In my third year of college my indie music snobbery was at its peak. I look back on this time with a mixture of chagrin and regret, because it gave me the most reductive, irrational, and hateful disposition I’ve ever had.

I studied abroad in Ireland for a semester, and it was there, while on a boat to an island, that I met and flirted extensively with J., another American on the same program. Our first conversation was, naturally, the clincher. I opened with the deal-breaker question: “What kind of music do you listen to?”

“Well,” she began, “at the moment I have a Belle & Sebastian song in my head.” She added that the song was “Get Me Away I’m Dying.” (Keep in mind: we were taking a sunset boat trip to an island off Ireland’s coast. The sky was clear and the weather was perfect, as it would be for all three days we were there – a phenomenon for that part of the country. But she wanted to get away from there, because she was dying.)

Did a red flag wave or a siren go off in my head? No. Enthralled with the right answer to my question, I pinched her flirtatiously, and our exchange became rapid and excited. We considered our shared snobbery to be some mark of destiny, not an indication of shared social decay and failure between two hipsters (a word I didn’t even know yet). For the next few days on the island we hung out together, exchanged music and stories, and kissed a lot among the oceanside rocks, grassy knolls, and cottages. It was a lovely thing to be doing in such a lovely place.

Upon our return to the mainland our relationship started its drawn out, fiery nose-dive. We broke up once, got back together, lost our virginities together. I cheated on her with the girl that had caused us to break up the first time and we broke up again. I came back to the States in January, she in June. When she returned we had an emotional conversation in which she blamed me for an eating disorder she had developed. She also confessed that she’d wished secretly to get pregnant from our constant unprotected sex so that I would not be able to (or would be less likely to) leave her. Inexplicably, we got back together again that summer, and finally broke up a few months later. It was around this time that even my most patient friends started using the word “fucked-up” after listening to my descriptions of the whole saga.

The relationship was as much my fault as it was hers, and at this point I can only say that my motivation for continuing it was a combination of guilt for having cheated and the assurance of getting laid. As for the Belle & Sebastian song, it exists as a palpable hole in the otherwise great album If You’re Feeling Sinister. I simply can no longer listen to the song without spending most of the 3:25 track time wallowing in what has come to represent all the horrendous missteps a guy can make in (awkwardly) starting, (poorly) maintaining, and (painfully) ending a relationship.