Moving on isn’t always easy, just ask Lena Dunham. The Girls creator opened up about dipping her toes back in the dating pool following her split from Jack Antonoff in January 2018 and revealed that she has struggled along the way.
“It was a modern non-love story, the only kind I’d ever really known. But this was my first time at the rodeo in my 30s, a decade so far remarkable for my first gray hair, my first time showing up for jury duty and my first real heartbreak, stemming from the public dissolution of a six-year relationship I had believed to be permanent,” Dunham, 32, wrote, in an article published by Vogue on Monday, March 18. “Jeremy (his name has been changed) ‘slid into my DMS’ after I posted a thirst-trap picture in some plus-size panties (fire emoji eggplant emoji water droplet emoji yasss).”
Dunham noted that, because she felt “lonely as hell” after her “near miss of marriage,” she decided to give Jeremy a chance: “This seemed like a good way to find someone to spend my possibly long and assuredly messy life with.”
The American Horror Story actress admitted that “during the brief spaces between rebound romances, I’d felt choppy and unrealized, like a vintage TV set without the sharpness adjusted.” Throughout this time, Dunham had also “recently become sober after years of dependence on prescription pills.”
She and Jeremy hit it off and graduated from DMing to texting and talking on the phone before she decided to meet him in person. The Not That Kind of Girl author spent two days with him at his Los Angeles pad and imagined what their future together would look like.
“I hope he would care for me when I got a fever or a bad review, that he was OK with an elastic sense of self and an even more elastic waistband,” she wrote. “After half a decade with the same person, I had returned to my dating life with the abandon of a grandma of 10 shopping duty-free. I had missed all of this: the anxiety of constructing a new identity worth wanting, the jittery caffeine-high moments before the first kiss and an introduction to someone’s second personality, the one they have when lust is released.”
Dunham and Antonoff, 34, split in December 2017. “Lena and Jack are no longer together,” a source exclusively revealed to Us Weekly at the time. “Lena doesn’t wish him ill-will. He was her first love. Their split was mutual. The relationship is done.”
