Podcast Episode: Boyfriends ~ I’ve Only Had a Few

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has been writing an autobiography one episode at a time, and this week he gets to the part where other people were involved — which, as it turns out, did not always go smoothly.

Mara: This episode covers his relationship history — five partnerships across several decades, several cities, and one very consequential birthday remembered at exactly the right moment.

Pip: Let's start with the relationships themselves.

Boyfriends ~ I've Only Had a Few

Mara: The frame here is simple and a little disarming: five relationships, all of them ended, and brett is accounting for each one honestly — not to assign blame, but because accuracy is the only standard the series holds itself to.

Pip: He opens with a line that sets the whole tone: "You could count the number of partners I have had on one hand. Literally. Five fingers, five relationships, and — if I am being honest, which is rather the point of this series — five variations on the same unmitigated disaster."

Mara: That framing matters because he immediately walks it back just enough to be fair. He wasn't unlucky across the board — he was, in his own words, on occasion spectacularly lucky. What he did with that luck is the actual subject.

Pip: The first relationship is a teenage one, and he's clear-eyed about his own behavior: he said "I love you" too early, she started mentally booking the church, and his response was to withdraw — less contact, then less again, until the message landed without his having to deliver it.

Mara: He doesn't dress that up. He calls it "not a chapter I am proud of" and moves on.

Pip: The second relationship is the one that carries the most weight. A high school sweetheart, lost contact for years, and then — here's the hinge — he still knew her birthday. He mentioned it casually to her mother, the mother was taken aback, a phone call followed, and suddenly they were formally together.

Mara: What followed was, by his description, almost suspiciously orderly: dated a year, engaged a year, married a year, son arrived. He notes his son needed open-heart surgery at five days old, and he deliberately declines to fold that into this episode — he says some things are too large to share the page with someone else's chapter.

Pip: The marriage lasted seven years. He's careful about how he frames its end — they didn't separate because he was gay, they couldn't find their way back to each other once he was honest about being gay. He calls that a distinction worth making.

Mara: The remaining relationships move faster: a man from Sydney whose affections arrived when brett had nothing to spare; a second boyfriend who moved in with good intentions and the wrong emotional constitution; and then a man in Melbourne he was fond enough of to relocate his entire life for — who lasted seven months.

Pip: Seventeen years then passed before the fifth and, to date, last boyfriend, who already has his own episode and doesn't get compressed back into a paragraph here.

Mara: He closes by naming the two who stand apart — his ex-wife and the man he moved to Melbourne for — and admits he couldn't tell you whether that reflects well on his capacity for love or poorly on his timing.

Pip: Five endings, no court cases, no restraining orders. The bridges, he says, mostly just weathered away on their own.

Mara: What stays with me is the precision of the emotional accounting — he knows exactly where he fell short and doesn't flinch from it.

Pip: Timing, memory, the gap between what you feel and what you're ready for. More of that territory ahead, presumably.