When the director of my documentary on marriage asked me which of my ex-boyfriends I would like to interview on camera, I told him, "We're going to have to hire an actor." I'm not friends with any of my exes, and I've never understood the appeal.
In fact, the only ex I ever considered myself to be on speaking terms with is the one person with whom I'd gone the longest without speaking: Peter.
I met Peter when I was 20 and he was 31. He was a tall, handsome British guy who would come into the Los Angeles restaurant where I waited tables and flirt with me. His recollection, I soon found out, was that I forced myself on him and wouldn't give up until he agreed to be my boyfriend. We were together for two and a half years, and then we weren't. He thought I was too young and needy, while I thought he lacked passion and didn't understand why he didn't want me to sleep over every night.
Peter, though, was my first adult love—and the heartbreak for me that paved the way for all future heartbreaks. He was the one you believe you'll eventually find your way back to because, at 23, your brain is exploding with the struggle to accept that not all things happen for a reason.
So I agreed to ask Peter to be in the film. Knees shaking, I called him on a phone number whose last four digits I've used as the code to every safe in every hotel room I've stayed in since we met. I told him I was shooting a documentary about marriage, why people do it, and how I've never wanted to get married—until, at the tender age of 40, I finally feel ready, now that I have no viable options. Peter seemed surprisingly open to the idea but needed reassurance that I wasn't going to make fun of him on camera—a theme, for some reason, that keeps reintroducing itself into my romantic relationships.
We met at a park in Los Angeles. It's supremely awkward seeing someone you used to have a lot of sex with for the first time in almost two decades. It's embarrassing sitting three feet away from your ex, trying to discern whether he's wondering how badly you've aged—or, more specifically, if you look fatter than you did at 23.
We talked about our relationship. He told me that I was a menace—that I would drink more than him and his friends combined, and then get up at 7 a.m. and run six miles. He said that I was opinionated and loved a good fight, and that I could get anyone to open up. He said that he would often find me laughing by myself, and that he felt like he was dating all of my friends too, that I was a complex character and a "beautiful hurricane." He told me that over the years people have said, "You should have married Chelsea. Look at the life you would have had." His response? "If I'd married Chelsea, I'd be divorced with two kids."
Ironically, that was the exact predicament I found him in. He has two small children, and at the time of our interview was going through a divorce. It was the kind of situation most women wish upon their first loves: Let's regroup in about 17 years and see who's where once you've realized what a big mistake you made by hooking up with two Asian women less than 24 hours after our breakup. (Which is what I walked in on 12 hours and four drinks after Peter and I split up, when I used my key to his apartment for the very last time, at 1:14 a.m. PST.)
When our interview was over, Peter and I got in a car and went to lunch alone. I was selfishly dying to hear what happened to his marriage, what his life was like, and to see if there was any truth to the phrase "Timing is everything." What I discovered is that there is—just not in the way I'd imagined. We bickered flirtatiously. I felt like I was 23 again—except that our roles were reversed. But then I recognized the feeling as something sadder: that I didn't, and wouldn't ever, love him again.
This was something I'd literally prayed to happen for two years after our breakup. My sister Simone used to listen to me cry on the phone, telling me there would be a day when I didn't pine for him. But when that day comes, you don't recognize it, because it's not one day. It's an amorphous cloud of time, and then it suddenly dawns on you that you haven't woken up thinking about him in a while, or wondered if he's laughing as much without you in his life. Realizing that those feelings have set in can be even sadder than the initial misery. You can't fast- forward heartbreak, and you can't rewind love—and, that's just one big bummer.
Then Peter asked me a question: "Do you still call everything you love 'Chunk'?" This made me cry. Peter knew me before I had a dog named Chunk, and before I lost my mother, whom I called Chunk. I even used to call him Chunk. Even though I knew I wouldn't be having sex with Peter again, never mind getting back together, I was moved that someone I hadn't spoken to in so many years knew me so well. It felt good to have been seen by someone I had no idea was paying that much attention. It also lent credence to the reassuring truth that I've always been exactly who I was pretending to be.
"It wasn't two Asian women, Chels," he blurted out during our car ride. "You didn't have to put that in your book."
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry about that. It just had a better ring."
This article originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of Harper's BAZAAR.
