Broken Men

When I was seventeen, I ended up in a relationship with a man more than twice my age. I say I “ended up in a relationship” but that isn’t right at all. I began hostessing at his restaurant the summer before I started college, and I might as well have had a mark on my forehead. The manager warned me. When he hired me he said, “Watch out for the owner, you’re exactly his type,” and he laughed uncomfortably and shook his head like it was a joke, but his face turned bright red.

I wasn’t worried, though. I had a boyfriend I loved, my first boyfriend, and even if I hadn’t, I knew this man was too old for me. I said he was too old for me many times, and I said that to him, directly, because he made it necessary. I was polite about it, he was my boss after all, but I made it clear I was not interested and not available. I thought I had it handled, I thought I’d managed to say it to him with a smile, without making him feel rejected, and without getting myself fired.

Nonetheless, this man would send dozens of roses to me at the hostess stand, he would stand there when there was nowhere else for me to go asking about my college plans, he would pay me compliments, his cheeks would flush when we talked, and his eyes would dance all over the place. His last girlfriend had been twenty-three. She was a soap star, I knew who she was. He was thirty-seven when I started working at his restaurant. Lots of women wanted to go out with him, he was charming. He was just too old for me.

Then my boyfriend left for school on the other side of the country, and I started freshman year at Barnard College. I didn’t know anyone, I’d skipped my senior year of high school, and all my friends were having their final, fun, “party year” together. Sometimes (often, those first few months of college), I regretted I wasn’t back there with them.

My boyfriend, always a gregarious guy, was making new friends at his new school easily, and I would hear them in the close background of our calls, telling him to hurry up. Sometimes they were girls’ voices, and I felt sure it was a matter of time before one of them convinced him long-distance relationships were unsustainable.

Meanwhile, Restaurant Guy (RG) continued with his full-court press. I felt abandoned by my boyfriend, which was neither rational nor reasonable — and I felt this way even more when he let me know his plans to come home for Thanksgiving were falling through. Eventually, I had a coffee with RG one night after work when I was feeling especially lonely and despondent. He, of course, said he would have picked a school closer to home if he’d been in the same position. Which he might have been if he were twenty years younger.

Not long after, I broke up with my boyfriend. I did not do it with the intention of beginning a relationship with RG, I did it because I was sure we weren’t going to make it four years this way. The phone calls were never private, neither one of us could afford to travel to the other, and I felt sure he would rather be free to have fun. I figured I’d probably feel that way, too, eventually. I no longer felt like part of his life, I couldn’t even picture his life. I was heartbroken, though, the way you are when you’re seventeen and don’t yet know you survive heartbreak.

RG was there to swoop in and cheer me up. He’d take me for coffee after work, or downtown to a new restaurant he wanted to check out. He’d order six things on the menu for us to try. He’d say I was so much smarter than the women he usually spent time with, and I could do anything with my life. He opened up about how much he missed his mother, and about his first wife who’d cheated on him and left him for a wealthier man — a story I should have listened to a little more carefully.

He kept asking me to go to the Hamptons with him, but I knew what that really meant. In the city, I could scoot around and go for coffee or go to dinner as his little friend, but if I went away for the weekend with him, that was code for taking the relationship in the direction he had wanted it to go from the beginning. By then, I thought maybe I’d read him wrong. Maybe he wasn’t this playboy guy after all, maybe he was a decent man who grieved for his mom and had been betrayed by his ex wife. Some May-December relationships were not problematic, right? Those thoughts had started to creep in, and he’d been a good friend, or so it seemed. He couldn’t be going to this much trouble just to get me in bed?

I said yes to the Hamptons. He was ecstatic. I am not going to give you a play-by-play, but I am going to say that what happened when we got there felt very much like a thing he’d done many times before. Like a mating ritual on his boat. I am not a betting person and I do not have money to lose, but I would bet if I got three of his exes together and we compared notes, he did the exact same set of things with all of us. I cried after. I did not feel special or good. I dove into the water and tried to make sense of what had just happened, because I felt used.

Things changed pretty quickly after that. He went from besotted to cruel on a dime. No more roses. In fact, I didn’t get roses from him again until over three years later when I left him and he was trying to win me back. I wasn’t the same girl with her heart on her sleeve by then, I was hollowed out. Crushed. But I’ve skipped ahead.

Instead of compliments, there were constant criticisms spoken so casually they’d leave me breathless. Maybe you shouldn’t have that slice of pie, you don’t want to ruin your body, after all. You should have talked more at that dinner party, people are going to think you’re quiet because you have nothing going on inside your head. You should have spoken less when we were with my friends, you don’t know how to read social cues. Why are you wearing lipstick to school, do you like some guy in one of your classes? Why did you tell that friend of mine how old you are when she asked, it wasn’t any of her business. Why do you act like such a child, it’s embarrassing, I can’t take you anywhere. You didn’t really look great tonight like my friend said, it was just the lighting. Maybe I’ll get you a boob job if we’re still together when you’re twenty-five.

This is the abridged version, but it went on the entire relationship, which was, of course, most of my college experience. He tore me down and kept me feeling anxious and alone, because that’s what a man pushing forty has to do to keep a very young girlfriend around — or, at least, that’s what men like this believe. He has to make her fall in love, and then make her feel like she is not enough. That way she won’t leave. She will start to agonize over why she is not leaving, and hate herself for it more and more as time goes on.

Every couple of weeks there’d be a night I couldn’t find him. He had three restaurants at the time, not just the one where I worked, so he would often spend the night going from place to place, because restaurants are “all-cash businesses” and you have to be there or people might steal from you. He would tell me how he’d been fooled in the past, and people you’d never think would screw you over would be the ones to break your heart. Which turned out to be funny words from him.

He had a cellphone, one of the first big clunky ones, and I could always reach him on his way from one place to another on a regular night, or I could find him at one restaurant or another if I called. Except for the nights when I couldn’t, and those nights felt like death. The managers would say I’d just missed him, but I could hear in the way they said it that they were lying, and they knew that I knew. We all knew.

Meanwhile, when I was at school during the day, if I failed to call this man between classes, there was hell to pay. He had me on a tight leash. If he didn’t get a call from me when he expected one, he assumed I was sleeping with the entire football team, which was a projection, of course. I was faithful like a puppy. I would have done anything for him. Nonetheless, he would go berserk, accusing me of all kinds of things, while I cried and swore I would never hurt him.

On the nights I couldn’t find him, I knew in my entire being he was with someone else, but I could not prove it. It was a thing I knew from growing up with my dear old dad, going on dates with him when I was a kid. Being parked in front of some woman’s tv, while they “rehearsed” in her bedroom. He was an actor, and that’s what he always told me. Then we’d go home and my stepmom would have dinner on the table and he’d say we’d been at the playground. Once in a while she’d catch him in a lie and it would be awful. He’d act like the victim, and I’d stand there watching my dad lie to a woman I loved, and a woman who loved him.

I knew what a lie felt like from inside the experience. I knew what a man’s voice sounded like as he walked through the door of his apartment after he’d been with another woman. I knew the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as this man I loved called me crazy for standing there sobbing, instead of admitting I was right. Those nights made me feel a desperation it is painful to think about, even now.

If you’d put my parents in a blender and popped out a person, it would have been him. He was an Olympic-level womanizer like my dad, and emotionally unavailable to me like my mom. Have I mentioned there were twenty years between my parents? Also, is free will really a thing, or are we destined to repeat some cycles before we can break them?

As a grown woman, it’s easy to see I was a girl thinking if I could get a happy ending in that relationship, it would make me feel better about all the things I hadn’t healed from my childhood. I didn’t know yet that it doesn’t work that way, because I hadn’t spent enough time in a therapist’s office, on a yoga mat, or on a meditation cushion. You can only know what you know.

I tried to leave so many times, but it was as if he could feel the exact moment when he should do something thoughtful, or say something sweet. Just enough to keep me hanging on. A seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-old has no chance against a man who is forty, forty-one, forty-two. None.

I wish I could go back in time and knock on that high-rise apartment door on one of those nights that felt like agony and say, “Hi, here I am, You of the Future. I know this is 100% Twilight Zone. I came here because I need to tell you something, and it is not that we won’t have flying cars in 2026. It’s that this man you’re living with will come as close to destroying you as anyone, because you end up staying too long. We need to pack up this very minute. Everything you think is happening, is happening, you do not need to wait for proof. The proof is what you’re feeling in your bones. Also, this won’t make any sense to you right now, but one day you’re going to read that this man you’re living with is in the Epstein files. Let’s pack.”

I might not have listened to anyone else, but I feel like a visit from Future Me might have done the trick.

You don’t get to do that, though. You don’t get to go back in time and rescue the younger version of yourself, you just get to have compassion for her, and you get to tell her she’s safe now. I am pretty certain all the versions of us we ever were are running through the halls and the grassy fields of our internal landscapes, and sometimes those versions rise to the surface because something happens in the present that is reminiscent of something that happened in the past.

Maybe our seventeen-year-old self comes and sits cross-legged inside our hearts with tears streaming down her face, and we want to throw ourselves in front of the speeding train coming at her so she doesn’t get obliterated, even though we know she makes it. Barely.

Grown men dating young girls and very young women, think girls and women are expendable until they have daughters of their own. Then they might adore their own particular girls, but they won’t extrapolate, they won’t suddenly have an epiphany and care about all girls, and discover a new and profound respect for women everywhere. Let’s not get carried away.

Men like that are not capable of genuine, abiding regard and concern for women and girls, because they are deeply and pathologically insecure, and trying to fill that void with external validation of their worth. Maybe enough women will do it, or enough money. Maybe if the women are younger and hotter. Maybe if they aren’t women at all, but girls, maybe then. Maybe more cars or faster cars or more expensive cars. Bigger apartments in better buildings on higher floors.

Larger houses in the Hamptons, and when houses won’t do, time to shop for estates. How about more restaurant openings, and more good reviews. Maybe it’s time to open hotels. Invitations to enough parties with enough of the right people. How many parties does it take to feel whole?

Guess that’s how you end up being friends with Epstein. Glad I wasn’t around to see it.

A man like that loves you while you serve him. He wants you when you are unattainable, or when you have no needs, as long as you are making him happy, and increasing his perceived value when he walks in a room — but who is perceiving that value? Whose respect does he care about, and whose calculations? Other men, of course, and only those men who seem more powerful than him, to him, based on his value system.

I left because I knew if I didn’t I would die and I didn’t want to die. I left because he made it impossible for me to do anything else. I left because he hurt me so badly in the end, he might as well have ripped my heart out of my chest and tossed it out of a moving vehicle. For three years I’d kept offering my heart to him even when he was cruel. Once in a blue moon he would stop and stare at me like I was a species from another planet, holding something pure and sacred that he might have wanted once, twenty or thirty years ago.

He came after me for a while. Roses again. Apologies. He parked outside the new restaurant where I started working and sat there watching me. He showed up at the gym, and when I saw him in the reflection of the mirror, I went into fight or flight mode. I let go of the bar I’d been pulling overhead in some effort to get strong again, and the weights clanged down and made me jump. I could feel everyone around us turn to look. I couldn’t breathe, I hadn’t seen him for weeks, but he looked relaxed. If I hadn’t known him so well, I might have missed that his face was red and he was breathing through his mouth. He was working hard to look casual.

He stuck a post-it on the mirror in front of me. He’d drawn a smiley face on it and written a note that said, “Don’t be mad at me.” If you knew what he’d done, you would gasp at the degree to which that note did not meet the moment. Imagine Brutus holding up a post-it note with a smiley face as Caesar lay dying, and know that I am not one for hyperbole when it comes to betrayal. “Don’t be mad at me, bruh.” Smiley face.

When it was clear I was not coming back, he replaced me with another young woman, not as young as I’d been, but young.

I called his house to warn her, the way other women had called me, but I did the same thing they’d done. She’d answer, and I’d pause, listening to her say hello … then she’d hang up. I didn’t do it to upset her — I wanted to tell her to run — but I couldn’t find the right words. I knew it would be fruitless. Blessed be the fruit.

She got out faster than I did, and I don’t know how many women came after her, and before the woman he married, because I stopped paying attention. He has daughters, though, I do know that. He became friends with Epstein long after I knew him. He’s a multi-millionaire or billionaire now, which was his dream. I am sure it’s still not enough.

It’s never enough for men like these, and I will never understand why so many grown women don’t see through them. It’s why they go for young girls and young women — women their age will not put up with their shit, except for the ones who will. Proximity to men who do not respect women will never keep a woman safe, and it will not keep their daughters safe, either — or ours.

I love these people who think this is not a club. This is 100% a club, and the president is in it. Musk is in it. Peter Thiel is in it, and JD Vance belongs to him. It’s a bunch of uber-rich white men who believe the rules don’t apply to them, and they can order up whatever they want. They believe they should never have to pay for their mistakes or their lies, nor should they be inconvenienced by the vagaries of the weather or anything else “average people” have to manage.

Voting rights? Stupid, lowly peons who can’t even figure out how to afford groceries — let alone game the system — getting to decide the president can’t keep fleecing the country to the tune of $2.2 billion dollars a year? Hell no he doesn’t think something as meaningless as a free and fair election should decide his fate, or our own.

He feels entitled to the presidency, to the billions of dollars, to knocking down the East Wing, to building a helipad instead of restoring the South Lawn as promised now that the ridiculous cage matches are over, to a golden jet from Qatar that has already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in alterations, to lying his ass off if that’s what he needs to do so that his supporters continue to believe his bs about the 2020 election — an election that took place while he was president! Under his Eye! An election that has been proven over and over again to have been accurate.

He doesn’t care, though, he wants to do whatever it takes to retain his grip on the Golden Goose. Consider that he literally got out in front of the entire country and said that of the last three presidents, he is the only one who could not manage to conduct free and fair elections. This is a man who will never admit he’s made a mistake or say he’s sorry or admit to weakness of any kind, but there’s no getting around it.

In 2016 when he ran against Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was president. Elections were (presumably) free and fair, because he has no issue with them, right? He won. He’s not suggesting there was a problem with the elections in 2016, so we can conclude President Barack Obama was better at running free, fair and safe elections. In 2024, Joe Biden was president, and the president is not complaining about election interference from “deep state actors” or “China” with that election, so it stands to reason, President Joseph Biden did a better job running free and fair elections.

So wow, out of the last three presidents, two of whom were Democrats, it seems the ONLY president to not be able to keep our elections safe from election interference was him. I cannot believe he finally admitted he is not as good as Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph Biden. I never thought I’d live to see the day. I wonder how they were able to make sure there wasn’t any foreign interference in our elections, but he couldn’t. Huh.

He’s surrounded himself with angry little men who will not stop him from spewing this nonsense. While his speech was laughable, Stephen Miller’s speech at the Opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism (ummm…wut) was despicable, but his soul left his body long ago. He is nothing but a white sheet now, screaming racist, fascist slurs, securing his suite in the depths of Hades. Please turn up the heat down there, it’s not roasting-hot enough.

Joining him in Backwards Land, and securing their own suites, were Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent. If someone set out to make white supremacy, white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, fascism and patriarchy look like the least appealing concepts in all of Creation, these would be the men to send in, so well done on that I guess.

The entire Cabinet is full of cosplaying tough guys, because those are the kind of men a man like the president thinks are macho. Say that three times fast. A man who thinks “men on women’s sports teams and men in women’s bathrooms” and “drag queens reading to kids” are the problem, when every woman alive will tell you the problem is angry heterosexual men, and very often, ones you know (AND NOT ALL MEN, but definitely not transgender people or drag queens), a man who will say “no more transgender people in the military” and probably not women, either, but definitely not transgender people — but then turn around and say he wants to start testing the military for testosterone levels and shooting them up if they need it?

I mean…Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

You just can’t make this up. Gender-Affirming Care for Manly Military Men, by Pete Hegseth, the man who can’t do a pull-up, lacks the integrity of even the most average guy, and thinks women don’t need to vote.

Then “girl dad” Faux News host Jesse Watters thinks it’s hilarious to make jokes about all the rapes that are gonna happen as a result, and it wasn’t the first time he made jokes about men “just whipping it out.”

“You know what’s going to happen? The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it — triple boost. And then they’re going to get out there and women on base, you better be careful,” Waters said. “Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals, and you better watch out.”

Yeah, that’s really funny. Nothing like rape jokes mixed with misogyny and racism to really get those laughs going. It’s so funny, I hope they fire your ass without severance pay, and I hope your daughters grow up and decide they don’t want to know you. Genuinely.

I want to leave you with some hopeful news, though, because there is some. Men like this are not strong. They’re angry and scared and lashing out because they can, and I mean that, literally. That is not strength. That is not power. Men like this are broken, and broken men will never win for long.

For example: Stephen Miller tried to get his neighbors arrested for protesting his racist and inhumane policies with sidewalk chalk messages. When that didn’t work, he and his family sold their $3.75 million dollar home and moved to a military base where they joined other senior Trump-administration political appointees living in Washington-area military housing. They now have the U.S. military adding to their personal security detail to protect them from scary sidewalk chalk messaging.

JD Vance is making so many insane last-minute requests from the Secret Service on such a regular basis — requests that cost taxpayers outrageous amounts of money, and require Secret Service Agents to change their plans on a dime — they have insider jokes, and even coins and badges mocking him. Bobcat is his nickname, OTR stands for “Off the Record” and refers to his off the record movements — such as shuttling his son to a golf lesson, a request that was interrupted by thunderstorms, not common sense. The coins and badges read:

“Bobcat OTR Survivors Club.” The logo includes the motto, “Advance. OTR. Repeat.”

The use of a military helicopter for a child’s schedule is unprecedented, with agents usually using SUVs to ferry children around, current and former Secret Service supervisors told MS NOW. Using the helicopter for the golf lesson would have required approval from the White House Military Office, which reports to President Trump. The helicopter costs $16,000 to $24,600 in taxpayer funds for every hour of use, according to estimates from the 2022 Department of Defense budget.

Imagine being so out of touch you think it’s okay to spend that kind of money getting one of your kids to a single golf lesson. The absolute audacity of mediocre men.

But my favorite decent news story of all right now? The Tate brothers were arrested in Miami, and Mr. Manly Manosphere was wearing some too-short, too-tight, fetching grey capris, and too-tight open-necked purple top. Please note, Barron is friends with these misogynistic human trafficking rapists. That’s all! Just wanted to mention. Men who talk about owning women as property, but then get arrested in shiny, tiny, grey capris are kinda telegraphing their deep need for therapy.

They should just stop fighting their feminine side so much. Maybe they wouldn’t be so enraged and violent. Maybe if the Tate brothers had been allowed to wear sparkly things as boys, we could have avoided a lot of pain for a lot of girls and women, and I’m just spitballing here. Maybe the problem with most violent men is they’ve rejected their softness and vulnerability because they were told it made them weak, but rejecting parts of yourself doesn’t make them disappear. You just end up carrying around a lot of shame, and repressed shame leads to all kinds of trouble.

Aside from that, softness and vulnerability aren’t weak; it takes real strength to be vulnerable. You know what’s weak? Using the size or power you have to inflict pain on people who can’t defend themselves. That’s the weakest thing there is.

Sending you love, friends.

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