If we’re unmarried at this stage in life, it’s deliberate. I despise when people act like this isn’t a valid option or that we’re unaware of the circumstances and decisions that have brought us to this point.
Maybe I was too eager to toss that white flag, surrendering the sacred space I cultivated while single in exchange for that safe space we’re taught relationships provide. When that surrendered space loses its sacredness, drink, pray, dissect, repeat.
I’m not absolving myself, but some of these men knew how to conceal their red flags. I crafted quilts, purses, and jumpsuits out of the rest.
Have you ever let a man grow on you? More like a mole than a wart. He wasn’t the finest specimen, but he possessed something rarer—genuine kindness. He was a good listener, consistent, calling exactly when he promised, showing up punctually for every date, and that proved sexier than any six-pack.
Kevin made plans, booked flights, secured reservations. That competence helped me to see beyond his receding hairline and his short stature. Since high school, a warped social norm had me bound to the idea that a suitor must be at least six feet. You know how we would establish height requirements? Must be this tall to board this ride. Well, he was significantly shorter than me, even in flats, but I made exceptions. Carefully vetted exceptions that I regretted mid-ride.
He was also shorter than his girlfriend, I would eventually find out.
I learned that men in the 5’5″ to 5’7″ range could be as deceptive as any six-footer. In the moment, his audacity was stupefying. I’m not sure when I understood that he may have been making concessions of his own.
There were others like Kevin, sans girlfriend. They could fix your car, your sink. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. The domestic lottery. I met them when I desired nothing more than good companionship and satisfying intimacy, but then one year passed into another and another.
Life happens.
I reconnected with someone who once held a place in my heart so dear that, for a moment, I thought he was the reason I had remained single.
When I left my first love and my home in Upstate New York for college in Atlanta, I ugly cried, clutching his basketball trophy as my family packed the car.
My mother hit the gas pedal.
Years later, I trusted my first love with plans for a milestone birthday. It was the classic rekindling fantasy where girl moves back to town, and guy never left town. He led me on. More accurately, I let him lead me on.
He made a call about a hookup for an out-of-state music festival. Two tickets. VIP. He offered my own hotel room in case I was uncomfortable sharing. The pleasure of my company was all he asked. He’d take care of everything.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn now that there had been dead silence on the other end of the line.
I imagined us in exciting ports of call along the way. Around him, I was that young girl again, and a kind of revisionist history allowed my heart to misremember his many broken promises, clouding my judgment.
The trip didn’t require passports, immunizations, or currency exchange—no. It cost me more than that.
He went silent three days before my birthday. Early morning on the day of departure, I was fielding calls from my sister and girlfriends, all wanting to hunt him down and do damage, but a part of me had known. The way he would call me “independent,” he could have just called me a bitch.
My text was short. You’re a coward. And that was more than he deserved. No blowing up his phone. No tears. Just an apology to my teenaged self who deserved better back then. Another to my grown-up self who knows better now.
A guy friend once admitted knowing how women worry when men don’t call and don’t follow through on promises. “Y’all start wondering if we’re okay, if we’re sick, hospitalized, or worse.” He had never seen me undressed, never made any romantic overture whatsoever. He would call me “Sunshine,” claiming he loved my smile too much to ever be responsible for extinguishing it.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, we’re fine.”
It’s an insight I’ve never forgotten.
No need to check on him. He was okay.
He was just another one, not the one.
I was out with Dwayne at a dance club, which seems masochistic from this vantage point. Let’s voluntarily enter a space where aroused people prowl for conquests.
We claimed a table near the dance floor—his jacket draped over a chair back, cocktail napkins protecting our drinks while we danced to one of those old-school guaranteed floor-fillers, and then I navigated to the restroom mirror. Straightening my dress, reapplying gloss, tingling with anticipation of a slow song to bask in his cologne, the 6’5ness of him… a woman approached during my reverie.
“Are you with Dwayne?” she asked.
I clocked her as an old girlfriend or ex-fiancée who wouldn’t want him back or did.
“Yeah,” I replied, bracing for drama.
“He gave me this when you left,” she said, tossing a napkin onto the wet counter. I watched his number bleed an illegible blue. “That’s not the kind of girl I am.”
“Thank you,” was all I managed, stuffing the soggy evidence into my purse.
This was before cell phones, before Uber, so I endured the evening, knowing exactly what species of man I was entertaining. A piece of shit. Once at my place, I tossed the napkin on the dash, hopped out of his car, slammed the door, and marched off—feet on fire—in too high heels.
“…learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served.” A quote I love, often attributed to Nina Simone.
I remember sitting in an office breakroom in my twenties, chatting with a coworker who had “walked into a door.” Our conversation drifted to Oprah. This was during the show’s golden era. Dabbing at her swollen eye, my coworker mentioned an episode featuring Maya Angelou.
She admired women like that, she said, “who are just so strong.”
It was her way of confessing that she wasn’t, and whoever hurt her depended on that vulnerability. Beneath her eye was the kind of puffy, purplish bruise no door had ever created. She came to work with various injuries over the following weeks—all blamed on hostile appliances, clumsiness, and wine-induced stumbling. She called in sick for several days, then never returned. No resignation letter, no forwarding address, no goodbye.
I was unprepared to respond when a coworker was suffering possible domestic violence. I’d failed her.
Killing my exes has crossed my mind more than once, but why stop at my own collection? Maybe I would pay a visit to exes of all women of a certain age.
Of a certain age.
That’s who we become after 40. A tone of gentility. A cloak of invisibility.
I would become the opposite. Something like a caped crusader in a midnight blue spandex catsuit with silver trim soaring through the night sky. Undismissible. I would spot each one, probably in the act of wasting another woman’s time, and there would be a reckoning.
It’s hypocritical to wish ill on those who hurt us without acknowledging those we hurt, who might do the same, justifiably.
In a few cases, I’ll always be the one that got away.
“If you give me a chance,” one man said, “I’d give you two of everything you’d ever want.” Those words stuck with me. His name and face did not.
It’s far less taxing to focus on those who shattered your heart than to remember the hearts we’ve shattered. Should I now be in his crosshairs? Are any of our hands truly clean?
It’s absolutely my choice whether I allow the time they stole and the pain they caused to metastasize within me. I absolve the version of me that tolerated those behaviors, but it’s not my decision whether men who’ve hurt me continue walking this earth. That’s between them and the higher power they recognize.
More importantly, have I kept promises I made to myself?
I have eliminated the parts of me that question my worth, my capacity to love others and myself. Even the part that suspected the physical abuse of another woman and stood by without offering support in real time.
I regret never properly thanking the woman in the restroom who chose sisterhood over complicity. Having been blessed with many years of dating education since then, I’ve kept her integrity as my North Star and surrounded myself with women of similar character.
Our real superpower isn’t in eliminating our exes but in walking away, whole, from relationships that have consistently broken our hearts.
LESLIE C. YOUNGBLOOD is the author of two middle grade novels, Love Like Sky (2018) and Forever This Summer (2021), published by Little, Brown for Young Readers. Youngblood earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her third novel with Little, Brown is scheduled for Summer 2028. She shares her writing journey on TikTok @lesliecyoungblood and her website, lesliecyoungblood.net.
ZANDRA JACK, professionally known as UNKWNZJ (unknown ZJ), is a Toronto-based mixed-media and digital artist whose bold, distinctive work explores Black identity, culture, beauty, and self-expression. Through her signature visual style, she creates striking contemporary imagery that celebrates Blackness while challenging conventional representations of Black people in art and popular culture. www.unkwnzj.com
