On Sunday, Lena Dunham shared a list of baby names she made with ex Jack Antonoff back in 2015. (Reuters)
Lena Dunham has revealed her heartache after breaking up late last year with Jack Antonoff, who she dated for more than five years, and the difficulties in coping with being alone.
“We sat in our shared kitchen of nearly four years and quietly faced each other, acknowledging what nobody wanted to say,” Dunham, 31, penned in a new essay for Vogue. “That obsessive connection had turned to blind devotion, and the blinders were coming off to reveal that we had evolved separately (the least shocking reason of all and perhaps the most common).”
When they split, the “Girls” creator found she had to retrain herself on how to be independent.
“For an exquisite moment, rather than mourn the loss of my partner, I mourned the loss of my bravery,” Dunham wrote. “I used to have no problem staring into the face of the hostess [in a restaurant] when I said, ‘Just one for dinner, thank you.'”
The couple decided that Antonoff would remain in their Brooklyn home, which he “fiercely” loved, and that Dunham would move in with her parents.
“As my relationship had unbraided itself, I would often fantasize about my own space … But that was easy to imagine with a living, breathing body beside me, the constant option to call someone and complain about the chaos of my day or the stain on my skirt or the irritatingly apologetic way in which the woman at the pharmacy had asked for two forms of I.D.,” she wrote. “Now, security blanket removed, folded and shipped to some distant warehouse, I moved in with my parents and lay across their spare bed texting everyone I knew, ‘sup?'”
Lena Dunham opened up about her breakup from longtime boyfriend Jack Antonoff in a new essay for Vogue. (AP)
Her next move was figuring out how to enjoy being alone again. She took baby steps — taking a long bath, reading a poetry book from cover to cover, dining in a restaurant solo— and eventually moved out of her parents’ place and into a temporary apartment.
Yet, even as the actress hinted at a new relationship, she wrote, “Someone would be coming over soon, the electric current of new romance in the air, but I was still defining myself by what I had lost.”
Eventually, Dunham found that when her friends called to check in on her, she could respond without feeling “the hitch in [her] chest.”
Dunham and Bleachers musician Antonoff parted ways in December in what was deemed a “mutual” breakup. Since the split, they have reportedly been in “constant communication” with each other following Dunham’s hysterectomy.
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