Fifty.

As AANHPI Heritage Month becomes Pride Month, I'm ready to confront the root of my issues.

“Miranda, only you and I can ever really know what happened between you and I. It's nobody else's business.”

In the finale episode of Sex and the City's third season, Miranda accidentally meets Steve, her would-be on-again, off-again partner (after they had spent the entire season shacking up and then breaking up), at a local Chinese restaurant as she's getting dinner. Their separation was by and large due more to an unwillingness to compromise than any deep-seated philosophical differences, and they eventually go on to have a long marriage.

These past couple of weeks have been educational for me insofar as learning how to use TikTok. As a Millennial who grew up with social media, I've been trying to stay away from them in more recent years because I should be doing other things with my time. However, I errantly discovered that TikTok is better than YouTube when it comes to watching clips of my favorite media, and I've unfortunately become hooked.

Miranda's dinner date with Steve comes after she berates herself for the entirety of the episode following an argument with Carrie, who had spoken to Miranda of her intentions to get back together with Big. Miranda very obviously disapproves: as Carrie's closest friend and also the most cerebral of the women, Miranda can't stop herself from pointing out Carrie's self-destructive habit of continuously returning to a dysfunctional relationship. Clearly stung, Carrie retorts that she at least doesn't just “throw away” the men in her life like Miranda did to Steve, causing Miranda to spiral into self-doubt. By the time she runs into Steve, Miranda desperately wants to be forgiven and thus broaches the subject with him; he says the above quote to her in reassurance.

There's something about this scene and what Steve says to Miranda that, for lack of a better word, triggers me. As I began to process my breakup with Henry, I turned to all of my friends and family and situational acquaintances (and even strangers) for support, and they all had an opinion. Of course, since I was inviting everyone into conversation with me, that was to be expected. They offered their insights as to what events might have informed his choice to walk away from our relationship or where I went wrong, some denigrating him for cowardly disappearing and others praising him for firmly reinforcing his boundaries. I was either right to have caused our separation, thereby cutting my losses short, or I was wrong for having transgressed his limits.

No matter what they said, even though I was the one soliciting their thoughts, I felt misunderstood. I couldn't explain in totality to anyone what our relationship had been. Nothing that anyone proffered was an accurate assessment—I knew because I was there. It was my relationship, and I was in it for real. I had seen the way that he looked at me, and I had felt the love he'd had for me despite his great difficulty in expressing himself. I knew he'd loved me in his own way. It just wasn't enough to keep us together.

The summer of 2022 was a summer of weddings. On the flip side of the social distancing required by COVID-19 rules, venues around the world allowed themselves to re-open with updated procedures. With a two-year backlog of events that had been postponed, everything was suddenly back on track. It felt like someone I knew was scheduled to get married every other weekend.

My extraordinary friend, Nancy, was one of them. I had spent months looking forward to attending her nuptials, celebrating her union with a man who matched her worth, not least because I had meticulously planned my next steps with my plus-one. Henry, who I would have seriously dated for over a year by then, would attend her wedding with me. I would present him to my friends there, and then I'd take him to become the first man I would ever introduce to my exacting mother.

Just months before Nancy's ceremony, we broke up.

I was utterly shattered. After a year of dating, Henry and I had begun to discuss our visions for the future. We'd be a dual-male income household based in New York City, and we'd combine our finances to jointly afford a two-bedroom apartment. His new job offered subsidies for surrogacy, which would come in handy should we decide to become parents. All of that would be induced by slowly intertwining our lives, and that would start by acquainting him with my family. My careful plans were in disarray.

Nancy flew across the country to look after me during my breakup-imposed breakdown.

She slept on my tiny, uncomfortable couch and spent over a week handling life’s basics for me. She refilled my soap dispensers, bought me groceries, dragged me outside, made me interact with our friends, tangping’d with me, convinced me to stop sending him roses and to instead reserve them for myself, and fed me copious amounts of avocado toast. Slowly, stubbornly, at the most pivotal junction of my existence, she breathed vitality back into my being.

She saved my life.

By virtue of commanding me around—and I truly am not being hyperbolic when I say this—Nancy rescued me from the brink. For over a week, she ensured that I ate and exercised, putting me through all the requisite motions so that I would stay alive. Of all my wonderful friends, she deserves the utmost credit for my continued existence. I couldn't thank her enough, but she waved me off. She said I could repay her by returning back to myself and, besides, I couldn't die before attending her wedding. To do so would be rude.

Over a month later, I was on a beachfront property in Malibu. Another close friend of mine had consented to accompany me to Nancy's ceremony. We sat next to each other and watched Nancy take her place at the altar, resplendent in her wedding gown, framed by the setting California sun. (Indeed, my original favicon for A YEAR WITHOUT WATER had a backdrop taken from my pictures of the horizon on that day.)

As I watched Nancy and her husband exchange vows, as I listened to them speak their truths in front of all their loved ones, all I could think about was Henry. Nancy stood there explaining her trepidation from when she prepared to meet her would-be husband for the very first time, wishing as hard as she could that that would be her last first date ever; I imagined myself standing up there with Henry, facing each other with vows of our own, and I felt tears threatening to escape my eyes. I could envision myself reading off my vows because I knew that I had it in me to write them all right then and there if I really wanted to, but I also knew that he would be incapable of doing the same. I had loved him enough to make it to the end, but he hadn't loved me enough to work through our growing pains. My heart broke all over again.

There are some pundits among us who believe that gay marriage (and, more broadly, marriage equality) in the United States has been an assimilationist endeavor. They argue that mimicking our heterosexual counterparts is neoconservatism in action because we shouldn't be emulating relationship models that are fundamentally dissimilar to ours, with all their gender roles and politics thereof. I don't quite agree. I don't think that we inherently copy straight people and all their accompanying baggage when we search for a primary partner to wed. I believe that less separates us than connects us because loving is a deeply human experience—I don't think that we're quite so dissimilar at all.

Moreover, it was never just about weddings. It was always a proxy fight for something bigger. Just as how Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission was at its core about the right to discriminate, United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges were about the equal right to exist: if I am barred from marrying on the basis of gender, if my marriage to a consenting man is not legally required to be recognized as it would be had I married a woman, then I am in effect a second-tier citizen afforded unequal status.

Windsor and Obergefell established the right to marry and for that marriage to be protected, but it's no longer guaranteed to remain a settled matter. Conservatives have been agitating for years to turn LGBTQ rights into a hot topic, and they've by and large succeeded with the help of an impotent Democratic Party. Homophobia is on the rise, and legislatures across the country have introduced and passed laws curtailing our ability to coexist.

Facing an organized right that is openly dismantling our civil rights, the Democrats have failed to put up a unified front even on counter-messaging, many instead opting to follow the Republicans and parrot their anti-trans gender essentialism. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, it's no secret that they've set their sights on doing the same to Obergefell next. Thus, as I considered who I wanted to be my husband, I did so with full awareness of the gravity of such a relationship: he would be my partner in life notwithstanding all the adversity we would face.

Henry was supposed to be my plus-one to Nancy's wedding and all the other weddings I'd attend throughout my lifetime because I wanted to be his. I was supposed to meet him at the altar with the most heartfelt speech I'd ever have prepared, but the realist in me just couldn't imagine him being prepared with vows of his own. I didn't think he could do it. The realization that he was incapable of doing the same because he just wasn't right for me was crushing. It wasn't going to be him. Seated somewhere amongst the crowd and watching the groom kiss the bride, I silently cried.

All my life, I haven't necessarily struggled with being gay because I've never seriously desired to be straight, but I have gone down every mental rabbit hole in trying to understand my orientation. What did it mean that I would spend my life being considered a deviant? What does it mean to be gay? I like men—so what? I didn't see why my personal life should matter to any uninvolved third party because it didn't concern them, and it was clear to me that anyone who would be offended by it was so resultant of their own insecurities. At the same time, I understood it wouldn't be my fault that those very same people and their discrimination would make my life more difficult. That comprehension, I think, undergirds my ability to empathize. It makes me more open-minded, it makes me a better person and more willing to love, because I know that my love isn't uninformed. My love is a deliberate choice.

Last weekend, I sat on a park bench in Greenpoint and listened to my friend, Max, dissect his love life. He's on every app, looking to date, but has so far been unable to find a man of color at parity (full disclosure: he's an East Asian man who just entered his thirties with a job and a double Ivy League pedigree). To an extent, I related. My own pedigree is less illustrious, but I commiserated with him about his circumstances. Dating, particularly as gay men of Asian descent, is a bit of a minefield: we're either fetishized or ostracized by non-Asian men, while other Asian men exclusively date or don't date us—we seldom stand on middle ground, where we're seen for just who we are. While we conversed, my mind flashed back to a similar exchange from three years prior.

“I know you know how hard it is to find something genuine in this stupid city, especially as a gay Asian man,” I'd said to Henry. It was the last conversation we'd ever have.

I was in his tiny studio apartment, finally speaking to him face-to-face two weeks after the pivotal event. He had thought I was breaking up with him during the intervening period, but I had been waiting for him to make amends; when I realized he wasn't going to, I moved to save as much of us as I could. And so, he told me about being a triple minority (gay, Muslim, Malay) in Singapore, where he came of age, and of the racialized hierarchy among the gay men there that placed him at the bottom. Our fortnight of silence had resurfaced old wounds.

I was sorry that they'd treated him that way, but the hierarchy here in New York isn't so different, as we both knew all too well. Better than anyone, we understood how hard it is to find a real connection, between all the Asian guys who only date White men or the non-Asian guys who just want us to personify their submissive sex doll fantasies. Grasping his hand and holding on for dear life, I begged Henry not to give up on us. When I left his apartment at last, I thought I'd gotten through to him; that he ultimately reached the opposite conclusion scarred me deeper than anything ever.

It's true that only Henry and I can ever know what really transpired between us. It's true that it's nobody else's business. It's also true that I've been holding onto the memories of him and me, even if doing so hurts me, because I've been trying to parse it in my own way, week by week. But, I think I'm ready to start letting them go.