Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

March 24, 2024

I just finished reading an excellent book written by one of my favorite authors about horrible breakups throughout history. Jennifer Wright’s “It Ended Badly” takes you on a tour of history by examining some of the world’s most well-known toxic couples. The overall theme she has woven into each chapter seems to be about making the heartbroken and downtrodden masses of today feel just a little bit better about the messy responses we sometimes have to breakups and having our hearts broken. You know how you might watch some trashy reality tv so you feel a little better about how your own life is going? If you read about historical relationship drama that was sometimes met with slander, murder, weird sex dolls, pedophilia, castration, and other atrocities, then you might feel a bit better about the number of times you texted your ex after he left you for a blonde named Chrissy. Ten voicemails on his phone is excessive and embarrassing in retrospect, but also legal, ya know? The book takes on one couple’s tragic downfall in each chapter. I don’t want to spoil too much of it for you because you should read this and some of Jennifer’s other great work, but here are a few things that stuck out to me:

1. Oscar Wilde, a literary genius had an ex-partner who called him “feeble-minded” in an autobiography called “Oscar Wilde and Myself”. First, can you imagine being such a boring person that the only way to sell your autobiography was to put the name of someone else who was actually famous in the title? I obviously didn’t know Wilde’s partner, Lord Alfred Douglas, but all accounts suggest that he was a cocky little shit who slandered Wilde’s name after Wilde served a prison sentence for participating in homosexual acts in their relationship. Let that be a lesson to you – your ex may say some awful stuff about you after the breakup, but your work/actions speak for themselves and your friends/family know your true character. We all know Oscar Wilde was anything but feeble-minded. Oscar put it best when he said, “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
2. I complain about ghosting all the time, this is not news to you. Nothing hurts more than when someone just disappears after you’ve had some form of relationship with them. I recently got ghosted by that guy with cancer that I told you about in a previous post. He blocked me on instagram and blocked my number. I honestly couldn’t tell you why. I drove over 3 hours to meet him for dinner one night and brought him some flowers for his table. We had a really nice date and he kissed me goodnight. When I tell my friends about the ghost of New Kent County, their response is to say, “Well, you have to cut that guy some slack because of the cancer, right?” I don’t know. He runs this non-profit where he collects cash and other things for cancer patients, and it’s really lovely. I guess I would have to have cancer to receive a little kindness from him myself? Gah, thinking about it makes me feel yucky and the whole thing really hurt me. BUT I will say, one story in Wright’s book had a new form of ghosting I had never considered. Timothy Dexter, a businessman who lived in Massachusetts in the late 1700’s had a wife named Elizabeth. At one point, he told all of his friends that Elizabeth had died. When they inevitably came to call on him at his house and saw Elizabeth (very much alive) in the house, he told them not to worry, it was just her ghost. Here I am upset that an internet stranger is treating me like he’s dead, but imagine having your own husband treating you like a ghost in your own house. I feel better.
3. The story that stuck with me the most (there are like ten others in the book that contain all of the atrocities I mentioned above) was the story of Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb. I had of course heard of Lord Byron before, but mostly knew of him through an episode of Drunk History where they implied that a weekend orgy with Lord Byron and other well-known writers of his time including Mary and Percy Shelley resulted in the bet that spawned Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. When Caroline, one of Byron’s biggest fans, met the poet for the first time, she described him as “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” This would turn out to be true, but she was also more than a bit mad, bad and dangerous also. The story Wright describes in her book is a long one but the gist of it is that Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron had a short affair (Caroline was married to some guy who enjoyed rough sex or something like that) and ultimately Lord Byron broke it off and broke Caroline’s heart in doing so. She proceeded to lose her ever-loving mind. She sent him scathing letters (along with a lock of her pubic hair), broke into his house and wrote in one of his books, made scenes in public when she saw him, spread rumors that he was sleeping with his sister and had a very publicized and self-indulgent bonfire with all of her friends where she burned all of the gifts he ever gave her. Byron wrote her some nasty letters in return, and the two began publishing novels and poetry with not-so-subtle digs at their former lovers in a tit-for-tat rap battle of sorts. Their feud didn’t really end until Byron died in war and Caroline said she wished she’d never spoken ill of him.

The Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb breakup really struck me because I think it’s one of the more relatable stories in the book. Most of us have never murdered our wives and then grieved by castrating and marrying a teenage boy who looked like her (horrendous abuse committed by one of the Emperor’s of Rome, Nero). Most of us have never married a beautiful young woman and then refused to consummate the marriage by publicly (and falsely) implying that there was something malformed about her genitalia (although Matt Riffe seems to think this kind of slander is funny to talk about on podcasts), like John Ruskin. But many of us have done things we aren’t proud of while in the tight grasp of heartache and grief – including stepping across boundaries, not being empathetic to the pain of the other party, and saying awful things to and about the person we used to love.

I feel so much for Caroline here. Her post-breakup feud with Byron isn’t all that distinct from the things you see on Facebook or Instagram posts when couples go their separate ways. Vague comments or inspirational quotes, generalized statements about someone’s character or even mental health (how often do we diagnose former partners as codependent or narcissistic?), motivational videos about moving on and deserving better, etc. We’ve all seen this stuff and maybe even posted it ourselves. Caroline’s behavior was a master class in how to overstep boundaries and not let go and move on. But I’d be lying if I didn’t behave the same way after my last break up. I couldn’t let go of it. I texted that man awful things (by my standards, anyway) and repeatedly begged him to stay. Months after the fact, I still wouldn’t stop reaching out. He had said he wanted to be friends and that he would never abandon me, but I pushed him to the edge where he had to cut me off completely. Sure, I wasn’t mailing him pubic hair or showing up at his house uninvited, but I was still overstepping the boundaries he set. And it wasn’t like I was waking up in the morning thinking, “Hey, I’ll go torture my ex today and make him feel absolutely horrible and crushed with guilt and stress”, but I couldn’t clearly see what I was doing through my own grief. I look back on those moments and cringe, and feel so guilty. I wish I had been able to understand the difficult position he was in and the pain he felt too – but my own pain was so intense, I couldn’t see anything else at all. I’m not making excuses for Caroline or myself, but I understand what she was going through.

Honestly, I even reached out to my ex as recently as October of last year. Six months ago. I had been dumped by guy I’d dated for a few weeks, and took it hard. It was the first time I had even dared to hope for a future with someone new, and when it all came tumbling down, I typed in that number that I know by heart no matter how hard I try to forget it and fired off a “Hey, how have you been?” text. He mercifully did not respond. I ran into him a few weeks later at a bar and I saw him whispering to a girl next to him while she stared at me with her mouth agape, and I got up and walked out of the bar. Shame is the only thing I felt – as if I knew he was whispering to her about what a crazy person I am. I even worried he would think I was stalking him and showed up there on purpose. It was one of the worst nights of my life. I realized that I would give anything to go back and handle myself differently in the wake of our split. I’m not crazy, but the pain made me act crazy and it’s hard to look back without feeling that shame. I don’t know much about Caroline’s character, but I would imagine she lost some sleep looking back on her behavior after Byron’s death. For Byron’s part – I think he was just a standard “fuck boy”, and it seems like he didn’t take much care to be sympathetic toward Caroline’s hurt – something I certainly can’t say is true of my ex.

I write in this blog and tell you about my wild dating stories, and yes, sometimes men act atrociously toward me. Sometimes I’m the atrocious one though. In my last post, I told you about the guy who said he was sick when cancelling a date and then showed up at the bar. I mentioned that I gave him an earful too. I don’t feel proud of that. I told him he hurt my feelings and acted very inconsiderately (true) but I was also a couple drinks deep and started to tell him “It’s always like this! All men treat me this way and I’m so tired of it! It’s always going to be like this!” He looked at me with his big, brown dairy cow eyes and looked horrified and so upset. He just kept saying “I’m sorry, it’s not always going to be like this. I’m sorry. Not all men are like me.” Y’all, it was like I took two years of trauma and disappointment and dumped it on this poor man with a vodka tonic in one hand and a shovel to bury him with in the other. He looked like he wanted to crawl under the bar. It was atrocious and not fair. I’m sure if he has a blog about his dating stories in DC, I’m in there now, depicted as the crazy woman who read him the riot act for calling in sick for our date. Seriously though, I do feel like dating me is some kind of stressful job where people call in sick to get out of it. What’s up with that?

I guess what I’m saying is that the theme of this book really resonated with me. We all do things that we aren’t proud of because we are human and life is just messy – and this is never more true than when you’re going through something terrible and hard. Being in love is the best feeling I’ve ever had and I’ve only experienced it once. The day that feeling was taken away from me was one of the most painful things I’ve been through so far. I acted like a little shit and I fell apart, and I wish I had been stronger and kinder (to him and to myself). It can sometimes be comforting to look back on ourselves at our absolute worst and realize “well, I didn’t do anything illegal and I didn’t physically harm anyone, and I apologized for it later.” Maybe that’s enough. Sometimes we are all mad, bad and dangerous to know but we can learn and grow and change if we are bold enough to look at ourselves square on. And hopefully the moments we are less than proud of don’t end up in a snarky history book and instead die in a snarky blog that no one reads.