Both Sides Of A Breakup

Many years ago I tried to write a novel that told the story of a relationship through interlocking segments from the two participants. I had an image in my head of the cover, very roughly: it would show a line on a piece of paper, with a sheet of translucent paper on top of it that had another line that overlapped the bottom one for some of the way, but then diverged.[^1]

The thing I was trying to get at was a bittersweet feeling I had at the time that life was full of relationships where you didn't so much disagree about the meaning or intention of particular actions but where you basically remembered completely different things, where a lot of the key moments that defined the relationship for one person passed by unnoticed by the other. And then you looked back and thought: even when I thought we were on the same page, where we really? Or were we just coincidentally having compatible separate imaginings for a while?

Anyway. I was recently delighted to find that this format exists, in the form of this New York magazine column called Both Sides Of A Breakup. Who knows how real this column is or isn't, ultimately. But I feel like it captures the spirit of relationships in a way that other things I read rarely do: the weird combination of disagreements about substance and disagreements of evaluation and then completely non-overlapping memories which somehow fit together as a patchwork of two people's lives for a little while. I'm not sure what % of people would enjoy reading these, but since you're reading me there's presumably an above-average chance you'd like them too.

[^1]: Hey, since we live in a time of miracles, I guess I can just generate a sketch for you – this isn't quite right, but it's amazingly much better than I could have conveyed this idea a year ago.