Can You Survive a Room Full of Exes?

All scenes, characters, and emotional disasters depicted here are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, living or texting you at 2 AM, is purely coincidental.

Here is what nobody tells you about moving to New York: the city is small. Specifically, the tech marketing world inside the city is small. Specifically, the company offsite for your first real job in that world will contain, at minimum, three people you have made terrible romantic decisions about.

I know this because it happened to me. Three exes. One hotel conference room. One pair of Karl Lagerfeld lugged sole boots that were doing more emotional heavy lifting than I was prepared to admit.

The thing about having bad taste in men is that you don't always know it in real time. You find out later, in aggregate, standing in a room where the evidence is just... all there at once. Like a gallery show you didn't curate but somehow funded.

I did not panic. I want credit for this.

I walked in like I belonged there — because I did — found the people I actually wanted to talk to, and let the rest of the evening arrange itself. When the inevitable eye contact happened I did what any reasonable woman does: smiled, said hey, moved on. Not cold. Not warm. Calibrated.

Here's what I learned about being unbothered: it's not a performance. You can't fake it hard enough for it to work. The only way to actually not care what your exes think of you is to be genuinely more interested in something else. Fortunately I had the boots, a glass of wine, and a conversation about a campaign I was actually excited about.

For about twenty minutes I forgot they were there entirely.

That's when I knew.

Not that I'd won anything. Just that New York was going to be fine. That my taste in cities was considerably better than my taste in men. That the boots were exactly right and so, increasingly, was I.

The exes are somewhere. Probably fine. I genuinely don't know and that, it turns out, is the whole point.