A moment of reflection. Lena Dunham opened up about the emotional moment when she moved out of her shared home with ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff after their split.
“Life happened and I fell in love and whispered those terrifyingly vulnerable three words: ‘Let’s buy something.’ And soon I was pounding the pavement looking for a place where we could build a future, consider children, and install that much fetishized Sottsass shelf,” Dunham, 33, wrote for Domino’s Fall 2019 cover story.
Dunham and the 35-year-old Bleachers frontman bid on a place to their liking, which had not been built at the time. While Antonoff was out on tour, Dunham worked with her mother, artist Laurie Simmons, to decorate the place. However, she noted that the frequent Taylor Swift collaborator “hated it” when he first saw it and she would envision her “dream space in my head” at night.
“The last time I saw that apartment was when we agreed, with love, that someone had to go,” Dunham continued. “‘You can finally eat in the bed without anyone getting mad at you,’ he said through tears.”
The Girls alum purchased a new place shortly after the breakup. However, she has regarded this decision as “a massive real-estate mistake” because she “bought something in a state of panic, feeling like if I didn’t put down roots soon I’d float away.”
Though Dunham never resided in her post-split home she claimed to have been “real-estate shamed” for, she crashed “on an inflatable mattress” in a pal’s living room and later “slept in my father’s office between two filing cabinets and used a box of printer paper as my nightstand.” The actress also “spent a few ill-fated weeks in a hotel.”
She eventually settled on a home she selected from a thumbnail picture, recruiting interior designer Ariel Okin to help decorate the place.
Dunham and Antonoff called it quits in December 2017. The former pair, whose romance began in 2012, were together for five years.
The Lenny Letter creator recalled her split with Antonoff in an essay for Vogue in May 2018. “We sat in our shared kitchen of nearly four years and quietly faced each other, acknowledging what nobody wanted to say,” she wrote. “That obsessive connection had turned to blind devotion, and the blinders were coming off to reveal that we had evolved separately.”
Before their split, Dunham joked in November of that year that Antonoff was preparing to pop the question.
“I thought jack was furtively planning a proposal to me with his sister,” she previously tweeted. “And he just admitted I actually caught him ‘talking s–t’ about me!”
