bad romance

on toxic relationships

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lovers, 1909

The danger of falling for a fuckboy is a tale as old as time. Whether lurking in the pages of 19th century literature or Hinge profiles, fuckboys have endured through the ages, leaving behind a trail of emotional wreckage. There are entire Facebook groups (“Are We Dating The Same Guy?”) dedicated to helping women weed them out by dishing tea on the various suspects in a city like New York.

Carola Lovering’s Tell Me Lies is about a toxic, on-again, off-again relationship between Lucy and Stephen that spans college and beyond. It’s an extremely triggering novel for anyone who has been in an emotionally turbulent relationship. The highs and lows, the push-pull dynamic, the cycles of pursuit and withdrawal are painfully relatable.

At its core, it’s a story about addiction—not the chemical kind (although there’s plenty of coke and booze), but the craving to feel wanted, seen, and chosen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire, but it can be easily exploited by a certain type of person.

An alarming number of women have had a “Stephen” in her past—maybe not quite a sociopath, but a serial player who ruined her and kept coming back for more. Just look at this Reddit thread:

Because the story unfolds through Lucy’s and Stephen’s alternating points of view, the reader is privileged with more information than the characters, and this contributes to the suspense. We know early on that Stephen is narcissistic, manipulative, and emotionless. On the surface, it’s inconceivable that Lucy should fall for such a terrible person who—it must be noted—has a “weak chin” and isn’t even good looking. But when you understand her backstory and the particular trauma she suffered as a child, it’s not only believable but inevitable that she should fall for his charms, and we read to find out if she can break out of her toxic cycle with him.

I inhaled Tell Me Lies on a long-haul flight, and it got me thinking about how messy and vulnerable our college years are. At eighteen, we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know what we want, and we certainly don’t know what love is. It’s all too easy to mistake sexual chemistry and emotional intensity for love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful, transformative experience.

Seeing Stephen at a wedding a few years after college, Lucy still feels viscerally drawn to him and has this very honest moment of reflection:

Maybe I didn’t always like him, but there is a difference between liking someone and loving them, and the power in that difference is enough to shape your life.

When she admits she loves him despite everything he’s done, she’s revealing how love—or what feels like love—can override reason and reshape the course of one’s life. You might argue that what she feels toward him is more like lust or emotional dependency, but that distinction doesn’t make her experience any less valid, any less powerful or real. It still hurts. It still changes her.

A friend of mine is in a situationship where neither of them talks about their dating lives, so she doesn’t know if he’s seeing other people, and he doesn’t know if she is. Instead, she’s piecing together context clues to figure out his status. This is an untenable situation, and I was surprised she was okay with it. But I think the arrangement satisfies some of her needs while keeping alive the hope of real commitment. Sometimes, uncertainty is preferable when seeking clarity could mean learning that what you want is impossible. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma: staying in a mutually tolerable situation feels safer than risking “losing it all” by asking for the truth.

In college, I dated someone who filled a particular void from my previous relationship. I felt like we were meant to be together because of how much we had in common and how intense the attraction was. This allowed me to ignore obvious red flags—like the fact that we almost exclusively hung out after 9 p.m. and rarely went on dates in public. I liked being the girl who was down-to-earth and uncomplicated, the opposite of high maintenance. For months, I didn’t ask him what we were because I didn’t want to come across as a person who needed labels to feel secure. I wanted to trust him and trust our relationship, so I kept a lid on my simmering worries. I was trying to maintain an image of myself as cool and unattached when I was anything but.

It’s worthwhile to examine why we avoid bringing up certain topics with intimate partners, what fears lurk behind the silence. The best way to test the soundness of a relationship is to make an earnest bid for what you want. But of course, that’s easier said than done. This is one of those lessons we all have to learn the hard way.

I love this Mary Oliver poem:

(Spoiler alert in this paragraph—) Midway through Tell Me Lies, I found myself desperately wanting Stephen to get punished. Believe it or not, chronic cheating, emotional manipulation, and gaslighting are the least of his crimes. I wanted to see him publicly humiliated, tarred and feathered, denounced by all his friends, and eating his heart out at “the one who got away.” But Lovering doesn’t give us any of this. She doesn’t cater to our collective fantasy of revenge, fueled by our own experiences with “Stephens.” And this is why the ending packs a punch. Just like in real life, we never find out if the toxic ex gets his comeuppance. Some stories we won’t stay in long enough to see how they end because, for our own sake, we have to GTFO.

All of the love languages—words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, gifts, and touch—can be mistaken for the real thing they purport to express. What’s important isn’t what a person does but why they do it. Lucy has a powerful realization at the end that Stephen’s displays of affection—his attempts to win her back—have nothing to do with her. It’s all a game to him, with high risks and high rewards. She realizes she’s no different than any other woman he’s seduced, and this painful, clear-eyed understanding is what saves her.