The Perilous Act Of Writing About Someone Who’s Going To Read It

I am Icarus with a MacBook Pro instead of wax wings, flying closer to the molten heartbreak I never see coming. I am also a writer, which means I only ever process my love life in the past tense.

I know writing about my relationships is a notional risk, but it lets me stay in control. If I write it first, I shape the frame. I get the final cut. I find it easier to write something for a thousand strangers than to send one honest text—no waiting for a response that might never come, no asking for permission, no hearing what my subject really thinks. Not yet. Not until it’s too late. Writing feels safer than speaking.

At least, that’s what I tell myself. The men I’ve written about—the ones I’ve loved or almost-loved or thought, for a brief, fleeting moment, that I could have loved—read the things I write about them. They always do. Maybe not right away, but eventually—out of curiosity, vanity, or because a friend-of-a-friend sends a screenshot with a casual “lol.” And though they usually don’t write back, suddenly, the risk—my risk—stops being theoretical. It becomes something I can no longer manage.

The riskiest thing I’ve ever done in a relationship wasn’t saying “I love you” first. It wasn’t moving too fast or too slow or sleeping with someone before it meant something. It wasn’t even staying too long in something I always knew I should leave but couldn’t. It was writing about him, Milo.*

(Actor. Part-time playwright. Full-time person I cannot stop writing into existence.)

When Milo and I started dating, my friends told me I was giving him too much power by writing about him. That I was revealing too much. Losing my feminine mystique. But I couldn’t not write about him. And, of course, Milo couldn’t not read what I wrote about him.

Milo didn’t just find my writing, either—he had gone looking for it. It was almost too easy. A quick Google and there I was, laid bare in the essays I wrote for strangers. The first piece Milo ever read about himself was something I had written about dating as performance. About the way we slip into roles without realizing it, about the difference between who we are and who we want to be seen as. In that essay, I had dissected our first date and stripped it for parts, analyzing the dialogue like a scene I had lived and was now trying to direct. I wrote about him favorably, nearly to the point of gushing. It wasn’t my best work. I was too careful. Too generous.

When Milo called to tell me he had read the piece, he told me he didn’t just like it—he loved it: “It felt like being sixteen and reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac for the first time,” he said. Admittedly, I didn’t understand his analogy. Was it a compliment? Some kind of foreshadowing? Did I make him feel like a drifter? A dreamer? Like a Kerouacian wanderer instead of a man who might one day love me? Or was it the thrill of being written about—the rush of knowing he had been immortalized?

Our relationship progressed and I kept writing about Milo, folding him into essays about intimacy, desire, and the impossible task of truly knowing someone.

In a moment of questionable literary instinct, I explored my strange inclination to compare my current boyfriends—Milo, in this case—as Jesus and my exes as Judas. A Jesus boyfriend is who you want to believe in; a Judas boyfriend is who you realize he was, once the story ends. It’s a dramatic framework, sure, but one that makes emotional sense: the boyfriend you’re with is cast as the savior—good, kind, incapable of betrayal—while the ex becomes the betrayer, the one who said he loved you and broke your heart anyway.

The morning after the essay was published, Milo told me that one of his friends had texted him, unprompted, just one word: “Jesus?” (This is not a text message you want your current boyfriend—or ex, or whatever he is now—to receive about himself over breakfast.)

Though he had laughed at the comparison, I felt uneasy. Because now it wasn’t just Milo reading between the lines of my neuroses, our relationship, or himself, anymore. Now, other people in his life were reading between them, too. People he knew. People I’d never meet. People who now had an opinion, a reaction, a one-word joke for something I had written about him, about us. That’s when I realized: Milo had always been part of the story, but now the story was also part of him. The risk wasn’t just mine anymore. He was bearing it, too.

He didn’t seem to mind. “It’s not like you say anything bad about me,” he told me once. “You only say the loveliest things.” Which, honestly, made me wonder if he actually understood my writing. Because I don’t write to be lovely. I don’t write to document, either. I write to process. To dissect. To figure things out in words because I don’t always know how to say them out loud.

My work is never only about the men I write about—I write to ask the questions I will never stop asking myself about relationships and, hopefully in the process of writing, to discover the answers I will always search for about them. I write to capture what love—theirs, mine, everyone’s—means. I write because I want the world to read about it in sans serif font.

Writing distills feelings in a way real life never does—it heightens them, sharpens them. I’d never turn to Milo—or anyone, really—on a Wednesday night and say, “Do you think you could love me? Really love me? Because sometimes I think my greatest fear isn’t being alone—it’s being known and still not loved. And I don’t know which would hurt more. But I’d write it.

The more I wrote about Milo, the more I wondered what would happen if he ever stopped finding it flattering. I worried he’d grow tired of seeing his personhood endlessly edited through my words. One night, lying in bed, with our fragile relationship between us, Milo told me that, at times, he was shocked by what I wrote: “I know you take creative liberties,” he said. “But sometimes I read what you write about me and think… is that really me? Is that what we are?” That’s when I knew Milo didn’t feel the way I felt about him. At least, not the way I wrote about it. I hadn’t only been writing what I couldn’t say aloud—I had been writing a version of us that, in the harsh light of our unwritten, unscripted reality, I had so desperately wanted to exist.

A few weeks later, over post-break-up-but-not-really-quite-broken-up drinks on the terrace at the National Theatre, Milo looked at me and said: “I can write about you too, you know. I have a three-acter about us in me.” (Which, of course, he does. Only Milo would frame this—us, whatever we were, whatever we are—as not a relationship, but rather acts and scenes and blocking and lighting and monologues. And maybe that’s why I wrote about him and only him for months. Maybe that’s why I started writing about him in the first place.)

As I wandered through Waterloo station after yet another afternoon spent basking in Milo’s relational haze, I wondered: what would his version of us, should he actually write it, look like? Would I recognize myself in it? How would the third act end?

I didn’t ask Milo these questions as we joked and drank wine because, truthfully, I didn’t have to—I knew I’d write about them later, anyway. And I also knew that, eventually, Milo would read what I had written about them, too.

Maybe one day, I won’t have to write about Milo anymore. And maybe, like all the other men I’ve written about, he’ll never have to write about me. But for now, I’ll keep writing. Because I don’t know how to stop. Because it’s the only risk I know how to take.

*Name has been changed.