Both Sides of a Breakup: He Thought She Was Hysterical About Politics

Alyssa Shelasky · 2026-01-16T07:00:08.769-05:00

In “Both Sides of a Breakup,” The Cut talks to exes about how they got together and why they split up. When Elana, 48, met Patrick, 50, she thought their political differences might balance each other out. After moving upstate and having a child together, things only got worse.

Elana: I met Pat about ten years ago, just before the 2016 election. I was 38. We met on Tinder. I had just returned to New York, where I’m from, after living in London for a few years; I worked as a correspondent for an American magazine. I was laid off and had to move back home into a Brooklyn studio that I owned and had been renting out.

Patrick: I thought it was impressive that she’d been living in London. I found her work interesting. She had interviewed a lot of British movie stars.

Elana: I was predominantly covering politics. Patrick was not a politically savvy person. He wasn’t ignorant, but he said something about how he was raised not to talk about politics socially. But that wasn’t a big deal, because ten years ago, things weren’t as heated as they are now, and there were plenty of people who weren’t “into” politics. It’s not that I didn’t care, it’s just that it wasn’t a deal-breaker. Plus, I’d interviewed so many politically minded bores, and I definitely didn’t want to fuck them! We each had a glass of wine and shared some truffle fries and deviled eggs. I really enjoyed his company.

Patrick: Who orders deviled eggs on a first date? Elana does. She marches to her own beat. I was down with all of it. She was strong, opinionated, smart. Different from my ex, who was an influencer, and exactly what you might imagine — pretty shallow. Elana was sophisticated.

Elana: For our second date, the only night we were both free was Election Night. I was, and still am, a die-hard Hillary supporter. Patrick was … I don’t know what he was. Indifferent?

Patrick: I voted for Hillary.

Elana: We went to a sports bar in midtown with TVs everywhere. I was trying to be flirtatious, but I was sick to my stomach as the numbers poured in. Patrick was supportive of me that night … I mean, I couldn’t even kiss him good-bye when he tried. But he definitely didn’t feel the weight of it all the same way.

Patrick: I was a moderate liberal, maybe skewing libertarian. I hoped Hillary would win too, but I wasn’t going to wake up the next day and feel like the world was ending.

Elana: I told myself that maybe we’d balance each other out; that my gloom and doom around Trump becoming president would be tempered by Pat’s general positive attitude. Pat is a hopeful person. Did I find it totally fucking insane to be hopeful at such a time? Yes. But who can be mad at hope?

Patrick: We had sex after a few more dates. It was really good. She knows what she likes. She’s a bit dominant.

Elana: Pat is good in bed, a proper lover. We’d have sex every time we hung out, which was every few nights. I was still reacclimating to New York. I started a full-time job at an e-commerce site, writing fashion and lifestyle content. Pat was a designer for a furniture company. He’s good with his hands.

Patrick: We did the typical New York dating thing for a few years: dinners at trendy restaurants, the intermingling of friends, an epic trip to Costa Rica.

Elana: There was always this underlying tension. A lot of Pat’s friends from his hometown are Trump supporters. Their Facebook posts would make me want to scream, but they weren’t my friends, they were Pat’s. I wanted Pat to battle with them on Facebook, but he never would. I kinda thought he was a wimp for not going after those idiots. But I also understood that he was a very sweet, kind, and calm person. It’s what I loved about him, but also what I grew to hate about him.

Patrick: She’d get scary about politics. One of our neighbors once referred to something she saw on Fox News — it was about a snowstorm or something innocuous like that — and I watched Elana turn red, and then later, predictably, she told me she would hate this person forever. I was concerned about how black and white she saw things, but I also loved the fire inside her.

Elana: My lifelong dream was to settle down and have kids upstate, and I could see myself doing that with Pat. After two years together, we started looking at houses. We’d visit five open houses in a day, then drive back to the city, discussing the ones we saw and how beautiful we could make them. Neither of us wanted to get married, but we shared this upstate dream. I loved him more than ever on those days. I loved house hunting together; loved his enthusiasm; loved his knowledge of architecture and renovations in general. It was total foreplay for me.

Patrick: I come from a very blue-collar family, and my dad and grandfather were really handy around the house. My brothers and I picked up a lot from them. Besides, everything is YouTube-able.

Elana: After a few years together, we bought a house, moved upstate, and, at 42, I got pregnant with our daughter. It was a very special time in our lives. I loved owning a home. I loved being a mother. I felt proud of our little family. Then came COVID.

Patrick: COVID really messed with Elana …

Elana: I was irate at the Trump administration. Pissed off at his mockery of masks. Pissed off at his horrific hatred toward Asian people. I was mad, mad, mad, mad, mad. Meanwhile, Pat was like, “Let’s start our garden beds, babe!” and “Should we get an outdoor sauna?” His nonchalance made me even angrier.

Patrick: We were safe at home. We had land and fresh air for playing with our daughter. We had a small pod of like-minded neighbors. We were going to be okay.

Elana: We started fighting all the time. The more tense I was, the more laid-back he’d be. Fucking infuriating.

Patrick: I’m not a fighter. I don’t have the stomach for it. And I really hated fighting in front of the baby.

Elana: I was angry with him for not making enough money, because I knew I was about to be let go again, more “restructuring,” and I wanted a break from work. I was angry with him for working on our house for 12 hours a day when he wasn’t doing his real job and instead of helping me with our daughter. But I was mostly angry with him for being so “chill” about COVID and the garbage fire that was the world.

Patrick: I wasn’t “chill” about COVID, but we weren’t really at risk. We’d wear masks when we had to go somewhere public. Life had to go on.

Elana: I resented how he made me feel like such a psycho bitch.

Patrick: We stopped having sex.

Elana: I never wanted him to touch me anymore. That was more of a me thing. It’s not that he became, like, repulsive to me. I was just shut down sexually.

The years from peak COVID onward were just … bad. Patrick and I would fight about everything. Dumb stuff like laundry — he asked if I could put his clothes away after I folded them, like I do for our daughter. I couldn’t believe he would scold me about some housekeeping issue.

Patrick: All I said was that if she was putting her clothes away and our daughter’s clothes away, it would take one extra minute to put mine away too. Otherwise, they stayed folded on the coffee table, where she would fold laundry. I don’t know. Every time I saw the laundry on the coffee table, it felt like a micro-punishment.

Elana: We had a very young child, and somehow you just go into extreme parenting mode, and then you’re able to leave your relationship issues unattended for months if not years. In our case, years! We were clearly not doing well and not getting better. Our conversations were surface level and cordial. There was no physical touch, barely a hug good-bye if someone would go into the city for work or something like that.

And in the background, there was always politics. I never stopped being mad about Trump, but once he started running for reelection in 2024, it brought all that stuff back to the fore.

Patrick: I actually considered voting for Trump. I believe in equality, obviously, but cancel culture and “wokeness” had really turned me off of the extreme left. My nephew is 5, and he had two kids in his class who identified as “they/them,” and I’m sorry, but I just think it’s too early for that stuff. That sort of thing pushed me to contemplate the right; to allow myself to say this is a democracy and I can actually think what I want. There’s a spectrum and I can veer right where it feels appropriate. I was terrified to tell Elana that I’d opened my mind to a Trump vote. I’d fully hide any political thinking or conversation from her, as if I were having an affair. I really avoided talking about anything with her, besides our daughter, house renovations, and logistics around our schedules.

Elana: He didn’t like Kamala. We never talked politics anymore, but once I heard him say on the phone to his father, “I’m not a fan.” To me, that meant he was turning Trumpy. Which was unacceptable. The tension around that election manifested itself in so many other stupid ways. Like, I’d blow up at him over the groceries. But it wasn’t about the groceries, it was about Trump.

Patrick: One time I brought home cheddar cheese from the supermarket …

Elana: It’s so stupid, but we had friends coming over for dinner — we never socialized together anymore, but we owed them a favor for helping us with a landscaping project — and they’re cheesemongers; they literally sell cheese for a living. And he brings home the cheapest cheese with a neon-orange sale sticker slapped on it. It’s so ridiculous in hindsight, but such are the things that would make me snap. I was cold to him during the dinner party, but I kept it together. The second they left, we got into a big fight. But Pat gaslit me, again, and made me feel insane about yelling over cheese. I tried to explain how the cheese represented stingy, greedy, ungenerous Trump supporters … but when I tried to articulate that, I sounded extra-unwell.

Patrick: If only we could have laughed at ourselves. But in no world can Elana laugh about politics. And in the end, I didn’t even vote.

Elana: I couldn’t be with a Trumper. And our incompatibility, and inevitable breakup, had now been prolonged for years. I started to map out an exit strategy. We had our daughter to think about. Shortly after Trump won, in December 2024, we had a very hard heart-to-heart about everything. Our first real talk in what felt like forever. We’d fallen out of love. We couldn’t make each other happy anymore. It was impossible to coexist. We sat at our kitchen table one night until the sun came up. We tried to figure out how to break up without damaging our kid.

Patrick: Our all-night talk wasn’t sad. Sure, it was melancholic at times. But no, it was a relief.

Elana: I loved Pat more than ever when that talk was over.

Patrick: I was worn down.

Elana: We decided, that night, that we’d find a way to live within a few minutes of each other and continue to co-parent. You have more housing options when you’re outside the city. Logistically, we probably could not have broken up if we still lived in Brooklyn. While we looked into other properties for him to rent or buy or build, he started sleeping in our guest bedroom. The pressure was off and we had peace in the house. We transitioned into friends who co-parent and live together pretty seamlessly. It was an indication of how right our decision was.

Patrick: I felt motivated to build something of my own. I went to look at some nearby land. I called my dad and my brother, and we figured out how to build a small house there, all hands on deck, for me and my daughter. Elana had put the down payment on our upstate house, and I covered the monthly mortgage, and that’s what we still do. I’m going to pay the mortgage because it’s where my daughter lives, and it’s okay, it’s not a ton of money.

Elana: Right now, Pat is back and forth between my house and his new place because it’s not quite done. Probably because neither of us has started dating again, it’s not awkward or uncomfortable being under the same roof. No major glitches when he sleeps over. It’s all about our daughter. Our breakup is actually really working for all of us. I’m so much lighter. I smile more.

Patrick: I don’t like spending nights without my daughter; it hasn’t really happened yet because either I’m sleeping at their house in the guest room, because my house has been under construction, or she’s slept at my new house ever since we’ve put in floors and heat.

Elana: This new little life we’re creating is going to be really good. Our daughter gets two houses, with two loving parents. I just got her a dog, and I think Pat’s getting her a dog too. We’re both committed to making sure she has the most beautiful life.

Patrick: This was not the life I planned. I never saw myself as married, per se, but I saw myself in a long-term, stable, loving relationship, with kids. I got about half of that. But we’re doing our best.