Please. Delete my nudes. I gave them to you in what can probably now be viewed as a moment of extreme desperation. A last-ditch attempt to show you that our love was real, and should endure. My way of saying: “please don’t forget about me.” Or: “look how hot and desirable I am. See what you’re missing?” I should have known that any such attempts to make you see what a dolt you were to let me go would be in vain. Love never prevails, conquers all, etc. Love is a marketing scam of a fairy tale told by suits in a boardroom who have never experienced anything like it themselves. They’ll go to their mistresses before they go home to their wives. Or better yet, “get” a prostitute instead. Order her like she’s a food item. And to some extent, she is. Consumable, ephemerally satisfying. Sex is transactional, love is a construct. So obviously, the former fits in better with our society’s capitalistic setup. Even though the domesticity that goes hand in hand with “love” also definitely helps with consumer culture on a more long-term basis than one-and-done sexual encounters. But I digress. 

I’d never actually sent someone a nude before. It was kind of a big deal. Which you obviously didn’t seem to give a shit about. That surprised me. You had goaded me for so long about giving you one that I thought when I finally did, your boner would practically burst through our text message thread. Instead, your reaction was pretty goddamn lackluster. It took a lot for me to overcome my trust issues and send them to you. After all, some part of me is constantly on the defense about a relationship ending. Though I want to believe that it won’t. Every time something starts again, I fool myself into believing that this will be the time. The one that sticks. No more endings unless they’re happy ones—which means we both die at the same time lying side by side and/or spooning. Like Rosalie Ida Straus and Isidor Straus on the Titanic. Sure, it was a sinking ship, which feels like a grand metaphor for any relationship. But they sunk on that ship together, and were committed to surrendering their bodies to the sea knowing that their love would persist (their heart would go on?) in some small way (namely, by being featured in a brief nod of a scene in the movie Titanic). They weren’t like Jack and Rose, totally out of sync (no pun intended) as the latter let her lover believe there was no room for him on the piece of floating wreckage she took up. Our love, too, is now nothing but a floating piece of wreckage that even I can’t bring myself to hold on to.

I guess you’re the Rose in this scenario, letting me drown in the misery of knowing that I wasted my nudes on you. It was the only moment of boldness and vulnerability I’ll ever have. And you squandered it. The entire purpose of the nudes, of course, was to keep you sated during our separation. I know they all said that long distance would never work out, but I told them we were different. We were truly in love. And better still, you weren’t a fuckboy who would just go around sticking your dick into any old (/young) hole. Or so I thought. 

Maybe it’s impossible for a woman to truly understand the “needs” of a man. Their chemical composition so different. So much more carnal, apparently. But I thought you would have been moved by my decision to send you these nudes, at last, after so many months spent hemming and hawing about it. About my fears of said nudes being in the hands of the overlords once sent through the abyss of ones and zeroes. About how anyone, including you, could manipulate them for their own purposes once they were “out there.” I truly couldn’t understand how so many women did this with casual disregard on a regular basis. There is nothing else that makes a person more vulnerable. And, naturally, “nudes” from men were just dick pics, omitting their face as a blatantly identifying feature. Just another form of inequity between the sexes.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s right that you should opt to stab me in the back almost at the exact moment when I choose to break down all my walls for you. It makes me feel more insecure than I ever have in my entire life, and yet you were supposed to be the person I could trust the most. But you’ve proven, as every other man before you, that love is a lie. Men can’t make the fire of their so-called passion burn eternal. At best, it will burn for about a year before it fizzles out. And the once steady stream of splooge becomes nothing but little spurts. God, what a fool I am to have fallen for your yarn. So once again, I must demand: delete my nudes. They are no longer worthy of your eyes or your dissection. What’s more, I would hate the thought of you using them “in a pinch” when you were going through some kind of dry spell after having essentially forced me to break up with you because you couldn’t just wait. 

Why, oh why, are men so impatient when it comes to fulfilling the “needs” of their wang? That’s what this is really about. You can tell me all you want that your sudden decision to turn your back on us (and your stomach onto another) refers to an emotional void. But I’m no simpleton. Not anymore. I know better than to assume men have even remotely the same level of emotional complexity as women. And that’s part of why the contempt for us is so strong. So present in every facet of society. Right down to the debasing fact that we must send men nudes in order to “stay relevant” in their minds. Me, I intend to prefer the prewar method of letter-writing going forward.