My first boyfriend was gay. Granted, I didn’t know that when we started dating. I don’t think he quite did, either, but eventually he figured it out. When he came out, I supported him in every way I could. I joined the gay-straight alliance; I listened when he needed to talk. In the end, he survived, I survived, and he didn’t actually ruin any songs for me.

The same can’t be said for my next boyfriend, Anthony. I met him during the first semester of freshman year, and we became fast friends—the kind of friends who feel the inevitability of becoming something more. Our first date was a campus screening of Singin’ in the Rain. The title song is a quintessentially happy, I’m-in-love-and-nothing-can-go-wrong song: “I’m laughing at clouds / So dark up above / The sun’s in my heart / And I’m ready for love.” It was just how we felt at the beginning of our relationship—sweet, hopeful, happy. We held hands and smiled goofily at each other, the kind of couple that you see when you’re lonely and single, and just hate. “Singin’ in the Rain” became our song. He bought me the movie; we watched it together and reveled in our cuteness. He wrote me endearing e-mails, bought me flowers for no reason, and sent me adoring cards. It was, as Gene Kelly sang, “a glorious feelin’.” It all seemed too good to be true.

One fateful night we were walking home to our dorm. At the front door of the building we noticed a flier advertising the next meeting of the on-campus gay-straight Rainbow Alliance. Anthony reached out his hand, disdainfully ripped down the flier, and threw the crumpled paper to the ground. I felt like he had crumpled up one of the most important people in my life, my ex-boyfriend, and thrown him to the ground. I suddenly saw Anthony as one of the kids my ex had to worry about in high school, the ones who called him “fag” and trashed his locker. But this couldn’t be—this was Anthony, my sweet, loving Anthony.

Looking back, the timeline is hazy. At first, things were clear in my memory, but strangely, the more I remember, the hazier it gets. Perhaps because I begin to remember the anguish and confusion that the passage of time has neatly arranged into an unambiguous progression. Maybe the flier incident actually happened before we even started dating and I blocked it out because, in all other respects, he seemed so great, so perfect. And he loved me. Perhaps it was only later that I pinpointed the episode as the beginning of the end. Is it possible that the beginning of the end was before the beginning?

In either case, we talked about it. I revealed my surprise, disappointment, concern; he countered with his religion. But he seemed thoughtful, open-minded. “The true test of maturity and manhood is tolerance,” he wrote in a letter to me. “A mature person does not rant and rave and tear down posters with which he disagrees.” He seemed to be growing, and I tried to convince myself that he would change his mind.

By ignoring my instincts about the flier incident, though, I shut part of myself down. Yes, we were happy and loving, but part of me just wasn’t there any more. The closer he wanted to get to me, the more I backed off. Deep down I felt icky. I didn’t want to be with a guy who didn’t share my values on this issue, and I avoided the topic, but my discomfort in our relationship became unbearable. Winter break was a relief. When he asked if he could visit during the vacation, I talked him out of it. I broke up with him a couple nights after we returned to campus, telling him that I wanted to be his friend but just couldn’t be his girlfriend right then. I was vague; he was sad but understanding.

The breakup was surprisingly smooth. A few days afterward, however, I was missing him, the way you do after you break up with someone you can’t love back. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I could talk honestly with him, see if we could work things out. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I thought, “after I sleep on it.” That night, there were three fire drills in our dorm. At the third alarm, I once again padded downstairs in my slippers and pajamas and stood waiting outside as the rest of the dorm poured out. There was Anthony. And there was some girl huddled beside him in the chilly weather—at 4:30 in the morning. Apparently he was spending the night sleeping on something too. Or, rather, someone.

Things got worse from there. Yes, I was the one who broke up with him, but I was hurt and felt he had betrayed me. On some level, I felt I had betrayed myself by not listening to my instincts earlier and honoring them. The true potential of the relationship had been poisoned by the acid rain of the flier incident and all that it revealed. We tried to be friends. But he started dating the fire-drill girl, cheated on her (“Did he cheat on me?” I wondered), and then started dating one of my close friends. He sent me mixed messages—affable one day, mean and avoidant the next. And he was still homophobic. I realized towards the end that I just couldn’t take the emotional exhaustion and complications of our tortured friendship.

Finally we stopped speaking. Anthony transferred to another school, and I deleted “Singin’ in the Rain” from my computer. I kept the movie in hopes of reclaiming what I remember to be a great movie, but I haven’t watched it since we dated. Every time I hear “Singin’ in the Rain” (not terribly often, true), I cringe and feel bitter. I wanted what Gene Kelly had when he was singin’ in the rain, and all I ended up with was a soggy, ruined song.