This week Benito Skinner announced that he and his boyfriend of nine years broke up, and I'm feeling like a hollowed-out husk; like a butternut squash that sat in the oven for an hour only to have its gooey insides scooped out and turned into a delicious seasonal pasta sauce or soup. Now I'm just a crusty squash skin sitting in the compost alone with no beautiful gay celebrity boyfriends to keep me company.
If you don't know Benito Skinner then clearly you're not gay, and that's OK. (See me after class.) Skinner created and starred in the Amazon Prime series "Overcompensating," and hosts a podcast with best friend Mary Beth Barone, "Ride," on which he recently delivered the news that he and Terry (aka the comparably gorgeous and talented creative director Terrence O'Connor) had amicably ended their relationship after nine years.
As a rabid "Overcompensating" fan myself, I've had a queasy feeling in my gut for months that Skinner's meteoric rise might take a toll on his otherwise steady-seeming relationship with O'Connor. But luckily, the boys broke up on good terms.
"It's just two people who want the best for each other, and I'm so excited to root him on," Skinner told Barone on their podcast.
If you're a regular reader of this newsletter (hi Mom!), you'll know I'm no stranger to celebrity FOMO and feeling like I maybe should be included in the intimate gatherings of my parasocial pals. And that remains true when they're going through hard times.
Take this breakup for example. We feel pain when our favorite celebrities split for the obvious reasons — we don't like when people suffer, especially people we care about — but also because their breakup is a crack in the façade. It's a tear in the scrim. It disrupts the illusion of total joy and fulfillment, typically the only things we see when we watch someone else's life play out through a screen. They looked happy — and it sounds like, in many ways, they genuinely were — but that's never the full story. And as consumers of their lives and work exclusively through TV and social media, that full story is something to which we will never have access.
Still, Skinner left listeners with a message not of despair but of hope. "If us breaking up makes you stop believing in love, I think it should be the opposite. Because I was with someone so special to me for nine years, in a committed relationship with my best friend," he said with the cameras off. "We loved and championed each other, we grew up together in so many ways. My whole 20s were with Terry, and I feel so unbelievably lucky to have met him and be part of his family. . . . So I hope that, if anything, you should believe in love, because I really had it. And I really, really feel so lucky to have met him and be around his genius."
Click the links below for more cathartic breakup content, and leave me be with my box of tissues and my pint of Phish Food. |
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