He wanted to go sailing in Greece. He booked a yacht before he’d found enough people to join us on it. He worked his way down the list of our friends, and the trip loomed closer and closer. We were facing a financially ruinous holiday if he didn’t fill the other berths.
One day, I got a text from him: Did I mind if Duncan* came with us?
I remember my stomach tightening. I took a deep breath before I answered, knowing he was stressed and that this was a quick solution. I said of course, that would be fine.
Duncan was a friend of his from Oxford, which all three of us had attended, but also my first love. I hadn’t seen him in a decade.
I met Duncan in the second week of my first year at college, in 2014. It was the kind of romantic entanglement you get into when you’re 18 and shy, and don’t know how to communicate properly. He was an English boy who’d gone to an all boys’ boarding school very young, and didn’t really know how to talk to women, let alone about his own feelings. I’d come from Berkeley, California, via Paris, France—both places where emotions tend to be expressed freely—but I found his awkwardness endearing.
Duncan and I were well-matched in terms of experience (i.e., neither of us had much), and that year, together, we learned how to have sex. It was tender, and I have overwhelmingly fond memories of that time. We said I love you but never thought of ourselves as a couple. We were both noncommittal, and the whole thing wandered to an open-ended non-conclusion. We graduated, our paths no longer crossed, and he receded into nostalgia.
And yet here he was again, on this 38-foot yacht, set to depart the marina of Loutraki on the island of Skopelos in the first week of August, having blossomed into a much more articulate person than I remembered. And here I was, in a red swimsuit (neckline to my navel, crossbody back, sideboob aplenty), which I’d bought specially to please the man I loved, being ignored.
That trip was a disaster in several ways. There was the time I was topless in our cabin, getting changed, and my partner said, in a tone of pantomime reproach, “Put those away.” Or the several instances in which he didn’t hear me, or possibly ignored me, while he was dealing with some piece of rigging or other. Meanwhile, Duncan was lounging around looking like an ad for a watch, all loose-fit linen, and all that sweet desire from ten years prior came roaring back. The ridiculousness of it all struck me: How had I ended up in this enclosed space with all of us partially clothed? Worst of all was the day my partner and I were alone on the boat and I suggested we have sex. Without looking up from his book (How Spies Think by David Omand) he said “No.”
I went to the beach and tried not to cry. Things I’d suppressed churned inside me: How infrequently he said “I love you,” how few compliments he gave me, how unbelievably untouched I felt, even now, when we were on holiday, supposedly relaxed and happy and floating on the Aegean. For a while, my doubts about our relationship had been like a panel of warning lights blinking in my peripheral vision: I was missing touch, deep kisses delivered at random, compliments, the occasional sexy text. I felt respected by him, and I knew he desired me, but it had started to feel like holding onto faith, with too little proof. At just 26, I felt cheated.
Duncan, who had been swimming, found me at the beach. Gently, he said that it was interesting to see my partner “in boyfriend mode.” I had been dimly aware that since university, they saw each other a few times a year, and had started playing cricket in the summer months, but my partner and I didn’t discuss their interactions in detail. Only later did it occur to me that he had likely downplayed the extent of friendship.
“On a good day,” I said, my voice cracking, “it feels as if loving him is my calling, what I was put on this earth to do; on a bad day, as if parts of me are dying in the dark.” He said that he saw my partner making the same mistakes he used to make. I asked what made him stop. His answer: “Lots of failed relationships.”
Nothing more happened with Duncan. On the last day of the holiday, as we waited for our flight home from Skiathos, my partner and I wandered down to the rocks by the sea.
“It’s doing a real number on me being around Duncan again,” I told him.
“Well he’s handsome and nice and you have history, so that’s understandable,” he said, calmly, holding my hand in both of his. “You have a summer crush. All I can do is go home and try to stay calm and see if it goes away.”
I burst into tears. “Why are you being so compassionate?” I asked.
We went home and for about two weeks, I felt as if I was going crazy. Parts of me that had been buried were suddenly raging. I tried to get Duncan to go for a drink with me. He said no; he was happy with his girlfriend and didn’t want to do anything to upset her, which I figured was fair enough, and validation that I wasn’t insane. He’d felt something too; my radar wasn’t defunct.
The whole thing tipped me over the edge. I told my partner that the things he couldn’t give me had made me feel ashamed of how much I wanted him, and that this was a lonely, lonely feeling. The day we finally called it, we managed to toast the good times. It was the second time I had ever seen him cry.
There was a brief interlude where I took my touch hunger to the trenches of Hinge. It was fun for a very brief time, and then made me feel like a delivery pizza. It was so hyper-sexualized and so deeply unerotic, that I got off it. Instead, I’m trying to cultivate what I call an autoerotics of the self: to inhabit my body fully, with joy and self-compassion; to protect those parts of myself which none but me can save. Eating and cooking and walking have become elevated pleasures, as have the dance-like dynamic of a really good conversation or the intimacy of a long-running private joke.
It’s been two years since my breakup. Last October, I went alone to Skyros, the more remote island to the south of Skopelos. I rented a tiny house with two balconies overlooking the sea. The town was quiet, many of the shopkeepers having closed up for the year and gone back to the mainland for the winter. One of the only shops open was the goatherd supply guy. I bought a belt I didn’t need and a collar for my friend’s dog, which I tested on my own neck. Then I continued down to the beach. Under my clothes, I was wearing the red swimsuit.
Stephanie Sy-Quia is the author of A Private Man, out today from Grove Press.
*Names have been changed.