To protect her privacy, we have given this contributor the pseudonym Elizabeth and changed certain identifying details. Elizabeth is an accomplished media professional in her 30s living and working in New York City.
I have never been particularly good at picking men.
For starters, I am a chronic positive projector, meaning someone could treat me worse than dirt on the bottom of their shoe, and I’d still find a way to romanticize it. I’m sure that’s rooted in some kind of childhood baggage, but I have plenty of recent disasters to unpack before we get there.
This story is about one of those more recent disasters — a catalyst, if you will. The kickoff to a long stretch of bullshit I avoided reflecting on for years.
A few months ago, curiosity got the better of me. I typed an ex-boyfriend’s name into Google and learned that he’s married now. The discovery itself didn’t stir much in me, but I found myself thinking about a Sunday morning seven years earlier, when that same man tried to force his way into my apartment at 5 a.m.
The more I reflected on it, the angrier I became. For years, I buried that traumatic event under more pressing crises. But life has a funny way of slowing down just long enough for old ghosts to introduce themselves.
In my late twenties, I was living through a difficult season. My family was unraveling in ways I didn’t know how to manage, and the stress felt impossible to contain. I would often wake up with my hair sticking out in fifteen different directions, my nervous system permanently stuck in survival mode. Eventually, the chronic stress contributed to an autoimmune diagnosis. That’s how overwhelmed I was.
When I met Adam, as I’ll call him here, life still felt hopeful. We met at a business school party in New York City, and Adam had an innocent quality about him that I found comforting. He was ambitious but boyish, and I saw a lot of myself in him.
Our interactions felt easy and comfortable right away. We talked about books, watched “Game of Thrones,” wandered around the city, and attended events with his classmates. I met people from all over the world through him (he was an international student as well). The relationship felt intellectually stimulating and culturally rich.
One of my favorite memories is meeting him at Joe’s Pizza after work. We’d split a slice, exchange a kiss, and walk back to my apartment together. Those sweet moments defined the relationship for me.
As the school year progressed, however, my family problems intensified. At the same time, Adam’s social calendar became increasingly crowded. He had an endless schedule filled with networking events, lectures, and travel. I needed support, but that’s not why he moved to New York City. Tension was inevitable, I suppose.
At first, that tension presented itself through petty disagreements and tearful phone calls. Then things started to get outright disrespectful.
There was a female classmate Adam always seemed to orbit. Wherever she was, he needed to be there too. Their friendship felt flirtatious to me, and I said as much. He assured me she had a long-term partner in London and that I had nothing to worry about.
Unfortunately, Adam seemed so consumed by his classmates and parties that he began ditching me, giving me his apartment key while he went downtown to party. I would lie in his bed, reeling from unsettling family updates, hoping he would come home soon so I could talk to someone.
I tried ending things more than once, but somehow he always found a way back into my life. I had a neighbor who pressed me on the issue, asking why I continued to entertain someone who was doing “nothing for me.” The truth is, I was lonely. I needed companionship, and I wasn’t in a position to reject distractions from the growing burdens I carried every day. Which brings us to the weekend when everything exploded spectacularly.
Ironically, it had been one of the best weekends we’d ever spent together. We attended the ballet. He nearly fell asleep during the performance, exhausted from classes and his relentless schedule. The next morning, we took a boxing class and got our nails done (I don’t mind a well-groomed man).
By that point, he often brought an overnight bag to my apartment so he could visit me between classes and outings. That evening, he left for a classmate’s party near my apartment. I wasn’t invited, but it didn’t bother me. I had somewhere to be at 7 a.m. the next morning and was too emotionally drained to care about another party.
He left around 10 p.m. I expected him back around one or two in the morning, but I dramatically overestimated how considerate he was. Around 3 a.m., I finally texted him.
He responded some 30-minutes later and told me he’d be back soon. At that point, I was furious. Nothing good is happening at a house party at 3:30 a.m., not even in New York City. By 4 a.m., I had had enough.
I texted him and told him not to come back. I said I would leave his duffel bag outside my apartment door. (I lived on the fifth floor of a locked building, and the bag would be perfectly safe.) Then, I went to sleep.
About an hour later, I woke to the sound of a key entering my lock, and my heart started racing. Months earlier, I had given Adam a key, but every time I asked about it, he told me it was back at his apartment. Apparently, it wasn’t.
At that point, I was fully out of bed and attempting to hold the top lock shut while he pried it open. He was stronger than I was, and I knew that. He had already turned the lock.
I had secured the top latch before going to bed, and when he pushed the door open, the latch caught. Unfortunately, it was a flimsy chain and no match for a 200-pound man. I pressed my shoulder against the door.
“Please just go,” I begged. I was crying. He kept pushing.
“Babe. Babe,” he said, slurring his words. He was clearly intoxicated.
I was terrified, but what I remember most clearly – physiologically, even– was the terrible heartache. This person knew how much I had been carrying, knew how difficult life had become, and still decided it was acceptable to treat me this way. I could not comprehend the audacity of someone hearing “no,” hearing pain in another person’s voice, and continuing anyway – in the relationship or in the pursuit of prying a closed door open.
I dug my shoulder into the door harder. He pushed farther inside. So I did the only thing I could think of: I screamed.
I had three neighbors on the floor. If he wasn’t going to respect my boundaries, maybe he’d respect the possibility of someone calling the police. After several failed attempts to quiet me down, Adam finally gave up.
He ran down the stairs with his duffel bag and disappeared into the night. A few minutes later, he texted me a photo showing where he’d left the key, hanging from the front doorknob outside my building, of course. I still wasn’t convinced he was actually gone.
Thirty minutes later, I walked downstairs. My hands were shaking. When I opened the front door and saw the key sitting exactly where he’d said it would be, I cried with relief. The danger had passed, but I walked back up the stairs mentally and physically exhausted, still trembling from the adrenaline.
For years, I dismissed what happened that night. I told myself there were bigger things happening in my life, and there were. My family crisis escalated. Just one month after the door drama, the pandemic arrived. Friendships changed. Work became more stressful. Life kept moving, and the memory was swept under the rug.
I heard from Adam months after the incident. He sent me a text message expressing concern for my mental health. Apparently, my screaming at a drunk man forcing his way into my apartment led him to believe I had some sort of emotional disorder. I suppose he didn’t consider how he had contributed to the escalation or how I must have felt.
When I learned Adam was married, the memory of all this came rushing back. Not because I missed him or wanted anything from him, but because I found myself reflecting on the confident woman I was before that incident, before the pandemic, before I started having panic attacks whenever I heard noises near my front door.
I wondered whether the selfish version of Adam I experienced still existed. Did he still stay out until five in the morning? Did he still treat boundaries as inconveniences? Did he ever think about that night? The truth is, I don’t know. People change, and I hope he did.
Adam’s wife is beautiful. It’s not often that I look up an ex or their partner online, but when I do, it is never out of malicious intent. I found myself looking at her wedding photos and feeling a sense of peace. I hope she got a better man than I got. I hope he learned from hurting me so that she could have a comfortable life filled with love and support.
For years, I viewed that night as something shameful. “Maybe he is right; maybe I have some sort of disorder,” I would often think. With time, reflection, and loads of therapy, it turns out my judgment was working perfectly. My instincts had been on alert for months through the late nights, the broken promises, the flirtations I was told not to worry about, and the growing sense that my needs mattered less than his desires.
The mistake wasn’t that I missed the signs; the mistake was that I kept ignoring them. Even more evident was the fact that I was ignoring my own needs for support and safety, which every human deserves when navigating life’s complexities.