"We're fighting over the dog, I love him like my own child," the man says after leaving home. "The one who thought of the breakup in advance wins," he warns.
You currently live alone or with your parents. What happened? Why did you go back to them?
It's virtually impossible to find a good rental in Prague. Either everything's expensive or so hideous you're afraid of what you'll catch. And sometimes, unfortunately, both together. When you break up with someone like I did, you don't want to live together for another few months before you figure out a place to live. We'd probably be eating each other in the same apartment right now. We didn't even make it a week.
The less than a week you were still in the same place together, what was it like?
Absolute hell. I wasn't sleeping, we were fighting all the time, all the shit, no privacy... The flat is my ex's, so of course he took the bedroom and I slept on the couch in the living room, which is a walk-through, so he walked past me to the toilet, to work, to the fridge, all the time... And it's not nice when it's a person you can't even see at that moment because your whole soul hurts.
What kind of shit are we talking about?
Well, besides the fact that I slept on the couch and therefore didn't get any sleep, it's about visitors. We never brought many people over, we liked the peace and privacy. And suddenly we had people over all the time. And of course they were spending time in the living room, so I had nowhere to go, nowhere to rest. He'd even take guys from the dating site just to provoke me. He was always coming in to get something when I was trying to concentrate on work or relax. Always loud music. And of course, he didn't clean up after himself in the kitchen, which we had connected to the living room, so I lived among his piles of dishes and untaken trash.
If you're honest, did you do any dirty work yourself?
I tried not to do them, I wanted to talk about the problems, to solve them somehow, but I couldn't. He wondered if I was angry, if I was shouting at him or if I broke a cup, but I didn't have the strength anymore. The steam had to come out.
Why did you break up?
We had a long-standing intimacy problem. My ex just doesn't want to have sex. I don't know why, we've talked about it a lot, but he just doesn't feel the need. He's not comfortable with physical contact. He's so needy, he'd like to have completely sterile sex, but at the same time he's not really into the hygiene thing. And then it's hard when he refuses to have intercourse without thoroughly cleaning himself, but at the same time he doesn't want to clean himself because it bothers him. It took an awfully long time, I constantly felt like I was forcing myself on him, pushing him into something. I was in a relationship for four years where I had sex maybe once every two months. And every time, I'd bring it up, often after some big argument. That's what shakes a man and his self-esteem. So, I'll admit, I've occasionally picked up someone in a bar and had something.
And the ex-boyfriend found out and didn't take it well?
Sort of. It got to him, some rat even took a picture of me in a bar and sent it to him from a fake Instagram account... I tried to explain to him that it was desperate of me because I just need sex to live, but he wouldn't listen. He put all the blame on me. And eventually he kicked me out of the apartment. He told me to go to a hostel. And I wouldn't be humiliated. I gathered my things and went to my parents' house until I found something. But renting in Prague for one is financial suicide unless you want to live in a 20-square-meter basement.
When we talked about money during the interview preparation, you said that it didn't matter to you as long as there was some kind of settlement. What do you mean?
I bought an awful lot of stuff in that apartment. When I came in thinking we'd work it out, he started screaming at me that I was a gold digger who was living in his place for free and therefore not entitled to any compensation. But I just wanted to make peace, because I was paying for, for example, a really expensive bed. Anyway, I'm not going to argue about money, that's beneath me. I don't care about the money.
But there's something you don't want to give up, right? Or someone...
A dog. A dog. We're arguing about the dog. It's ours, and I love it like a child. I guess I'm just an idiot, but when we got him, only the partner was on the paperwork and the breeder's payment came out of his account. Also, his name is on the vet's records, and the food was ordered from the e-store in his name and so on... In retrospect, I feel like he knew ahead of time that we would break up at some point and wanted to make sure the dog stayed with him. I'm so sick of it. To me, it's like losing a family member. I want to keep him with me, I was the one who originally suggested we get a dog. But my ex is a fencing lawyer, it's a living hell.
Do you see any way out of this?
More like a lesson: The one who thought of the breakup ahead of time wins. I really think that while I thought we were going to be together forever, he was careful about where he was and whose name wasn't so he'd have something to attack if there was a problem. This is a huge life lesson for me and I beat myself up for not being smarter. That I loved blindly.
What did your parents say? Not just about your fights with your ex-partner, but about you coming home?
It's okay, but it's not pleasant. We never talked about much of anything in our house. Ever since I was a kid, I was always around clubs and camps and grandmas. So I don't really know how to talk to my parents. In fact, I don't even want to. They've accepted it as a necessary evil, they know I want to move out when I can, and that's it. No drama, but no support either. No one asks me how I'm taking it. No one cares if I'm hurting, how I feel about my ex, or why we broke up. It's probably partly because, although my parents don't say it out loud, they were never thrilled that I was gay. So they're just quiet. But at least I have the privacy of a locked room.
