COSMOPOLITAN July 2015 147
love & lust
- NAME HAS BEE
N CHA
NGED. PHOTOGRA
PHY BY JEFFREY C
OOLIDGE.
GETTY IMAGES
“Nancy had only sons, and soon she
started calling me her adopted daughter.
I thought of her as family, too”
a safety net, the freedom to
f*ck up – and would never be
able to have. Not without his
and Nancy’s help. I felt my
life closing in on me.PART OF ME
KNEW THAT
staying with Max was just
holding me back from having
an independent adulthood. A
bitterness began to infect our
relationship. When we first
started fighting a lot, there
was something erotic about
it – we’d scream our heads off,
say the most hateful things
imaginable and then f*ck like
lunatics. But after four years
or so, we stopped making out
after we’d hurled f*ck-yous
across the room. Sex becamenear-extinct. I’d also accrued
a complicated debt to Nancy
that was both financial and
emotional. What relationship
can you have with an ex’s
parent? There’s no vocabulary
for that. If I walked away from
Max, I’d be walking away
from Nancy, too.
I wanted to open up to
Nancy about my issues with
her son – after all, we talked
about everything else. But I
couldn’t, and eventually the
relationship crumbled too
much to deny it any longer.
I left Max one morning afterspending nearly six years
together. In the taxi, I sobbed,
full of terrible, heartbroken
joy. As hard as that was, the
hardest part of my breakup
with Max was telling Nancy
about it. I called her, shaking,
and told her I loved her. She
said it back. I believed her.NANCY AND
I STILL TALK,
although our relationship has
obviously changed. When we
do, she reminds me to makesmart choices and to be brave.
I miss her like hell, and I will
always think of her as family,
but I don’t regret my choice.
I knew I was finally ready to
move on from the financial
and familial stability that I
had come to rely on.
I moved in to a tiny
studio apartment. I maxed
out my overdraft every single
month. I drank too much and
ate just yoghurt for dinner. I
dated some idiots. My life was
chaos, just as I’d feared, but
for the first time in my life it
was no one’s but mine. #When you’d rather
get his mum’s name
tattooed than his...