“First, there is an opportunity. Then, there is a betrayal.”

I knew it was coming the way astronomers know about distant collisions. The calculations were there, precise and terrible, but the impact remained theoretical until it wasn’t. She was my best friend for six years. She was my girlfriend for a few of them, and today she is no longer in my life. I trusted her not to do something that I should have anticipated she would always do: When she decided it was time for her to move on, she justified it to herself by renarrating our friendship.

When people divorce their spouses, one of the most common defences put up to protect the self is the claim that the relationship was never truly as it appeared to be. Oftentimes, this comes in the form of “I never loved you” or “I was forced into this marriage.” This creates a permission structure to leave the relationship entirely, as the logic that emerges is something analogous to “false pretences.”

The basic logical structure is as follows:
“I was never truly engaged to the level that I pretended to be, *(ergo) our relationship is to some extent, necessarily a lie, *(ergo) I must leave you.”

She couldn’t claim that she never loved me. Nor could she claim she didn’t care. Instead, she invoked the digital world to take responsibility away from her. At the core of her critique of our relationship is a process by which the digital world supposedly made our friendship less material, and also that this process was predictable. Implicit in her construction is the notion that it was all a mistake. But what is telling about this construction is that I am almost certain she wouldn’t apply this critique to me: it was she who should have known, and the onus isn’t on me.

This suggests something about the nature of her critique. What she is assigning to “the internet” is really a process that occurred, if it even did at all, within herself.

The result is a slightly awkward “I’m sorry for making something more real than it should have been.” It’s insulting, as relationships are not constructed by one party, and it’s hurtful, as it nullifies much of the goodwill that I had towards her if the goodwill was built on faulty premises.

Near the end, our conversations began to feel like lying in tall grass, watching something enormous pass overhead, both magnificent and doomed.

And it is also, crucially, a betrayal. Of everything we promised each other not to do, of our friendship, and of the thousands of hours we spent over the years in dialogue.