The True Story of My Fake Ex-Husband

❤️ Valentine’s Day can exacerbate loneliness for people who have lost partners, broken up with partners, and are single for other reasons. For many more, it’s simply an irritant.

So I thought I’d tell you a story that reflects the paradoxical nature of Valentine’s Day and what it elicits: absence and presence, fact and fiction, and especially love and a marriage that happened once and has withstood the test of time, even if it also never happened at all.

Since I was young, I’ve always known that our society has a lot of things backward, and as I got older, I began to wonder whether we’d also gotten the idea and the timing of marriage all wrong.

After all, it takes a long time to get to know someone, and if you’re a person who wants to get married, sometimes the time it takes is forbidding. When you genuinely know the person who is the subject of the marriage question, realizing who you’re with can be crushing.

Instead of spending a year or more getting to know someone before deciding to spend your life with them, perhaps we should decide right away to spend our lives with our new partner and discover, in time, whether we want to continue.

I’ve done many spontaneous and whimsical things in my life. Some amazing things, like running away with the Cirque du Soleil for a year. Some ill-advised and traumatic: dating my literary agent.

But one has stood the test of time, not only as a story I’ve told at dinner parties (ah, simpler times) but as an unbroken bond stretching across continents, time, language, and truth.

This is the true story of my fake ex-husband, Pablo.

My most profound insights (and funnest stories) don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These deeper dives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

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