Sable Monroe

I’ve had a six-year relationship with a man I’ve never met.

And before anyone asks: yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds.

Not a real relationship. Not even a full situationship. More like a long-running emotionally ambiguous side quest that periodically resurfaces between seasons of real life.

We talk on and off throughout the year. Sometimes a few times a week. Sometimes not for months. He’ll vanish into the wilderness of his own life and then casually reappear in my phone with a “hello beautiful” text that I strongly suspect gets copy-pasted into multiple conversations like an emotionally unavailable newsletter subscription.

And somehow, six years later, we’re still here.

The funniest part is that I’ve known for most of those six years that he had a girlfriend.

Not a casual girlfriend either. A live-in, travel-the-world-together, common-law-wife type of girlfriend. The kind of relationship that should logically eliminate the need to cosplay as a mysterious single man wandering the internet collecting emotional side conversations.

But logic has very little to do with whatever this is.

Years ago, he told me he deleted his Instagram. Unfortunately for him, I have two Instagram accounts. One respectable. One for investigative journalism.

The investigative journalism account could still see his profile.

Interesting.

That’s when I realized I hadn’t been witnessing a man deleting social media. I had been witnessing a man temporarily removing me from visibility while he backpacked across Europe for six months with his girlfriend.

I almost admired the organizational skills.

The truly insane part is that he still does not know that I know.

For six years, I’ve been quietly carrying this information while we continued talking about life, work, graduate school, stress, goals, random thoughts, and hypothetical plans that both of us know are probably never going to happen.

That’s the part that makes me laugh now.

We’ve talked about visiting each other’s cities. Taking trips together. Meeting someday. The occasional flirtation drifting into erotic territory before dissolving back into ordinary conversation about work schedules and daily life.

And the whole time, I knew.

Not only did I know, but I stayed.

That’s the uncomfortable truth underneath this entire story.

I entertained a deceitful man for six years because somewhere along the line the entire thing stopped feeling like romance and started feeling like a bizarre social experiment that neither of us acknowledged out loud.

At this point, I’m not even sure he fully experiences himself as deceptive. I think he mentally separates people into different emotional compartments and temporarily lives inside whichever version of himself fits the conversation.

And maybe I did the same thing.

Because if I’m being honest, I never truly intended for this fantasy to become reality either.

Sure, we talked about trips and visits and “one day” scenarios, but somewhere deep down I think both of us understood the unspoken agreement: this relationship worked precisely because it existed at a distance.

Fantasy survives much more easily when nobody books the flight.

Younger me absolutely would have booked the flight, by the way. Younger me would have shown up in Europe demanding answers like a low-budget psychological thriller.

I say this lovingly and with full self-awareness: I am a retired bunny boiler.

Current me? I’m entertained.

Because six years later, despite knowing the truth, despite the lies, despite the disappearing acts, despite the fake single-man performance, despite all logic suggesting this connection should have died years ago…

we’re somehow still together.

Not together together.

But together enough that if he texted me tomorrow talking about taking a trip somewhere, I’d probably laugh, play along for a few messages, and then go back to my actual life.

Which honestly might be the strangest part of all.