At 5:11pm on a Friday, my phone buzzed with a text from Matt. I was deep in work for my graduate program and his message momentarily stunned me. The same Matt who had ignored me despite promising to call me was now reaching out again. “Hey! Are you still in OC? I’m visiting Noah for the weekend and if you are, I was curious if you’d be willing to meet up with me for a long-awaited chat.”
The day he ignored me, Matt had told me, “I'm free to call you on Thursday. I'll check my schedule and confirm tomorrow.”
He never did, though his profile picture (Modigliani’s portrait of Jean Cocteau) kept popping up in my Instagram Stories feed. This disappearance, though familiar, struck me as particularly jarring.
We met on Instagram. We were both alumni of the same university. He had clicked on one of my Instagram stories: a snippet of an Andy Warhol interview with Joan Didion. “This is perfect, what is this about?” he asked. We texted about Didion, Southern California, and the drought that had marked our adolescence. We bonded over the irony of leaving our hometowns and then returning.
Despite our deep talks and daily texts about Scorsese films, iconography, and William T. Vollmann, our relationship remained undefined. I was still nursing the wounds of a spring breakup, and though Matt never asked me out, our disjointed conversations were intoxicating. This was new and exciting, especially compared to my most recent relationship, which had been stifling and chemistry-free.
In the whirlwind of Southern California, where relationships in your 20s can seem as fleeting and unpredictable as traffic on the 405 Freeway, Matt seemed like a refreshing anomaly. He’d played college baseball, but insisted his true passions were more aligned with Terrence Malick, Nietzsche, and little-known indie bands.
It wasn’t long, though, before Matt started ignoring me, often in the middle of a conversation. After I didn’t hear from him in three months, despite him constantly checking all my stories, my friends urged me to cut ties. “I’ll buy you tea if you finally get off his ass,” my friend Allie said jokingly. I did, and we laughed as we drank, celebrating the end of this particular chapter.
Many months later, Matt asked me to follow him again on Instagram. One morning, while driving to Long Beach, his name appeared on my lock screen. I accepted his request and followed him, assuming he would deal with his absence. He didn’t. I sent him a brief iMessage asking what was new. Our resulting exchange was friendly but superficial, and he disappeared again, reappearing a month later to swipe up a story about a band we both liked.
We began texting each other every day. He confessed that he had been directing his time and energy toward “love and becoming” and noted that he felt unable to engage in deep dialogue with others until “the energetic paradigm was fulfilled, ideally down to the quantum level.” Finally, I asked him to call me, and he enthusiastically agreed, saying that he admired me and laughingly said that it had been a long time coming.
And in a tale as old as time, he promised me he would confirm and then proceeded to disappear on me again. It was that weekend that I found out he had been seeing someone. I felt uncomfortable, as I would never have been able to say that I was in a relationship. He hadn't said anything about a partner. I sent him a couple of voice messages expressing my discomfort.
He didn’t open my messages, and of course he reached out to me again later on another platform, eager to plan a dinner with me while I was back in town. I was at a Huntington Beach coffee shop on a Saturday morning, sipping a lavender latte, when he called to finalize plans. We agreed to walk after Mass, but he never responded to my message about the time (“it’s Novus Ordo, how about 5:30?”).
The next morning, I ended our connection, telling him that he lacked follow-through ability and that it was amazing that he could wax poetic about so many things and yet treat me more like an abstract concept than a person with feelings, someone who wouldn’t be hurt because I was on the other side of the screen and couldn’t be touched. He didn’t respond. He simply unfollowed me on Instagram.
If that wasn't enough, a college friend informed me that one of her close friends had had a similar experience with him several years ago.
Unfortunately, the line between “indie f—boy” and “man who shares my passions and interests” has proven to be incredibly thin.
As a graduate student in theology and library science, it can be hard to find someone who can hold a meaningful conversation. But thanks to Matt, I realized that sometimes it can be worse when the guy can. Despite his insistence on presenting himself as a “creative” and an “artist,” he was more interested in creating a persona than in maintaining a stable connection.
Sure, he called himself the co-founder of a movie studio, but the arty black-and-white photographs of him smoking cigars and staring into the distance at the Getty made it clear he was more interested in playing the role of the brooding, misunderstood artist, someone who took pleasure in possessing me when it was convenient but had no real desire to reciprocate. I wasn’t his friend; I was his scene partner in his film A24.
As I told him in my last iMessage, ending our on-again, off-again connection that never culminated in a date, “I’m a person behind the screen, not a philosophy book, not an intellectual fantasy.” A man who acts like the protagonist of a Cigarettes After Sex song, I told myself as I deleted his contact information, is not going to be the great love of your life.
The author is a writer and graduate student living in the greater Los Angeles area. She's on Instagram: @julialouisemorrow
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