my ex told everyone we were in an open relationship. we weren’t.
Last summer, I ended a relationship that still feels strange to think about now.
We met in Paris during winter break of my junior year of college. The year before, I had lived with French exchange students at my university in the U.S., and through them I met my ex. He was my first love, and I’m sure it helped that we met in Paris, a city that already encourages people to romanticize their lives a little. Up until then, most of the attention I received from men came from frat guys who wanted something casual, so the relationship felt unusually sincere to me from the beginning.
For most of it, long distance worked surprisingly well. I was finishing university in the U.S. while he was in Paris, and we talked constantly, visited each other when we could, and built routines around the distance. For a while, I genuinely thought we were building something stable.
Things started changing after he moved to Toulouse for a master’s program.
At first, I interpreted it as stress. The program was difficult and far outside his undergraduate background. But over time, he became harder to recognize emotionally. The more patient I tried to be, the more defensive and dismissive he became. I mostly responded by trying harder to understand him.
When I visited Toulouse, and things started unraveling almost immediately.
I met his friends the night I arrived. His friends weren’t hostile toward me. If anything, they seemed confused. It felt as though they had prepared themselves to meet one person and instead met someone else entirely. The morning after I arrived, one of his roommates casually asked me while I was doing dishes whether we had always been in an open relationship.
I said no. I assumed there had been some misunderstanding.
Apparently there hadn’t been.
It turns out that he had been presenting a very different version of our relationship to his new circle in Toulouse. From what I later understood, he had told his roommates and friends that we were in an open relationship, that I was emotionally cold and controlling, and that he felt trapped but didn’t know how to leave.
Over the following weeks, his roommates made it a point to get closer to me, and gradually realized how distorted his version of events had been. That realization frightened them more than I expected. They had spent months emotionally supporting him through what they believed was a difficult relationship, and suddenly they no longer felt certain they understood who he was at all.
The tension in the apartment had already been building for other reasons too. In the months leading up to my visit, he had started treating his friends poorly. The more exposed he felt, the more unstable things seemed to become, and the more he tried to control the people around him. At some point, I’m not sure he fully distinguished between protecting himself and believing the story he had created.
One evening, about a month into my stay, his roommates asked me to leave the apartment because they needed to confront him privately.
Later that night, he found me and asked if we could walk.
We walked through Toulouse while he told me he had something important to confess. I still loved him then, so before he said anything, I remember trying to calm him down and telling him, “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together.”
Then he admitted he had cheated on me with three different people.
One of them was a girl I had met a week earlier at a party we hosted. I had been asleep upstairs when he slept with her in his roommate’s room.
Right after he told me, it started raining heavily across the city. People around us ran for cover, but we kept walking.
For the first time in months, he admitted that he had been cruel to me, and that I had been fair to him even when he gave me very little reason to be. I remember feeling exhausted more than angry. I found myself explaining my reality again, something I had already spent months doing.
What affected me most wasn’t even the cheating itself. It was realizing that someone I loved had slowly rewritten me in order to make his choices feel acceptable both to himself and to the people around him.
He never addressed this with me directly. He mostly just nodded silently as I asked him about it after hearing everything from his roommates.
Several of his friends no longer wanted to stay close to him afterward.
After the breakup, he left for Paris for a while. I watched him pack in silence. Before he left, I gave him a letter and said goodbye tenderly despite everything that had happened.
I stayed behind in Toulouse with one of his roommates.
At first, it was entirely innocent. We mostly talked because we had both lived through the same strange situation from different angles. A week later, we took the train to Paris together. He had work there, and I needed to figure out how to get back to the U.S. We agreed to revisit my favorite places in the city together, partly because I didn’t want all of my memories of Paris to remain attached to my ex.
Somewhere during those days, the dynamic between us shifted. Nothing dramatic happened at first. It was mostly conversation, small moments, and a kind of charge between us that gradually became harder to ignore.
On the train to Paris, I asked him directly whether something was going on between us. He denied it immediately.
The first night we arrived, we went to my favorite jazz bar. At one point, a couple interrupted our conversation to tell us we were cute together and asked whether we wanted to go somewhere private with them. We laughed awkwardly, took their number, and said we’d text them tomorrow. Then we danced until closing. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.
When we got home that night, I asked him again whether he was sure there was nothing between us. He told me we’d talk about it the next day over lunch.
At lunch, I told him I wasn’t interested in some chaotic sexual escapade, but that I would be open to something sincere if he was. He seemed conflicted. He said he didn’t want to take advantage of a vulnerable situation. I told him that if he was unsure, then there was nothing to discuss.
A few hours later, he texted me asking to meet him at Luxembourg Gardens.
When I arrived, he pulled out his phone and read something he had written about how he felt. It could have easily felt awkward, but instead it felt earnest in a way people rarely allow themselves to be anymore.
I won’t go into detail, but the week that followed was unexpectedly healing. Not because it fixed anything, but because it reminded me what honesty and desire could feel like after months of self-erasure.
There was also something meaningful about experiencing Paris again with someone who had witnessed me at one of the lowest and most disoriented points in my life, had seen the collapse of a false version of me, and still looked at me with admiration afterward.
I also began to realize how much of the meaning I had attached to my relationship with my ex had actually come from me. I had spent so long attributing all of the beauty to the relationship itself that I hadn’t noticed how much of it I had been bringing into it all along.
When I finally returned to the U.S., the emotional weight of everything caught up with me. I had graduated, turned down law school, cut off contact with my father, and suddenly found myself unemployed, single, and packing up the college life I had spent years building.
For a while, I felt suspended between versions of myself. I would walk through my nearly empty college town feeling strangely detached from time, oscillating between gratitude for everything this place had given me and uncertainty about what came next.
At the end of the summer, I moved abroad to stay with extended family while figuring out my next steps.
For months afterward, parts of Toulouse stayed with me physically. Sometimes I would wake up with the feeling that I was still in that apartment, still sensing that something was wrong before I fully understood what it was.
There was a great deal to rebuild afterward, and a great deal to reflect on too. None of it was perfectly clean or simple.
Still, if I’m honest, the romance in Paris helped more than I expected it to.
There’s more to the story, but that’s probably where I’ll leave it for now.