09: Florence, NYE (eve) 2014

[4-minute read]

Content note: sexually suggestive scene, sexual violence, physical violence, intimate partner violence, strangulation.

Do you remember that Christmas episode of The Bear — yes, that one — where tension hums beneath the surface until trauma and drama explode to ruin the special occasion?

Exact. Same. Energy. Here.

I don’t really remember the restaurant. Just that it was bad.

Odd like a cafeteria. Not the setting you’d imagine for a first anniversary dinner, on New Year’s Eve.

It’d been two-and-a-half weeks of travelling very well together, him and I. Helsinki > Milan > Cinque Terre > Florence > Venice > Rome.

With one exception... three days into the trip, he confessed he’d assaulted a previous girlfriend. So there was that.

Catch up here: Chapter 06: The Battered Wives Club [Helsinki Café, The Avalanche].

Shame. Grief. Guilt. Disgust. It was a young man trying to confess his way into redemption and a young woman suddenly confronted with the dangerous consequences of an unsupervised attempt at self-led accountability.

What troubled me most was that despite his parents, her parents, and the repeated refrain of ‘I was lucky she didn’t press charges,’ counselling had never begun.

The confession landed like a natural disaster—sudden, destabilizing, and impossible to ignore.

My immediate response was to encourage counselling. I knew many men (my dad, my older brother, heck, even Tony Soprano) and many women (my mom, my older sister, and myself) who attended counselling.

To me, this was an easy, natural and mandatory next step.

Although I framed it as encouragement at the time, I’d set it as a boundary internally. Once we were home, he would attend counselling. We probably both would. In my mind, that would happen before I gave him or the relationship any more of myself.

But in the meantime? We were just three days into a five-and-a-half-week-long trip through Europe together. I guess we’d just get carry-on. There’d be some months apart anyway after that. So who knew where the wind would take us.

Two and a half weeks later, it was New Year's Eve. And also our first anniversary.

In that first year together as a couple, we’d never had an argument. Ironically, instead of gifts, we opted to celebrate our first anniversary with our first fight.

The only other squabble we’d had — both on the trip and in our relationship — had been ten days earlier in Cinque Terre. When he tried to suggest I was acting like a princess for being upset about damp bedsheets in the 2.5-star hostel I’d booked and paid for. You be the judge.

However, this was far different. This was something objectively insensitive.

Something that went beyond his opinion and spoke more to his sense of entitlement.
Something that hurt my feelings.
Something that he’d never done before.

Why is it so common that men’s knee-jerk reaction to being confronted by their own guilt is dismissal?

Captured well and in a lighthearted way: Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo of The Giggly Squad — Men never say sorry, my experience #gigglysquad #men #sorry #newyear #foryoupage

He called it a “joke.” But it was clear the intent was something that might only be funny to an audience of men conditioned by cultural misogyny than to a girlfriend.

I was taught to explain how and why it hurt. Hoping to find understanding and repair.

This is an important value I’ve come to recognize I need to share with or have in common with my partners. My Myers-Briggs oscillates between The Debater and the Diplomat. It’s an almost equal parts right-brained, left-brained kind of thing. In elementary school, they pegged this early on, and I was encouraged to be a peer mediator.

Unfortunately, with little empathy for how it landed — after a few attempts to de-escalate — I let him know that I didn’t want to spend any more of my time that night with someone so disrespectful of my feelings. I asked again, and when he denied, I picked up my coat and walked to the exit.

When I got to the door, I paused. Did I really want to go back to the hotel on New Year’s Eve by myself? The answer was no. Going to a different bar by myself also didn’t feel like the right thing to do. So I walked back to the table and asked him once more to meet me with some care and understanding.

Is it just me, or were too few millennial-and-older men not taught that well enough in school?

I don’t really remember his apology, but I remember feeling proud to stand in my truth. At least feeling met and understood.

Besides, the true test of an apology in a relationship is changed behaviour.

The night continued in typical New Year’s Eve fashion for a couple of mid-to-late-20-year-olds at a bar in a foreign country.

We shared pitchers of beer with the folks around us. We ordered cocktails from the bar. We danced. We celebrated. We rang in a new year while toasting to the first one we’d spent together. Spirits were high.

When it came time to leave the bar with the tour group and head to the bus, we followed. Suddenly, we were among tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people flooding the streets of Florence.

I stopped to zip up my jacket or take a photo. When I looked up, he was nowhere to be seen.

Up next >> Chapter 10: Door kicked down