I had always been a good girl. I had always played it safe and followed the rules ... until I met Ben*.
It was my first day of grad school. I rushed into a seminar late because my car had died. I surveyed the room: 11 pale hipsters ... and Ben. Tan, muscular, tattooed. He looked like he should be training for the X Games, not deconstructing contemporary American literature. I took a seat across from him.
After class, Ben offered to take a look at my car. While he fixed the battery, he told me his life story. I learned that he had dropped out of high school, had been to jail multiple times, and had experimented with a wide range of drugs from the predictable (pot) to the terrifying (heroin and crack). Everything Ben told me about himself should have turned me off. But instead, it turned me on. I had spent my 23 years until then being good, and here in front of me was someone who was, by all standard measures, bad. And I wanted him.
Ben quickly became my best friend at school. He was smart, sensitive, compelling. We were both in complicated long-distance relationships, so we kept it platonic ... at first. We would go out for drinks and talk for hours. Being with him made me feel rebellious. I got the contact high without ever having to do anything dangerous myself. As we spent more time together, we started to test the boundaries of our friendship. One night, he kissed me. Just like that, I was hooked. I found myself having a full-on affair — and some of the best sex of my life. Allowing our relationship to become romantic was the most reckless thing I had ever done, not only because we were cheating on people we claimed to love (I broke it off with my S.O. six months into my relationship with Ben; he stayed with his the entire time) but also because his drug use was becoming a real presence and problem.
The first time I saw Ben smoke crack, I was reading in his bed while he put his laundry away. Just as casually as if he were folding a shirt, he was smoking something. I stared. Even I knew the pipe he was using was not the kind you used for weed. "What was that?" I asked. He looked at me. "Oh. That was crack." My heart dropped, and I started to cry. My mind raced with anxious questions. Was he going to do something crazy or violent? I had no idea what a crack high looked like, but I knew it wasn't good. What happened next was about the last thing I would have predicted. Ben sat next to me and talked to me in a calm, comforting tone. He told me he was sorry and he understood I was scared. Maybe if he had turned into a drug-fueled monster, I would have been able to leave, but he still seemed like the kind, sexy man that I loved. By the time I was done crying, he wasn't high anymore. He explained that this is what makes crack so addictive. The effects are very short-lived, so users are always chasing the high. He talked to me about his crack habit as though he were a school teacher introducing a new mathematical concept to a student. Pi has been the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter since before you knew what a circle was. Ben has been smoking crack since before you knew who Ben was. The world has not changed; you just have some new information about it. Once my shock wore off, I realized I wasn't angry. In fact, I was excited. It was that contact high again (not a contact high from the crack smoke — that would have freaked me out enough to walk away). I'd witnessed someone do crack, and now I got to tell people about it. I was a badass. Or, OK, I was in love with a badass. And I wasn't as square as I'd thought.
But just like an addict's relationship with her drug gets more dangerous and destructive (and less rewarding and exciting) as she slips into the abyss of addiction, my relationship with Ben became more destructive as I fell harder in love. He was my drug. He made me feel wanted and alive in a way that I had never felt. But he also made me feel desperate and lonely and needy. I found myself lying to my friends, trying to convince them Ben's drug use wasn't such a big deal. But I was also lying to myself. I would forgive anything to keep Ben in my life, like when he disappeared for four days with no explanation — or the time he called me in the middle of the night asking to borrow $500 because a drug dealer to whom he owed money had just gotten out of jail or the many times I woke up to find him missing from my bed and knew he'd left me to get high. I forgave these things, with very little protest, because the intensity and excitement of being with him made me lose track of everything else. When he showed up again, I would cry and tell him I couldn't be with him, but within 10 minutes, we would be naked and entangled. I knew there was no happy ending to our story, but I just. Couldn't. Quit.
I wish I could say there was a rock-bottom moment when I kicked Ben to the curb, but the truth is, after two years together, he graduated and moved away. I was less like an addict flushing her supply down the toilet and more like one whose supply ran out and who couldn't get in touch with her dealer. After he left, I started to get him out of my system and see how bad he was for me. Finally, I stopped picking up his calls. I didn't tell him I was quitting him because I knew that would be the equivalent of a drug addict getting high "one last time." You don't get to have a sweet kiss good-bye with your addiction. Because that kiss will inevitably turn into a never-ending masochistic fuck session.
While I got over Ben, I dated a string of nice men who seemed boring at first. But as Ben slipped further into my past, I realized dating him hadn't been brave or exciting. It had been the opposite. Being in a relationship that you know is doomed is safer than being in one that might work, because you never have to worry about messing up a good thing. Many years after Ben, I've realized it's so much better to be high off another person and to have them be high off you than to be high off the proximity to someone bad while he is high on crack.
Ben called me recently. I picked up out of curiosity. He wanted to let me know he had gotten clean and he would be sending me a letter. An apology. I told him I was glad to hear he was clean but asked him not to send the letter. I was clean too. And I wanted to stay that way.
*Name has been changed.
This article was originally published as "How I Broke My Addiction to Him" in the September 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition!
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