I had ever done. Years later, I read a line from the poet Andrea Gibson — “Anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay than to go” — and thought: Exactly.
More than a decade after Chris and I met, our daughter Emma was born via surrogacy. A year after that, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal government’s prohibition on recognizing gay marriage, Emma blew bubbles around us at our small wedding ceremony, where we vowed to love one another and care for our child. Before long, our son Caleb was born, making us a family of four.
For better or worse, for richer or poorer, no one seems to be leaving.
Brad M. Snyder, a writer in Menlo Park, Calif., is working on a memoir based on this story.
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