How a Queer Folk-Rock Artist Saved Me From Emotional Abuse
I don’t love the word “ex” for him because it’s misleading—since I don't believe we were ever actually, honestly dating. But "breaking up" remained the thing that I had to do.
Jake and I were in each other’s lives for 10 months because we were housemates, and we were technically a “couple” for six weeks during that period. But to say that we dated, that we were “partners,” would imply that I consented to being in the relationship. Consent under duress, though, isn’t real consent—it’s empty consent.
I’d moved to a new city in August 2018 after realizing that Brooklyn life wasn’t working for me. My new city’s pace suited me far better: Unlike when I lived in Bed-Stuy, I could walk around my neighborhood as early as 8 p.m. without encountering many other people, and I appreciated the balance of tranquility and clearly being somewhere full of fellow queers (on Grindr, my entire grid was packed with people in walking distance, including right around the corner). I could also walk or bike to bars, clubs, grocery stores, the gym, and everything in between. It was perfect.
At the time of my move, I was a very young queer—a baby gay, as they say. By that point, I had lived with straight women, bi women and, in one instance, nine straight men, but never another gay man. (This was my term for myself then, but I’m an agender AMAB queer person and don’t use “gay” or “man” anymore). I was nowhere close to emotionally developed or politically informed enough to be dating people in a manner that respected either myself or them, but since I was on Grindr and Tinder, things happened anyway—almost all of which damaged my psyche. So, naturally, when I found housing in my new big-city neighborhood—where public transit access, inexpensive rent, proximity to nightlife and flat, biking-friendly roads (OK, minus the competition from cars) made it the obvious choice for me to live in—and one of my housemates, Jake, was going to be a gay man, I said to myself: “No matter what happens, you can never date him.”
I really should have listened to that inner voice. For the first month, Jake and I acted like best friends; it was delightful to have an actual friendship with another gay man. He did, though, make an awful joke about date-raping me (there are no typos in this sentence) on my second day living in the house. I wish I could remember exactly what he said beyond just that it was something about assaulting me, but I do recall that he, our housemate Molly (who remains a close friend of mine to this day) and I were in an Uber on our way to my friend Daisy’s housewarming party. I recall Molly having a strong reaction to what Jake said too; I recall that Jake’s apology wasn’t great; and I recall that, since he did apologize, I made the mistake of registering his wildly inappropriate, if not dangerous, remark as only a yellow flag. After that first month—on a night out with him, Molly and some other friends at one of our city’s then-biggest gay clubs—I experienced the first in a series of red flags that would occur over the next two months.
During that time, Jake successfully convinced me, without ever saying as much, that to hurt him was to create an emotionally unsafe household environment. On a Sunday night in October 2018, I went on a date and told Jake and Molly that I might bring this person home afterward. Our house had thin walls, so I made sure we were quiet when I indeed took this date back to our place. When my visitor and I exited my room, Jake wasn’t home, which was unusual for a Sunday night.
The next day, Jake changed his RSVP to a Facebook event we were co-hosting at our house to “Not Going.” He didn’t ask or tell me before doing so; it felt passive-aggressive. About four hours later, Jake arrived home and, instead of saying hello and asking how my day was, he went straight to his room without saying anything or making eye contact. Something was off. After a bit, I went to his room to talk.
His light was on, but his door was closed. I knocked on the door to no response. I knocked again. Still no response. And then, I knocked again—still no response. I texted him to say I wanted to talk; he responded unusually coldly with, “About what?”
Later that night, Jake, Molly, and I were downstairs as though nothing had happened, and Molly asked me how my date went. When I said I brought the guy home, Jake said petulantly, “Yeah, I heard the whole thing,” even though that couldn’t have been possible. It felt aggressive, but instead of calling him out, I didn’t acknowledge him. My choice incentivized him to keep stepping out of line and making it clear that, if I were to date anyone other than him, I would be living in an emotionally unsafe home.
Worse yet, at around midnight that night, Jake apologized in person for “being moody earlier” and said that he “just gets like that sometimes.” Around 12:30 a.m., I was in bed and about to turn my phone off when he texted me to ask if we could talk the next day so that he could get something off his chest. I assumed he was going to tell me he had feelings for me, but when we talked, he didn’t say anything of the sort.
Few things are more destructive to one’s everyday well-being than feeling unsafe, even emotionally and not physically, in one’s home, which is supposed to be a location of refuge from the madness, the bustle, the exhaustion of the everyday. So even though, in early November, I was still convinced Jake wanted to ask me out and had recently said something to a friend along the lines of, “I think he wants to date me, but he also does questionable things pretty often,” when he asked me out via text (yes, text even though we lived together) while he was out of town in late November, I said yes without even thinking about it. I had been manipulated into believing that I wasn’t even allowed to think about it.
During the six weeks when we were technically “dating,” I realized I had to get out for a number of reasons. The day after Jake got back from his time away, we were watching a TV show with Molly; he and I were next to each other, under a blanket, on the couch, with Molly across the room in the recliner. Jake began giving me a handjob under the blanket without my consent. I didn’t want it, but I said nothing because Jake had manipulated me into feeling unable to protest. I felt uncomfortable the whole time.
My birthday wasn’t long after this, and he threw a surprise party (two friends concerned about our relationship warned me about it) at which there was an expensive birthday cake. On my actual birthday, he gave me a gift on which he spent $100 and made no effort to hide the receipts.
A few weeks afterward, I told Jake I was afraid to bring things up to him because of how he was treating me. He didn’t apologize. Instead, he told me exasperatedly that I could tell him anything. So I told him the birthday stuff was simultaneously amazingly kind and incredibly imposing. He cried (a common abuser tactic) and looked away, though he did admit that a coworker warned him that I might react how I did.
My illusion that we’d break ground during this conversation was shattered. So, at the end of this conversation, when Jake asked if we could make our relationship official, I was so completely in shards that I said: “Yes.”
I managed to end the dating portion of our relationship in January 2019. What pushed me over the line was that, one night, we slept in my bed before work the next day, and I just couldn’t get to sleep. Often, if I move to a different room and sleeping surface, I can get to sleep pretty quickly, so I moved to Jake’s room and slept in his bed. When he saw me there in the morning, he asked, “Why are you in my bed?” I had texted him when I moved to preemptively explain myself, and I showed him the screenshot of my text, and his only angry reaction was, “Ugh, you’re so weird.”
This incident caused our “breakup.” We still, of course, lived together after breaking up, and we would live together until August 2019. But Jake wouldn’t stop trying to make us a “couple” again despite my remaining firm that we would be just friends from our break up onward. This was attempted coercion: I said many times that we would never date again, and instead of listening to me and respecting that boundary, he kept pushing for only what he wanted. On at least one occasion, he sat me down with tears swelling in his eyes, but not quite falling, to ask me out again.
On another occasion, Jake confronted me after a workday in a particularly aggressive manner. He shoved his phone in front of my face with my Grindr profile loaded and shouted at me: “What is this?!”
For about five minutes, I explained myself to him in the same way that someone caught doing something that could ruin their life would, but then, I remembered: We’re not together. I’m allowed to be on Grindr. I then also remembered: Jake has never used Grindr before. I then realized: Oh shit. He downloaded Grindr just to see whether I’m on it. I immediately realized: That’s wildly inappropriate. I somehow found the courage to call out his BS.
He quickly retreated, and not long after, he stormed out of the house. As he did, he shouted, as loudly as I’ve ever heard anyone yell anything: “NAKED!!!!” Then he slammed the front door. I was shirtless in my Grindr profile picture as is basically the standard, but naked? Not even close.
I cut Jake off completely just under two months before our time living together was set to end. That’s where the 2019 album All Mirrors, by the folk-rock artist Angel Olsen—who came out as queer while promoting the album after that one, 2022’s Big Time — arrived in my life. I didn’t expect All Mirrors to be this dramatic, orchestral firestorm given Olsen’s indie-folk past. It also made me realize I had to end things with Jake. As a music journalist, I was sent the album in June 2019 ahead of its October release, alongside press materials that described the LP as being about escaping a toxic relationship, which hit home and was also an understatement.
Just over a minute into the album, on opener “Lark,” Olsen started all but screaming over an explosion of strings and percussion that boomed as hard as the drum machines on Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” This woman was pissed, and so was I. When she wailed: “Learn to look me in the eyes / Yet I still don’t feel it’s me you’re facing,” I knew who she was talking about in my life. At the end of the track, as the strings swelled into cinematic fireworks, she shouted: “You say you love every single part / What about my dreams? / What about the heart? / Trouble from the start.” If this was a breakup album, as the press materials described, and she was this angry on just the first track, how could it end? Should my relationship with Jake end the same way?
I was also deeply moved by “What It Is,” one of All Mirrors’ songs that hewed closest to the ‘70s rock of her previous album, 2016’s fantastic My Woman. “Knowing that you love someone / Doesn’t mean you ever were in love,” I heard Olsen murmur through heavy vocal filters and insistent bass guitar, later sneering: “You just wanted to forget / That your heart was full of shit.”
Although there’s a theory among Olsen fans that this song was actually her speaking to herself, I heard it as: When Jake tells you he loves you, you’re right that he just loves an image of you that he’s created of you in his head, not the real you. When the real you, the one who isn’t OK with being treated how he treats you, emerges, his love disappears, too. And when he loves this image of you, it’s to forget about the garbage in his heart.
“Impasse” narrated why I was afraid to leave for a while. “Go on ahead / Tell your friends I was wrong / Take it all out on me,” Olsen sang in her lowest register atop tense, distant strings and a low-pitched guitar rumble. Knowing that she did eventually leave after having these thoughts compelled me to try my hand at escape, as did her crying, “I never lost anyone!” as the strings ascended into a terrifying cacophony. Maybe she was pretending not to have lost anyone, but I interpreted this as: She left, and now, this person doesn’t exist to her. That could be me.
A stanza from “Tonight,” a track that cooled things down from the album’s prior tempest, explains it best: “I like the air that I breathe / I like the thoughts that I think / I like the life that I lead / Without you.” Hearing this perspective amid such calm, clear-headed music, I knew that I, too, could soon experience this serenity. I loved that Olsen sounded excited to have left her partner at the start of “Summer” as she wailed, “Took a while, but I made it through / If I could show you the hell I’d been to” and stopped herself mid-thought instead of completing that last line; the awful person from her past wasn’t even worth shining a light on.
Suffice it to say, everything Olsen was sharing in her lyrics was everything I needed to hear. I first heard the album on a Friday, and Jake was away for the weekend, so when he got home that Sunday, I cut him off. For good. For real. And I continued listening to the album for the roughly two months between then and when he was set to move out to remind myself that, even though we would still regularly see each other during that period, I was absolutely correct to not acknowledge him, to not give any of myself over to him.
Not that it was easy. I was responsible for paying one of our monthly utility bills and requesting a third of the cost from Jake and Molly via Venmo, so I couldn’t fully block my housemate on all platforms. When he texted me about a payment request as though we were still friends, nothing from All Mirrors helped me figure out how to approach that; I didn’t have a map or a guide, so I had to navigate this one on my own. When he talked to me one time in the house as though we were still friends, then tried to talk to me about not being cut off anymore and pouted, “I didn’t do anything,” I had nothing to pull from on All Mirrors to address that.
And yet, I survived. Jake moved out. I moved on, though not immediately. Both of the times Jake contacted me after moving out—asking to talk and insisting he “wasn’t that person anymore” (yeah right)—I felt a surge of rage. I knew not to respond at all, so I didn’t, and listening to All Mirrors soothed my soul each time.
For a full year after he moved out, I still felt anger. Still feared running into him in public but simultaneously envisioned giving him a piece of my mind if I did. Still felt somewhat awkward around Molly, who remained living with me after the breakup, since she and Jake were friends before I knew either of them. Still just felt rage if I listened closely enough.
All Mirrors was there for me then, too, just as a mood piece—darkness, fury—instead of for lyrical consolation. At some point, though, I stopped listening to it. Retrospectively, that’s because I no longer needed it. Amid the Covid lockdowns, I met my partner Ren, and I’m confidently using the word “partner” here and will forever because, other than due to an act of God or fascism, I’m pretty goddamn sure we’re gonna be together forever. We met via OKCupid (yes, OK fucking Cupid) during the pandemic and messaged daily, eventually doing some video chats before deciding to add each other to our Covid pods and carefully, safely, regularly see each other in person. Our digital conversations were grounded in deep and clear interest in each other, a shared politics of compassion and empathy and active listening and fearlessness to share our perspectives. It was a world apart from what I experienced with Jake.
In my five-plus years partnered with Ren (I’m now in my early thirties, whereas I was in my mid-twenties when Jake was in my life), I’ve learned that a relationship can be the polar opposite of the emotionally abusive dynamic I experienced with Jake. To use Polysecure terms (Ren and I are polyamorous), Ren is my secure base. The foundation of our relationship is mutual support, caring, communication, active listening, respect, sharing (of time, physical space, love, and more), laughter (especially laughter; we’re the silliest people you know) and everything that the radical feminist writer bell hooks describes as comprising love in her masterpiece All About Love.
It’s exactly the relationship I was searching for and that I think we all deserve. In fact, Molly has described me and Ren as the partnership in her life she’s most convinced will last! I’ve fully moved on from my past of being abused, to the point that, when Ren briefly encountered Jake in a club and relayed that to me, I kind of just shrugged it off and moved on. They told me they ran into Molly and Jake, hugged Molly and couldn’t even get Jake to look them in the eye. I wish I had been there to see Jake cower in shame.
Yes, I can still tap into the negative emotions of being abused; I had to do exactly that when writing this essay. But writing this was the first time I listened to All Mirrors in years. I still listen to My Woman and Olsen’s second album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, every now and again, and they hold up delightfully, but I now associate All Mirrors with a me who no longer exists. I no longer need its incensed songs about leaving a harmful relationship, because I’m in a relationship that’s more supportive and loving than I used to think I deserve (and bitch, I definitely deserve this).
I couldn’t be more grateful to All Mirrors for its role in my life, but I’ve moved on from it—I’ve broken up with a breakup album, if you will. And my hope is that, in writing this, I reach someone who’s going through the horrors of emotional abuse and show them that there may be a way out. I’m not saying there always is; if that were the case, abuse wouldn’t persist. I am saying, though, that maybe one day, you’ll encounter a work of artistic expression that compels you to freedom. Follow that calling if it’s physically safe to do so. A new you might be on the other side. I’m there now, and it feels great.
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The story about him screaming 'NAKED!!!!' at the front door is equal parts terrifying and pathetic. It captures the desperation of an abuser losing control. I'm so glad you recognized that 'consent under duress is empty consent.'
Thanks for sharing this story! It's always good to let it out! Glad you did what you had to do.