‘When my date arrived, I studied his face looking for a particular reaction’: Shon Faye on dating, love and heartbreak as a trans woman
I wrote a romantic fantasy for myself to cope with my fear and vulnerability. Would it hold?
It was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Which is a bold claim about a breakup with someone I’d known for all of 18 months. I can be a little dramatic sometimes. But honestly? Not about this. I have never known agony like it. An older pain, the kind caused by far more shocking blows dealt to me in the past, seemed to lie dormant in my bones until the anguish of heartbreak reanimated it. I felt all of it – the old pain and the new – erupt at once. My body was burnt up by it.
In part, the devastation was caused by the rupture catching me unaware, like a natural disaster no one sees coming. It had been my private little earthquake, and it razed me to the ground. Many of us have experienced this kind of breakup. The kind that nothing prepares you for. The kind that leaves you existentially unstable. The kind where the only reasonable response to the first note of an Adele song on BBC Radio 2 is to wrench the car radio out by brute force and toss it out of the window.
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