The news is on the background while I wait for a phone call. I decided this would be a good time to start writing about another relationship. I hope the act of putting the words down will help ease my anxiety about uncovering new aspects of my personality, history, and habits. I’m learning a lot about myself and my attachment styles and where they stem from. Therapy has been helping me unlock a lot of myself. Sometimes if leaves me raw and open; other times, however, it motivates me to write and let out all that I’m discovering.

Let me tell you about more of my relationships from the summer of 2018 in Provincetown. We were moving quickly, diving into this bond. In many ways, it felt too quick to me, though we did have some really great moments. We had bike rides and adventures to the beach including full moon bonfires. There were outings galore and a lot of sex. When I do say we jumped in, we had been dating a week and announced our relationship on social media on the Fourth of July. We seemed inseparable until he left his show after tension and then he took off for New York City for a week to try and make some connections and headway in a job search.

Our relationship was monogamous and that of strong potential, or so it felt. I even visited him at this apartment in New York and then returned to Provincetown. We spent a week apart, and during that time, there was a visiting friend of his from San Francisco that he had always had a thing for. I remember the phone call like it just happened. He was calling me to ask if I was okay with them sharing a bed because his friends was going to spend the night, which I was already very hesitant about, but I agreed to. I said was not okay with them sharing a bed and he said he okay. I thought that the expectations were clear, but everything went different than I had hoped. He cheated.

The entire next day was Carnival in Ptown.  I had so much to do that day, including a show, but we took time to talk to each other. The entire time I had to repeatedly ask more questions in order to get him tell the truth. The issues here were that I felt betrayed because we had set a boundary that he agreed to and yet he still broke our trust and then continued to lie. I was willing to listen, but I would not listen to fallacies.

Maddelyn Hatter & I in Ptown

We were both willing to work on the relationship in order to move forward. The problem was, I wasn’t ready for an open relationship, but he wanted so badly to have sex with so many people—and in so many ways he did. His deceptive nature continued to plague us. I only wanted to build a foundation for us, but that was hard to do based on distrust.

By summer’s end, we decided to take a leap of faith and live together. In a lot of ways that felt fantastic, but the reality was that this step caused more issues between us. We tried to hold onto something that was merely a summer fling and should’ve been left in Provincetown.

I suppose I needed that experience to grow into who I am now? I guess you’ll just have to wait for the next few installments to find out.