How to Dump Your Nice, Moderate Boyfriend
By: Lauren Ingeno
Tags: Relationships, Love, 2016 Election, Millenials, Politics

I opened my eyes on November 9, 2016, unsure if I had slept at all. My boyfriend’s lopsided bed creaked beneath my body. Next to me, he was sleeping soundly, as if the world was just as we had left it the night before.

Maybe it had been a nightmare.

I reached for my phone and opened my email, squinting as I pressed my thumb on the New York Times newsletter. “In Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment…” the subject line read. Tears rolled down my cheeks. He stirred and looked at me with his drowsy green eyes.

“Are you OK?”

“No. I’m not OK. What are we going to do?” I pleaded, shaking the headline in his face.

“Wow,” he said. And then shrugged. “It’ll be alright.”

My shock turned to rage. He thought my question was rhetorical, but I had meant it literally. I wanted to devise an action plan, to commiserate, to scream. All he could muster was a whisper.

I sat up and stared around the dark bedroom. He hadn’t voted for him, he assured me. But wasn’t his quiet apathy still to blame?

“It’s not going to be alright, OK?” I sneered.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

I left his apartment incensed. Was I sleeping with the enemy?

We had met four months earlier, on a sticky July night at a beer garden. I drank too much and confidently approached the tall stranger wearing white pants and leaning against the bar. “How about you buy me a shot?” I slurred. “Ah, no,” he said with a smile. Then, we danced, and I put my number in his phone.

He seemed to me like a modern-day Cary Grant, just the right mix of flirty, stoic, and sincere. When he told me, with such earnestness, “I’m in business school. I really enjoy it,” I wanted to laugh, but I bit my tongue and decided it was cute. Who really enjoys anything, anymore?

By the time I saw him in the daylight a week later, I couldn’t believe he wanted to go out with me. He was a former captain of his college crew team and a good Irish Catholic boy, with the looks and manners that could make a grandmother say something like, “They don’t make ’em like this anymore!” I am an ambiguous shade of brown that leads people to say things like, “What are you?” He was practical, respectful, private. I am impulsive, brash, dramatic.

During our early weeks of dating, I danced around the subject of politics, not wanting to burst the affable facade I had carefully constructed for my new, model Boyfriend. When I found out who he’d voted for in 2012, I felt queasy. But really, he was more apathetic than conservative, and maybe opposites really do attract, I told myself. To him, I was exciting. To me, he was sweet. Especially when it seemed like the entire world was yelling at each other, it was a relief to be with someone who wanted to stay out of the boxing ring.

Who was I, after all, to be self-righteous? Growing up, politics bored me, and the closest I ever came to organizing was when my favorite brand of jeans stopped selling my size. Even while living in Washington, DC, for two years after college, I proudly answered “No” on my OkCupid profile to whether I was interested in politics. I was searching for a fun jock, not a wonky Hill staffer.

But the country shifted in the summer of 2015, and something in me had shifted with it. A deep, fiery resentment rose from somewhere in my stomach and into my throat from the minute Donald J. Trump — a career racist, rapist, and con man — triumphantly descended down that stupid escalator, declaring Mexicans rapists and Obamacare “the big lie.”

Then, 62 million people voted for him anyway. For the first time in my privileged life, I realized democracy was not something I could take for granted.

On November 10, I found out that a crowd of protestors was planning to gather at City Hall. I called my boyfriend. He said, “hmmm,” and mumbled something about hoping the streets wouldn’t be blocked. He had to get to class that night.

I hung up and sprinted to Center City. Expecting a few dozen others, I was amazed by the growing mass of what looked like several hundred. For the past 24 hours, I had felt lost, lonely, and hopeless. But as I linked arms with total strangers, I was energized. I wasn’t naive enough to think shutting down traffic would change the outcome of the election, but shit, it felt good. If I wasn’t alone in my despair, maybe there was a pathway out of it.

But, the shouts of strangers only amplified the silence in my own relationship. Over the next two months, my boyfriend refused, for the most part, to talk about politics at all. He told me he understood why I was so invested, but maybe I was “a little too woke.” I started to feel like we were living on two different planets: He stressed about upcoming work presentations. I worried about the impending nuclear holocaust.

I decided to confront him after the Women’s March in January,

“You understand why I went, right?” I asked while in line at a dumpling restaurant in Chinatown.

“I don’t know.” He paused. “Yeah. I guess. I’m glad you had fun.”

“It wasn’t just fun,” I said. “It was important to me. I wish you had been there too.”

He looked away and shook his head. “I don’t think you need to disrupt people’s’ lives to make a point.”

I rolled my eyes. “But that is the point.”

“There are other things you can do.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” I said. “Are you planning to call our senators this week?”

I could hear myself sounding like a snob, but my blood was boiling.

“Let’s not talk about this right now,” he said sharply, sounding like my father.

“When is the right time to talk about it?” I wondered, genuinely.

In the months that followed, he was a good boyfriend. He listened intently and offered satisfying advice when I asked for it. He planned dates and wrote detailed itineraries for out-of-state getaways. Together, we mocked the bickering house hunters on HGTV, went for late-night ice cream runs and early morning bike rides. My friends and family adored him.

When conversations turned to politics, he’d chat a little then try to change the subject. One night, I insisted on listening to a political podcast while we cooked dinner.

“I don’t know how you listen to them all the time,” he said. “Don’t you get sick of it?”

“It’s news. It changes every day,” I shot back. “Don’t you get sick of the Golf Channel?”

“This is dumb,” he told me. “We wouldn’t be fighting like this if Clinton had won.”

“Yeah. But she didn’t.”

Still, I was conflicted. There was something tempting about logging off Twitter and talking to him instead about our weekend plans. The world felt chaotic and dangerous. Life inside my safe, relationship bubble may have been disconnected from reality, but at least I was safe there. Did I need a man shouting next to me with a sign, when I had one who would be waiting at home with dinner and a back rub?

So instead of delving deeper into activism myself, I watched other people, those “everyday Americans” that politicians like to tout about, act like superhumans. Poor, single mothers crowded into town halls to point their fingers in the faces of Republican lawmakers while giving eloquent, captivating speeches about what it was like to work three jobs with three kids and no sick pay. Veterans in wheelchairs slept overnight at the Capitol. Teenagers knocked on doors in below freezing temperatures. Women spoke up about the men who had harassed them. Men stood by them.

In the midst of all this movement, my boyfriend stayed still. What would set him off I wondered? Was there any social injustice that would stir him to cry out? Or better yet, to take action? Inside our bubble, I was starting to suffocate.

One October night, I tossed and turned, trying to imagine a future with my partner.

I called him the next morning and told him something was wrong, though I couldn’t quite place it. We talked for a while, and finally, I said a thing that had nothing to do with politics at all: “Sometimes, I don’t know how you feel about me.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked. I could hear the hurt and shock in his voice. “I’m not going to scream how much I love you from the rooftops.”

And in that moment, I knew it was over between us. I didn’t doubt that he loved me, necessarily — he had shown me, in quiet moments of intimacy and acts of selflessness.

But what I had learned over the past year is that forward movement requires loud declarations and big risks. Whether in love or politics, some things, I decided, are worth shouting about.