We actually made it work pretty well during four years of long distance for college. And we did get to spend summers together, except when I was on internships, which was . . . well, yes, every summer but junior year, and I had that coding boot camp at UCSB then, so . . . yup, every summer. So maybe there were no summers together, but I did end up with a killer CV, and that was nice. Better, even.

When we graduated college, Oscar was offered a job in Portland, and I was going to follow him and find something there, but I got into Caltech’s Ph.D. program, which was too good an opportunity to pass up. I really thought we could do five more years of long distance, because Oscar was a great guy and so, so patient and understanding—till the beginning of my third year. Till the day he FaceTimed me, crying because he’d met someone else and had no choice but to break up with me.

I wept. I stalked his new girlfriend on Instagram. I ate my weight in Talenti gelato (salted caramel truffle, black raspberry vanilla parfait, and, on a particularly shameful night, mango sherbet melted into a pot of Midori sour; I am filled with regrets). I cut my hair short, to what my hairdresser dubbed the longest bob in the history of bobs. I couldn’t bear to be alone, so I slept in Mara’s bed for a week, because Hannah tosses around way too much and I’m pretty sure she changed the sheets twice in the five years we lived together. For about ten days I was utterly, soul-smashingly heartbroken. And then . . .

Then I was more or less fine.

Seriously, considering that Oscar and I had been together for almost a decade, my reaction to being one-sidedly broken up with was nothing short of miraculous. I aced all my classes and my lab work, spent the summer touring Europe by train with Mara and Hannah, and a couple of months later found myself shocked to realize that I hadn’t checked Oscar’s girlfriend’s Twitter in weeks. Huh.

“Could it be that it wasn’t real love?” I found myself asking my friends over Midori sours (sans mango sherbet; I had regained my dignity by then).

“I think that there are lots of kinds of love,” Hannah said. She was nestled next to me at our favorite booth at Joe’s, the grad student bar closest to our apartment. “Maybe yours with Oscar was closer to the sibling variety than to anything resembling a passionate affair between soul mates? And you’re still in touch. You know that you still love each other as friends, so your brain knows that there’s no need to mourn him.”

“But initially I was really, really devastated.”

“Well, I don’t want to armchair-psychologize you . . .”

“You totally want to armchair-psychologize me.”

Hannah smiled, pleased. “Okay, if you insist. I wonder if maybe you were more devastated at the idea of losing your safe harbor—the person who was there for you since you were kids and promised to be there for you forever—than at the idea of losing Oscar himself. Could it be that he was a crutch of sorts?”