Ex has begun expressing doubts about Sven.

His concerns include Sven's lack of college education, his wrinkles (apparently airbrushed in the photos I saw), his shortcomings as a tango instructor, and his insecurities (about which Ex said little). Quoting the ever-mocking heroine of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Ex dubbed Sven a "specialist." His entire world revolves around tango dancing (although he's recently begun branching out, adding the hustle to his repertoire). He loves spending afternoons at museums - an important fact, mind you, since I do not, and this was one of Ex's reasons for deciding we were incompatible. But Sven's reactions to the art are limited, confined mostly to expressions of appreciation or dislike. This concerns Ex. Sven can talk (and, one would assume, dance) circles around almost anyone on the topics of tango or the hustle. But life consists of many other topics, particularly for someone as deliberately cultured and well-read as Ex. Ex may be an essentially Dionysian creature, but he is also passionately intellectual and loves to learn. Sven can teach Ex about the tango, but not much else. To quote Ex, "there is trouble in paradise."

I was glad to hear about this "trouble" for two reasons. One, it meant Ex might break up with Sven. (He'd already considered it, but a friend convinced him to give Sven another chance. Needless to say, I hate this friend.) Two, it meant Ex and me might get back together. After all, if he broke up with me partly for Sven and Sven turns out to be a disappointment, then Ex might finally come to his senses. Underwear model or not, a shared love of dancing and long walks through museums does not a long-lasting relationship make.

Ex fed my hopes even further when he revealed, after I pressed him, that he was beginning to have doubts about our separation as well. I asked if he would be jealous if I met someone. He said he would be happy for me. My brain said, "fuck you," but my mouth said, "maybe I'll sow my own wild oats and fuck as many men as possible." He was silent for a moment, then said, "that stings." And my brain wept for joy. If he could be hurt by the idea of me being with other men, surely he must still want me, even just a little.

None of this changes the fact that Ex, once again, is fucking Sven - or at least sleeping beside him in our old apartment - at the same time I write myself into a stupor in the early hours of the morning.

It is 3:45 AM. My desk, once positioned neatly against a wall in the old apartment, is now crammed at an angle into my new apartment between my "compact sofa" (sans cushions, which need to be vacuumed) and random sprawls of boxes. Yes, I am now (almost) completely moved in to the new apartment. The move took place this afternoon; Ex procured a U-Hall and I, two lesbians and former members of the LGBT student group I advise at the college. I set my Scooba to work on the bedroom floor, vacuumed the bed and box spring, made the bed, and dusted/hooked up my TV and stereo. The bookshelves, desk, filing cabinet, and kitchen table and chairs still need to be dusted. The sofa endured a small tear in the upholstery and needs to be mended. The floors in the kitchen and bathroom need to be swept and mopped. And the cable installer isn't coming until Tuesday, which means no cable TV to distract me, and no internet aside from a tethered cell phone.

I'm reaching a point of crisis in the breakup. Not the kind of heaving, sobbing crisis I experienced a few days ago, but a quieter, and in some ways more troubling, crisis of thought. I don't want the relationship to be over; that's nothing new. For a time I grudgingly accepted it, but lately I've started thinking that our relationship is merely on pause; that despite Ex's insistence to the contrary, this is merely a "trial separation." Just as Ex felt in his gut that we could both find better matches, I feel in my bones that we are each other's best and only true match. I believe we will find our way back to each other, not to continue our relationship as it was, but to restart it, each of us stronger and wiser about our own and each other's needs. I believe this as I believe in the roundness of the earth and the inevitability of my own death. I believe it with the conviction of a irrefutable truth.

I'm in crisis not only because Ex may not feel the same, but because I don't know how much longer I can hold on and still manage to forgive him should he change his mind. Were he to come to me tonight (which he won't) or two weeks from now (which he might) and say he made a terrible mistake when he broke up with me, I could probably forgive him - for Sven, for all the pain and anxiety he's caused me, and most of all for giving up on us without trying. In fact, I might even thank him, for without the breakup, I would have probably continued taking him for granted and he me. But I can only hang on for so long (many would say I shouldn't be hanging on at all). I hang on because I can picture Ex and me as old men recounting the story of our relationship, perhaps to a niece or nephew or even our own child. I can hear old-man Ex saying, "many years ago I broke up with Steve, but he fought - he fought so hard - and I love him so deeply for that, because if he hadn't fought, we might never have rediscovered how much we love each other."

I can fight for another two weeks, maybe even two months, but I can't fight forever. As my new upstairs neighbor suggested (yes, I even confide in two-day-old neighbors these days), Ex could be going through the gay equivalent of a mid-life crisis. (Ex just turned 36, which, in the culture of the gay dance clubs, basically means you're a zombie.) Sven may have wrinkles, but he's still Ex's junior by a decade. This could just be a coincidence, but, either way, Sven represents something new - if not the trophy wife to Ex's balding, middle-aged divorcée, then a taste of excitement in lieu of the predictable and mostly unexciting thing that our relationship had admittedly become.

I can weather a mid-life crisis, but not indefinitely. I can see now that our relationship needed more excitement. Perhaps monogamy really can't work, at least not between two men, and perhaps the Svens of the world do us a service by shocking us out of our complacency, by making us see afresh the partners we once imagined we knew by heart, having already seen everything we thought there was to know about them.

My therapist once said the key to sustaining a long term relationship is for a couple to transition "from mystery to mastery." "Mystery" is what defines the early, "romantic phase" of the relationship, where your partner is terra incognita and the relationship itself a never-ending parade of thrilling new surprises and discoveries. Unfortunately, these surprises don't last, which is why both partners need to adjust their expectations, learning to draw excitement and pleasure from "mastering" how best to satisfy each other based on everything they've learned. Like so many couples, Ex and I never mastered the "mastery" part, but I'm beginning to see how it can be done, and how "mastery" can lead to its own kind of surprises.

I asked Ex to read this entry, as I'm addressing the rest of it to him. The romantic in me wants to surprise him, to make a public declaration of love like the hero of a romantic comedy, shouting it across a crowded train station just in time to catch the ear of my departing lover. Those of you who are not Ex, be warned. What little remains of my dignity is hanging by a thread, so stop reading now if you'd rather preserve a more dignified image of your humble, heartbroken author.

Ex, my love - my one and only match,

This is my love-letter to you, my call across the crowded train station, my Orlando to your Vita Sackville-West - only much shorter. I love you beyond the length of this letter, beyond even Proust's seven volumes. As you've witnessed firsthand over the last few weeks, my love for you is so big that my own skin can barely contain it. It has caused me to burst out in sobs that render me speechless, that nearly break me open. It has left the taste of hell in my mouth. It has made me hate you and worship you and thirst for you in ways I haven't felt since the first few months of our 12 years together.

You know how much I love and miss you, how jealous I am of "Sven." But I am also grateful. I am grateful to you for intervening in our mutual stagnation. I am grateful to you for my sadness, for the urgency of my emotions, because this urgency reminds me I'm alive. I am grateful for my own space, for nearly 30 days of soul-searching, for many more days of soul-searching to come, and for the realization that I am, as yet, deeply incomplete. I need to get a new job. I need to keep writing. I need to rely on myself, inspire myself, and chase my dreams on furiously fast feet. I took it for granted that I could fulfill myself partially through you, make your accomplishments my own. But now, for the first time in my adult life, I have begun tracing a line between us, one that delineates where you end and I begin. I am tracing this line by necessity, not by choice. But I needed to do it, and I am grateful to you, even to the point of tears, for compelling me to begin.

At the same time I'm grateful, I'm also shattered, because in separating myself from you, I am beginning to see you again as I haven't seen you in years. I see your tenderness, your beauty. I see lines and muscles in your body that I hadn't noticed since college. My skin burns for you just as it did during one of our first nights together. I was laying on your bed in your dorm room - two beds pushed together - and foolishly caressing my face against a stuffed animal - a teddy bear? - on the pillow. Do you remember? You said archly, "You must love that bear." Of course it wasn't the bear I loved any more than it was the bear my body wanted to touch. Later in the night, you climbed on top of me, face and body illuminated by grey-blue stripes of moonlight. I see you now as I saw you then: lunar, mysterious, beautiful.

I don't want to resume our relationship where we left off. I want to date you again, to woo you, to seduce and be seduced by you. I want to use what I've learned over the last 12 years to master how best to fulfill you, but I also want to re-evaluate what I know, to clear any debris of false assumptions. I want to get to know you again. I want to live separately, sharing only ourselves, our art, and - for the time being - our car. I want to be less pragmatic, more romantic. I want to use what I've learned about myself over the last 12 years to become a better lover and a stronger, more independent man. This blog - and this note to you - is my first attempt since age 20 to do so.

I want to go to dance concerts with you, to show you movies. I still don't feel comfortable at gay bars - I would rather write, or at least dance at a "mixed" club. I can't change this. I can't turn myself into someone who goes dancing two or three times a week, who commutes to Manhattan whenever possible because I think it's the greatest place on earth. I can spend four or five hours at a museum - I can even enjoy those hours - but only rarely. I am still the same person. I watch movies. I go out to see friends, even those who live in the city. But most of all I love writing and being comfortable at home. Your art requires people, music. Mine requires a computer and a proverbial "room of one's own," and it's here, in this room, that my passion lives.

I can't change who I am, and I can't change you. You are a dancer. You need space - literally, to dance, and figuratively, to be by yourself. I know you have trouble sharing how you feel. In the past I felt my only recourse was to pull your feelings out of you like so many bloody teeth, but now I realize you're entitled to wrestle with your demons in private. If you want to tell me about them, I will listen. If you want me to join you on the mat, I will fight to protect you; I will smash a chair over the head of anyone who calls himself your opponent, who tries to make off with even the smallest piece of your self-worth. But if you want to be alone, I won't crowd you. If you wish to do battle with your darkness by yourself, I will pray for you but step aside.

I won't ask you not to dance, to stay home when you want to go out. I will not judge your ambitions. I've judged you in the past because I believed we should both have exactly the same ambitions, that we should, in effect, be the same person. But I am now learning to be my own person, which means we can both want different things, some of which we may not be able to provide for each other. But I do not believe this makes us fundamentally incompatible. I believe it makes us two people, whereas in the past I insisted on seeing us as one, denigrating anything that did not match my concept of the one, mutual "self" which, in the earliest years of our relationship, we had jointly vowed to cultivate.

I know a new relationship between us might not work. Were this a "persuasive essay" of the kind I sometimes ask my students to write, I would omit this paragraph entirely, but I am saying everything I know, and I know a new relationship might not work. For one thing, I will need to learn to trust you again. For another, I will need to preserve my new self-knowledge and not backslide into complacency and co-dependence. But I'm glad I don't know if it will work. Better not to know than be so stupidly confident in the unbreakability of a thing that one forgets to treasure it, to regard it one regards all humans, animals, and objects - as temporary. We fool ourselves into thinking our loved-ones will live forever, our pets will accompany us to the grave, our possessions will retain their emotional value even after we are gone. These illusions are part of the comfort of relationships, animals, and objects, but they can also be a trap. I - we - trapped each other in a lie of permanence. Only now that the lie has been exposed, only now that I've been forced to confront it every day for the past 28 days, can I see you with new eyes and love you, once again, for the man you truly are.

Before you give up on us, before you board the train in the crowded station, please hear my call. Before you allow yourself to fall in love with another man, listen as I describe my new vision of myself and the world. I am dying to pull you back into my life for safety, for permanence, but I have come too far, even in 28 days, to call you back for these reasons. I have "passed the point of no return," as you say. Allow me to rediscover you. Allow yourself to rediscover me. Perhaps some sense of permanence, no matter how illusory, is necessary for any relationship to survive. But let's not think about that now. I love you with all the fervor of my 20-year-old self. If you can love me again - or if you love me still - please do not board that train.

Yours,

"Steve"