The most valuable words a therapist ever said to me

My own version of Belle Burden's Strangers

Apr 17, 2026

Like every other perimenopausal white woman in America, I read Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers last month. The book is a cool, careful reconstruction of a marriage, and of its undoing — or of the moment, rather, in which it was undone, the moment Burden’s husband of 20 years told her, calmly and with no room for argument, that he no longer wished to be married.

I liked the book because I like gossip. I, like Burden, wished there had been more answers, though I knew there wouldn’t be. I lived it, after all. A much lesser version, no marriage or kids, but the same excision. I, too, was cored like rot from a relationship I thought was healthy. I, too, had to reexamine what I believed to be true: that I was seen, that I was loved, that I was safe. See that, Belle? That’s me raising the martini I don’t drink to you. Girl. I know.

I was thinking about Strangers again today, listening to Becca Freeman and Olivia Muenter on Bad on Paper speculate about why Burden wrote the memoir. Burden asks the same question of herself, is asked by many people in her life, and she writes a bit about breaking patterns, the women in her family undone by so many men, wanting her daughters to have a different framework for who and what a woman can be, even one who has been unceremoniously tossed aside.

There’s something else there, though, and I felt its relentless current underneath Burden’s calm prose: the reconstruction of evidence, a desperate, forensic accounting of the relationship itself, sifting through the detritus to find the missing piece. Not to undo what has been done, but to understand, finally, how it could have happened. How you could have been so wrong, when everything felt so right.

Burden’s ex doesn’t appreciate her writing about him. I know my ex doesn’t either. I don’t know, man — you dated a writer. I think that’s what the kids refer to as “fuck around and find out.” There are two sides to every story, of course, but there’s the rub: I don’t know his story. Burden doesn’t know her ex’s story, either. They chose not to share it. And in that absence, what happens? What do we put it its place?

When I was 26, my boyfriend of eight years broke up with me.

Or, rather, he started drinking and crying a lot.

Or, rather, he stopped coming home at night.

Or, rather, he started sleeping with his best friend’s (kinda maybe sorta ex?) girlfriend.

We were together, and then we weren’t; I went away for a weekend and when I came home, he had moved all of his things out of our apartment. I asked him why and he didn’t, or couldn’t answer. He was there, and then he was gone.

He had cheated on me many times over the course of the eight years we spent together, though they had been minor infractions, I think, the kind you could chalk up to being kids, to committing too fast. And I wasn’t blameless — I flirted too, blurred lines, pushed the giddy limits of youth, of power. Not long ago a friend asked why I kept going back to him, and I didn’t have an answer other than he was the first boy who had ever loved me. The only, really. And once we went to Venice in the middle of a flood and held hands as we waded through waist-deep water, and once he hiked a sign that read “I love you Meghan” up to the top of a mountain, and once he wrote me a letter for every day we were apart.

So I went back to him until I couldn’t, because of the sandwich.

There’s always a sandwich. Belle Burden’s was literal: when she finally convinces her cheating husband to return to their family home to explain to their three children why he’d walked out on them (after twenty years of marriage! during a pandemic! and relinquishing all childcare duties!), he asks her to make him a sandwich.

A fucking sandwich!!!

And she does it!!!

My sandwich? A few weeks before it all went to shit, my boyfriend got very drunk at a party. Was he already cheating on me? It’s hard to know. His best friend’s girlfriend was there and he followed her around like a puppy while drinking half a bottle of vodka. He disappeared for a bit and when I found him he was vomiting against a fence. I had to drape his 6’5” body over my shoulders and walk him up and down an alley to try and sober him up enough to get him home, and he kept sobbing, “I’m a terrible, terrible boyfriend.” I comforted him, tucked him into our bed, and then he asked me if I could pull up the DMB setlist and read it aloud to him. Which I did. Before going to sleep on the couch. Later, when I woke myself up to make sure he wasn’t choking on his own vomit, I stepped in something wet, and realized he’d pissed in the corner of our bedroom.

And yes, I cleaned it up.

So anyway, it was after that — after he took all of his stuff, after he stopped coming home, after I begged him for an explanation, a reason, anything — that I found out about his best friend’s girlfriend. I found out from the (now former) best friend, though I might have found out either way, because she lived just down the block from my apartment — from the apartment that had briefly been our apartment — so sometimes I would stand beneath her window in the summer dusk and watch them cooking dinner, drinking beers, the soft, easy choreography of two bodies moving around each other in the kitchen. I would wonder what would happen if I threw a rock at them. I would wonder, as ever, what went wrong.

And it was after all that — after I’d done the accounting of the eight years we’d spent together, attempting to find the clues I’d missed along the way — that we ended up on the same public bus one morning. I watched him for a few stops, my body liquified by horror, before I pushed my way down the crowded aisle to hit him, hard, on the back. “Hey,” I said, my voice raw and strange, and he turned around, looked me in the eyes, then turned back and elbowed his way off the bus.

Thankfully, I was on my way to therapy. “He just looked at me,” I gasped to my therapist. “He didn’t even say anything, he just looked at me, and then he ran away.” Over and over again I said this, over and over. “Why won’t he tell me what went wrong? Why can’t he just talk to me? Why did he leave?”

Finally she stopped me, which was rare — she was one of those therapists who rarely spoke, left you lingering in your trauma for so long that you worried she might have decided you were simply too broken, giving you the space, ultimately, to (ugh) fix yourself — and then she said,

“Meghan, he’s just not as capable of being in the world as you are.”

He’s just not as capable of being in the world as you are.

Those words became my rosary. They propelled me out of the life we were building and into a new one. I started eating again. I started doing yoga. I moved to Brooklyn. I bought a busted bike and rode it around Prospect Park radiating fury. I got a job reading poetry and two new roommates and learned how to do winged eyeliner. He’s just not as capable of being in the world as you are, I repeated to myself as I wept openly on the F train, a kindly Russian lady passing me tissue after tissue.

Somehow, these words unlocked something about who I wanted to be, and who he wasn’t. I wanted to be someone capable of holding all of life’s complexities. Someone capable of caustic self-reflection. Someone capable of being greedy and grasping and still thoughtful and careful, someone capable of a deep appreciation for the world and the people in it. Capable of recognizing that yes, sometimes feelings change, and sometimes the thing that once felt right may feel wrong, and yes, that is painful and wretched but it can be faced head on, with dignity, with care.

You can hurt someone and try to explain yourself.

You can end a relationship in a way that honours, rather than devalues, the thing you built together.

You can be the person who makes their own sandwich.

All these years later, trying to think about those eight years we spent together is a bit like looking at a broken arm. There’s a feeling of wrongness, of confusion, of things not being the way they should. I know I loved him, but I’m not sure I knew him. Not that it matters, not really. My husband is a man very capable of being in the world. We live there together. We have two daughters. We will teach them how to be in the world, too. I am very lucky.

I still have a recurring dream in which I’m back with my ex. It’s nothing dramatic, we’re simply living our lives, but I have this pervasive feeling that I’m in the wrong place, with the wrong person. I know that I used to be happy, and I’m not anymore, though I can’t say why. I want something different, but I don’t know what that different is. I wake up breathless, sweating, and turn to find Vic, and I’m overwhelmed with relief. It’s only lately that I’ve started to wonder whether that is what my ex felt, all those years ago: adrift in the life we were building, knowing that it no longer felt right but unable to articulate why, wanting to get out but not knowing how to do it without blowing it all to bits.

It’s not that hard, I want to tell him now. You just have to be in the world. It’s a good place to be, I’d say. Just look around.