Dear Sugar: Do I Wait For My Ex?
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The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart-sick. Sugar is here. The both of us. Speaking straight into your ears. I'm Cheryl Strayed. I'm Steve Almond. This is Dear Sugar Radio. Oh dear song, won't you please share some little sweet days with me. I check my bell by oh and the sugar you send my

Dear Sugar,

I miss Ben. We met when we were both hired as actors for an absurdist dining experience that was a huge disaster. The food truck that was supposed to feed all of the patrons who had paid lots of money to be there was in an accident, the waitstaff had fevers, and Ben and I were the only performers who stuck it out. We spent a humid night two Junes ago walking street blocks carrying paper plates of cold pasta into the venue, trying to appease our very wealthy and very grumpy audience.

it was so horrible and so surreal that we spent the evening laughing hysterically and finding excuses to touch each other on the arm aww that's sweet when we finally got out of there we went to a bar he bought me a drink and i'd guessed the exact date of his birthday on the first try the rest as they say

is history. Except it's not. Ben broke up with me three weeks ago after we'd been together for a year and a half. Around the time we met, Ben realized that he was also attracted to men. I'm a straight woman, if that was unclear. He feels like this is something he needs to explore for himself, and after talking through options, an open relationship, a breakup, we realized that the only way for him to do this and be fair to me was for us to break up. It felt really unfair at the time. It still feels unfair.

ben is also attracted to women and we fell for each other so hard and so fast that most of the time his curiosity about men didn't matter we were just happy to be together he also didn't tell me about his interest in men until a year after we were dating

"'Ben has expressed that I am the person he feels like he wants to spend his life with, at least right now, but he needs some answers first. He knows, however, that it's unfair to ask me to wait for him while he figures some of this out. He knows that I may end up falling in love with someone else during this time. He might discover he likes being with men more than he likes being with women, or who knows, meet another woman he loves more madly, and that we can't really hold on to anything.'

but we're really fucking good together. We both know this, and I think we both feel like we'd like to have babies together and be old together and do crossword puzzles and spend Sunday mornings buying things we don't really need at Trader Joe's. I can't really imagine ever meeting anyone I feel more compatible with.

The thing that makes this especially hard is that we both float in the same circles of theater artists. Professionally, it hurts both of us not to interact. We have so many mutual friends and even mutual projects. I deleted my Facebook page and have mostly been staying home because the idea of seeing him somewhere and not being there with him is really hard to bear. It makes me want to leave the theater industry and leave the city and go live in the Arctic Circle where I don't have to deal with anyone.

Even if I rationally understand his reasons, and in some ways understand that he feels like some of this time and exploration for himself may actually benefit us in the long run, I am also very hurt. There's the additional question that I don't know what it means that I had sex with someone for a year and a half who might actually be gay. I know this is petty, but there is some part of me that's hurt that maybe Ben wasn't enjoying having sex with me as much as I thought he was.

I know sexuality is complicated and that it's possible Ben was enjoying sex with me and also curious about what it's like to be with men. But when he says he's hopeful we can be together again one day, I'm confused. Would this mean he'd be choosing to prioritize the emotional romantic aspect of our relationship even if sexually he'd rather be with men? How do I make sense of that?

And if he says he does enjoy sex with me after this blow, could I ever actually believe that? I'm trying to get myself out of my oversized sweaters and face my days and my life and my own questions, but I know on some level that means letting go of Ben, and the prospect of that feels terrible. Is it horrible to hope that this is only temporary?

I know you can't see into the future, Sugars, but do you think this is something we could ever work through? Do you think we'll ever want to? How important is sex in relationships? Thanks, Broken Hearted.

Oh, first of all, brokenhearted, I just want to say I'm so sorry. It really, really hurts. I mean, just when you said you deleted your Facebook page, I felt it was palpable to me, that feeling of being devastated and wanting to reduce that devastation in every way possible, and you withdraw, which of course then only probably makes that sorrow and loneliness feel greater. So I first want to just extend that.

Yeah.

And not just sex, not just sex, but, you know, sexuality. Like, is broken hearted? Has she been in love with a man who is bisexual, who's gay, who's just having a moment of exploration? We don't know. But what I thought we could do, Steve, and the drum roll is, talk to, as far as I'm concerned, America's greatest sex expert,

An advice columnist and podcast host. You don't possibly mean. You couldn't possibly mean. Dan Savage. Oh, my God. He's had the column Savage Love for ages. I mean, I really have been reading him for years and years. He's basically America's sex educator. He really is. Yeah. I mean, in all seriousness, I have so much respect and admiration for him because he's really advanced the conversation so far and away beyond...

anything that's ever discussed in sex education classes and so forth. Yeah, I would always read his column and be like, wow, it's a big, complicated world, and this dude is no bullshit about it. He's no bullshit. So listen, let's give him a call. All right. Stranger. Stranger. Stranger. Can we talk to Dan Savage, please? Yeah. So he's just at the newspaper office. That's kind of awesome. Stranger. Stranger.

Hello. I'm Dan Savage. Yes. This is Cheryl Strayed. Hey, how are you? I'm great. I'm sitting here with Steve Allman. Thank you for coming on our show. My pleasure. I'm a little wary to give advice to this person on your show, but I will. Really? What are you wary about? She asked you for advice, and you're very gentle and compassionate.

compassionate and I'm very blunt. Well, you know, okay, well, I'll just give my advice to her. People are with people they want to be with. And people will say to someone that they're dumping, oh, I really want to be with you, but I can't be with you for X, Y, and Z reason. And it's almost always bullshit. And it's a comforting lie, but it can do real harm when people believe it, when they think it's true.

Right? Yeah. And this girl believes the lie that she was told. She's not doing the I got dumped auto-translate that we all need to do, which is when someone says it's not you, it's me, this is not the right time, or whatever. It's you. They don't want to be with you. And

They're trying to be nice, but it ends up not being nice because it prompts you to live in false hope and to torture yourself as this girl is doing. Right. Yeah. Bi or gay, it's over. And you have to move forward with the assumption. You have to believe it's over. Tell yourself it's over. And don't be a drama queen about it. Stop being such a theater major. Don't delete your Facebook page. Don't quit.

theater what a theatrical thing to do to threaten to quit theater because you got dumped in your 20s by somebody else in the theater well and also if you're if you're in theater you've got to sleep with at least 10 more gay men before it's over that's in the contract yeah you'll have so much in common with all the other women you'll win tony's with one day when you guys can sit around backstage and talk about all the guys that you dated who then came out exactly and

I mean, this is what I meant. I knew Dan would say this or I had a strong sense and he would say it much more bluntly. But just to concretize it, brokenhearted, I'm going to just read back to you something you wrote. We both know this. We're really fucking good together. We both know this and I think we both feel like we'd like to have babies together and be old together and do crossword puzzles, spend Saturday morning buying things from Trader Joe's and we're so compatible. You need to recognize that he just broke up with you.

Right. That person who wants to spend the rest of his life together with you just broke up with you.

And it's true, out of guilt and obligation and whatever else, we try to cushion the blow. But, you know, that cushion becomes a sword that the dumpy then, you know, stabs himself with repeatedly. I've done that. I've been on both sides of that equation. Right. And I think, too, we try to not know the answer that we in our hearts know is true by asking a whole bunch of other questions like, is he gay? Is he bi? Is he going to, you know, none of those questions matter. I think, Dan, that's a great question.

point and bring up. It doesn't matter if he's with an elephant next. He doesn't want to be with her. And although that would be so harsh, that would be, I think you're right, Dan. And I mean, I know you're right. I think you're absolutely right. You know that we, we, we want what we want. And you basically, you don't break up with somebody you want to be with.

You don't. Right. And people never, you know, someone will ask somebody out and they'll say, you know, I'm too busy at school right now or work is really stressful. What is that? Who's not busy all the time? Right? Right. That's a lie. And then people will write me and say, you know, they were busy at school a year ago, but now they're graduating and they still don't want to go out. Well, they did never want to go out with you. They would have gone out with you a year ago. School be damned. That was that white lie that people tell or an iteration of it. Right. Right.

Although it's, in fairness or just to be more precise about the nature of her situation,

They were together for a year and a half, you know, so they had a considerable amount of time to draw close to one another and so forth. So it's easy to say, hey, get over it. But she's three weeks out. She's in her mid-20s. She should feel her feelings. Absolutely. She should feel the shit out of her feelings. And, you know, my advice is always to wallow, to annoy your friends, to journal, to cry, to eat a lot of ice cream. And then after a month, shut up.

go to the gym, see a movie, ask your friends about their lives. Even if you have to fake it, do it. And of,

And you also have to know when you go into dating that it's a year, a year and a half. That stage of a relationship is the discovery process. That's where you're figuring out if you could be with this person for the rest of your life. It isn't some horrible betrayal or some unparalleled occurrence for after a year of becoming emotionally invested with someone, they decide you're not who they want to be with and they walk. You're

You're signing up for that when you go into dating and mating, for that kind of heartbreak. And you should, you know, brokenhearted, plow all of this feeling into your art. Instead of being dramatic, use it in your dramatics. Right. You know, part of this too, brokenhearted, you know, we want to believe...

what we want to be true. And, you know, she definitely has been told by her ex-boyfriend, like, oh, I love you. You're really the one I want to be with in the end. And so she's not fully to blame for having believed that. He's probably, you know, saying some things that aren't true that maybe he doesn't even realize. He's not being entirely honest with himself. And the horrible part is he thinks this is letting someone down easy. He thinks this is being compassionate. And it's the opposite.

It's cruel. Yeah, it is. You know, but then, you know, you get both sides of it, though. You know, if somebody tells the white lies and someone doesn't understand them, then they get hurt.

And then, you know, people will press someone for the real reason they're ending it. You know, someone says, it's not you, it's me, it's not the right time. And they go, that's not true, that's a white lie, tell me the truth. And then they do, and then they're destroyed by the truth. It's just any, you know, getting dumped sucks however you're dumped. But,

When you hear the White Lies, you have to auto-translate into... At the very least, he or she is telling me I'm not who they want to be with. And not right now. Ever. Ever. And you have to act as if it's never want to be with you. Because that's...

In 99.99% of the cases, that's what the truth. There is that 0.01% of the time when, and I don't want to give brokenhearted false hope, where people do circle back and get back together, but you can't operate under the assumption that that's going to happen. In fact...

trying to maintain that illusion is actually decreases that tiny infinitesimal chance that he's going to circle back. You actually need to move on and lead your life. And then if he realizes he made a mistake, he'll come to that on his own. So I think, I think all that is true. Now let us,

You know, that's the main part of this letter. The other piece of this that I'd love to hear your take on, Dan, is, you know, I think you're absolutely right that it doesn't matter, you know, why he broke up with her. He did. And that's that's the reality. And she needs to move on. But, you know, she's she's sort of reeling from the shock of this idea that this is news to her that he's attracted to men. And it does seem that her wound is even made more painful because of this.

And I'm curious about, you know, any words of counsel or wisdom you can give to her or anyone who's sort of been left by a partner because they have, you know, desire. Wisdom but not comfort. I can give wisdom but not comfort. Right. She's not in the comfort business. Well, then just give us some wisdom, honey. Maybe he's bi.

He could be bi. There are lots of bi guys out there. He could also be gay and knew he was gay, but didn't have the courage to come out and was seeing if he could do straight, if he could fake it. And a lot of people who do that are fooling themselves. They're not just being malicious shits. And they're only doing that because of the homophobia in the culture that they've been victimized by that didn't allow them to be who they were from the gate, out of the gate. That's absolutely...

absolutely possible. And it's possible that he's attracted to you and you're the exception, or one of the few exceptions out there, one of the few women out there that he's actually legitimately, honestly, sexually attracted to, but he's mostly attracted to other men. That's what he's going out there to figure out. But once he figures that out, he

He's still not going to circle back to you in all likelihood. So you can't put your life on hold. We can all accept that all of this perseverating about whether he's gay or straight is part of this larger self-destructive obsessing about a guy who's just not that into you. But I wonder if you've encountered, Dan, just in the many questions that you've grappled with, some version of this same...

crisis or trouble where a breakup where one partner chooses to be, you know, of a different orientation sends the person who's been broken up to into this kind of identity spiral because she's seeming to now sort of basically question her own worth and sexual value because of this.

Well, what she should be questioning, which is almost a more difficult question, is not her own worth or sexual value, but that the entire relationship was a lie. Right. And that's what she doesn't seem to want to face up to the possibility that, you know, the love and everything else that she thought was there really wasn't and couldn't be. And so instead of questioning him and where he's at and his worth and heterosexual relationship, if that works,

that way she's questioning her own worth. And that's a mistake. You know, if he was gay all along and knew it and was experimenting with her or stalling, you know, afraid to come out, then he was using her in a way that's kind of vicious and kind of not okay, especially in your 20s. High school, I think you get a pass because of the crushing pressure to be straight, even if you ain't. But 20s,

20s, no. I say this to gay guys all the time who are doing this to me. You're not allowed to treat another human being like a fleshlight. And he could have been doing that. But you won't know for years until he figures this out or comes all the way out or doesn't. And I think your larger point is that as actually, not that it doesn't have anything to do with her, but it's not a reflection of who she is and how she's going to move through her life. She somehow absorbed it probably as a way of hanging on to

you know, the entanglement that keeps them alive in some way or keeps the relationship alive in her mind.

Right. And his rejection of you, brokenhearted, does not at all speak to your worth as a human or a sexual partner. Right. You just have to find somebody who actually values those things authentically. Yeah. You know. Right. It actually speaks to your awesomeness as a sexual partner if somebody who isn't on some fundamental bedrock level attracted to you enjoyed sex with you. Right. You're that good at it. It's like you made Thai food for someone who hates Thai food, but they loved your Thai food. That means you make great Thai food. Right.

So there is one final question that we'll ask you before we end our reindeer games, which is this kind of ridiculously, obnoxiously delicious question right at the end. How important is sex in relationships? Let's force Dan Savage to answer that.

It's as important as it is to the people in that relationship. I think we can, particularly people in my line of work, over-emphasize the importance of sex, and then people who are in perfectly content, contented, happy, even companionate relationships where there isn't much or even any sex, in

Instead of looking at each other and saying, are we in love? Are we happy? And the answer is yes. And being satisfied, they look at each other and say, well, the whole world says that we can't be happy or there's something wrong. So how important is sex? It's as important as it is.

Right, as both people decide, yeah. Yeah, to both partners. You have to kind of, you both have to be on the same page. Well, you have to be in the same chapter. If one person is perfectly content in a sexless marriage and the other person is perfectly miserable, that's not going to work. Right. And it can be a hugely important thing at one stage in a relationship and less important at a different stage and then come roaring back. Or the tie can go out entirely or two people can stay together after the sex has stopped between them and be having sex with other people but still be in love and going home to each other. Right.

It depends on what those two people want and what works for them. No, that's absolutely it. And we are so grateful to you for taking the time to talk to us, Dan. We are all admiration for your good words and good work. And I love you guys. I love your stuff. I love sugar. And I apologize to Brokenhearted if I...

bruised you no man she needed some tough love and it was tough but there was also love but there's love we know I mean that's that's the thing is you're speaking from experience you know we all are right right and we've all been used by people and then found out later and then felt humiliated we've all used people and felt bad about it and tried to minimize it by saying nice things on the way out the door to make ourselves not look like the shits that we actually were to those people yeah

And I would, if I could throw out a personal experience, I was dumped by a guy, and I have a theater background. I still do theater. And we were in the show together, and it was horrible. But I had to go into the room and be on stage with this guy who had completely destroyed me emotionally and dumped me and broke my heart. And so I would say to Brokenhearted, stop avoiding him.

Go where you think he might be or don't go places because he might be there, and it'll be searing the first time you see him and less so the second time and even less so after that. Stop hiding in your house. Stop avoiding being on social media or wherever else you used to go. Be out there in the world and stop being...

So terrified. Yes. So how long ago, Dan, was this theater drama? 30 years ago. And when I think about it, like even to this day, I like wince and cringe. Because it like brings it all back. Yeah. But we survive it. I mean, the great news about romantic heartbreak is it always gets better. I mean, not distillery. It gets better. Thank Dan. But, but,

But it really does. Like we all have felt that like, okay, I cannot live without so-and-so. It feels that way. And then a couple of years pass and you're actually thanking the stars that –

that that relationship ended because it opened you up to whatever that next thing was. And brokenhearted, that next thing will most likely be somebody who really is into you. That's right. And Ben is going to be with his hot, huge elephant, tromping around the same pretentious, artsy, histrionic parties as you. And you're just going to face him down, man. That's right.

Thanks so much, Dan. It was absolutely a pleasure to have a little wisdom bomb dropped on our heads. Oh, thank you guys. I really enjoyed it. And you'll have to demean yourself sometimes by coming on my podcast and doing the same thing, taking your question on my show. Oh, absolutely. We'd love it. We'd love to. Bye, Dan. Bye.

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There is something liberating about having somebody who, you know, just essentially say, yeah, here's what's happening. And I love also that he was a theater major, because that's the other thing that was so clear to me from this letter is there is drama. Right. Well, one thing that we talk about a lot is this idea that we are either diminished by or held up or empowered or defeated by the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. And

Read this letter right from the very beginning. We have this grandiose, incredibly romantic, funny, sweet, tender,

love story. It seems faded in the stars. She guessed his birthday on the first guest on the night they met in a bar after they had this very bonding experience together of doing this crazy dinner party. And, you know, there's all this high drama in the way she writes about their love. And then, you know, even when it came crashing down, it's really grandiose. Oh, he wants to break up with me, but he also wants to grow old with me and have babies with me. And so I think that Broken Hearted

I know it's hard. I know it hurts. But I think you need to go back and revise that story. Because this man has chosen to separate himself from you, has chosen to end your relationship. He probably still cares about you and loves you, but he doesn't want to be your romantic partner.

I guess in some ways ask yourself, like, how has, you know, perpetuating this narrative of the high romance, the sort of fadedness of your bond with him, how is that actually harming you? I think in so many ways it can serve a relationship when you have that kind of romanticized story. It keeps you together. It forms a bond. But now it's in some ways...

Extending this attachment in ways that are really hurtful to you and destructive and also not reflective of reality. So rewrite that story of what's true between you because the truest thing is what Dan said. Yeah. It's over. It's a tough story. And the truth is it's probably not the first time it's going to be told in your life, brokenhearted, or in the life of the people who you wind up breaking up with. Yeah.

It's the process of being in those experiences and drawing close to another person that's like the one thing that you should take out of the rubble. You are capable of giving yourself so fully to this person. It's the wrong person. He wasn't a good caretaker of your love. But the impulse to give that love, to have that experience, to try to draw close, that's beautiful. That's yours.

One of my favorite stories in all of literature about breaking up is David Foster Wallace's short story called Everything is Green. And by short story, I mean it's a short short. And it's about that moment of recognition. The narrator is a man. He's older than his female lover. And he's recognizing that it's over.

that really he doesn't want to accept the truth, but he has to. And accepting what's true is true. It's something I've said on this show before. It's something I say a lot to myself because it was one of the hardest things for me to come to in my life. Simply accepting that what is true is actually true. And it's painful, but it's important to do. Right. And it's going to be essential for her to

move forward find somebody else to love somebody else to love her you can do it and the way you move forward is just by doing it one breath one step at a time yeah

Dear Sugar Radio is produced by WBUR. We're produced and edited by Lisa Tobin. This episode was recorded at Cybersound in Boston. Send your letters to us at dearsugarradio at gmail.com. We love hearing from you. Thanks. Let it go.