When My Husband's Ex-Hookup Sent Us Disturbing Hate Mail
You all asked me for the full deets on this story, so here it is.
A while ago, in some article (I forget which) I casually mentioned that before we started dating, my husband used to hook up with this girl who later sent us literal hate mail (as in, stamped and delivered by a Richard Scarry ass mailman) after our wedding. Many of you were like, what? How can you just bury that lede? so thanks to you, I will be telling you the full story.
My husband Nick and I met in college when we were twenty-one and nineteen, respectively. About a year into our relationship, a particular woman from his past returned to our campus from her year abroad—let’s just call her Kayla. She was a bit of a mythical figure among our mutual friends, in that multiple women had “warned” me about Kayla. Ooh, watch out for Kayla. Whatever. Apparently, she and Nick had only hooked up, never really dated, but they were really close and Kayla was “crazy.”
Knowing that many perfectly lovely women were subject to the “crazy” label over insignificant, normal things like throwing out a carton of pre-cut mango because they thought it was poisoned by ISIS (oh? just me?) I did what any young woman in 2009 would do—checked out Facebook.
This was back when Facebook served to facilitate real-world interactions instead of being a repository for AI-generated images of single middle-aged women crying into their birthday cakes and a series of Reels notifying me that “In your 30s, your child will run a low-grade fever for two hours. It’s incredibly important that you rush him to the ER.” No, in 2009, you could actually get useful information about your social circle from Facebook—parties that were happening, friendships between particular people, updated relationships, etc. And what I saw was a series of comments, one letter each, left on a photo of me and Nick in our Halloween costumes, from Kayla:
P
R
O
P
E
R
T
Y
Okaaay, so she had commented “PROPERTY” in a very weird way, on a photo of me and Nick together. Maybe she was just high-fiving us, coming up with a more friendly way of saying “Your pussy is his now, diva!” Or, obviously, she was indicating that he was her property. I asked him about it, and he said it was “jibberish” because he has dyslexia and couldn’t actually read it. When I told him it spelled “property,” he said “That’s just her sense of humor! She and I have zero sexual chemistry, we hooked up a couple times at freshman orientation and never again. We’re like Jerry and Elaine.”
This Seinfeld metaphor was deployed every time I worried about Kayla’s return to campus. Oh don’t worry, she’s just harmless little Elaine in her big clunky boots and urban sombrero. But even if they were truly platonic friends, I still worried she would be a massive pain in the ass. After all, how many times had I been forced to contend with an extremely possessive, annoying male friend of a guy I was dating? Many times! A friend did not need to have sexual chemistry with a man to completely torpedo his relationship. I had already seen a relationship’s demise at the hands of a guy named Zach who played Ultimate Frisbee. Besides, Nick once told me that during his brief situationship with Kayla, she had broken into his dorm room through the window because he failed to respond to a text. At the very least, Kayla had done me one massive favor: made me look less insane in comparison. Either way, I kept my guard up.
