When I look at the writing I’ve done over the last several years, there is one inescapable and increasingly frequent truth that emerges. I have compromised in varying degrees the privacy of myself and many of the most important people in my life. I don’t want absolution for this because I don’t think it’s a condemnable offense. Still, I do always feel, if not guilt, a weight of responsibility to limit my descriptions of other people’s private lives to the points where they’ve intersected with my own. Hopefully that context will be enough to ensure a diligent reader finds these descriptions as subjective and incomplete, based on the needs and personality of their creator.

On Sunday Andrew Cohen, a legal analyst for CBS and contributor to Vanity Fair, wrote a column about his ex-girlfriend in AOL’s Politics Daily. It stands in contrast to his legal punditry as an opening of a private part of his life, regretting a lost love while simultaneously wishing her great joy in the future. He also chose the most spectacularly inappropriate day to make these ruminations about his emotions public: his ex’s wedding day to another man.

In Cohen’s explanation of his love-lost-forever (a woman eleven years his junior whom he met during the immolated wallow of a mid-life divorce), I find a lot to relate to. I’m not moved by anything he’s written, and I think there are big strands of dishonesty and self-delusion that run through his thinking, but I’m familiar enough with dishonesty and the will to self-delusion. I’ve often felt the conspicuous weight of how much I’ve written about my own failing and falling out with the last woman I had dated, someone who I’d similarly described as the “love of my life.”

Breaking up, and moreover, being left by virtue of something profoundly unchangeable about one’s self is hard to accept without writhing at least a little. There’s no more final blow to one’s sense of romantic self-worth than knowing a person so fatalistically cherished has made a sober, honest, and irrefutable decision to be with someone else, forever.

There is a heap of aphoristic wisdom to help the abandoned move on. We’ve absorbed through social osmosis all of the truisms about finding someone new to love, indulging one’s self, making time to just feel bad without apology. There’s a rough kind of rehabilitation process that you can navigate with friendly support–a twelve-step program for the helpless fop who finds himself at the emotional bottom of all things. The degree to which these things can be helpful varies, but I can say I never found true solace in any of it.

Being dumped by someone you love so much as to drape the worth of your entire life around them is a fate for which there is no real treatment. It’s a loss that extends beyond reason. And in mourning my own ex-girlfriend I found reason often exacerbated the pain I was in and the hopelessness of staring at an empty space that once was filled. (“Where’d you go?” I remember myself saying to the still air in my apartment in the weeks and months after she left—as much a simple exhalation as it was a real question.) Admitting to this undersea of irrational need and weakness is hard to do while alone. Doing it in public is awful, but it has its own allure of fatalism as well.

In recent times, many people have recoiled at the public accessibility of what could once be safely stowed away in private. The last year has seen great stirrings of mistrust against Facebook’s privacy settings. Friends of mine have shut off their accounts, others have forwarded alarmist notices about how to properly gird your online persona from the mirthless eye of future employers, exploitative identity thieves, or voyeuristic carnivores. I can never understand these needs for privacy, to be one way here and another way there.

To say something is “public” is to say it is a product of the people, a representation of who and how we are. Privacy is an act of withdrawing from people, which makes it a poetically contradictory idea to pull away something that is, in some way or another, a product of our community. I admit I have a broad and prefabricated cover for my nonchalance on this point. A writer can be debauched, expressively irrational, and a bit of a shambles while still being solidly in the boundaries of past precedent. A legal analyst less so.

In this view, the main benefit of privacy is temporary freedom from the expected castigation of others. I’ve never been able to accept that as a good reason for self-censorship or dishonesty through omission. I don’t have anything to be private about, and I don’t fear whatever castigation may come my way by virtue of confessing my experiences for whatever they are. It’s what I am. I can find no reason to hide it, and hiding it does nothing to make my sometimes immature, inane, helpless thoughts less true.

Insisting that we always present our most public faces, while conceding the choice of our peers to be condemnatory over things that most often are matters of taste and personality, is debilitating. It takes away from our understanding of each other and ourselves, rather than adding to it. It lessens our exchange by funneling it towards untrue ideals without grounding things in the sometimes noxious realities of our mammalian selves.

Still, there’s something hard and irresolvable in putting a small part of someone else’s life into a public format. I’ve made a rule of referring to people by first initial. I’ll inevitably break this rule one day, and I confess it’s mostly arbitrary, but it’s a compromise I’ve made with myself. No one knows who A, B, C, D, or N are that didn’t already know. It hasn’t made it any easier for people I’ve sometimes written about to suddenly find a private experience we’d shared reduced to a few paragraphs of my rhetorical fumbling at the bra strap of meaning.

But writers represent themselves, and their portraits of other people should never be trusted. The act of writing, even impersonally, is a way of saying something about yourself. I read Mr. Cohen’s account of his sense of loss as a smoke signal sent out in hopes of accomplishing the opposite of what he actually claims. It doesn’t sound to me like the voice of a man who wants someone to be happy without him, it sounds like someone making one last, grand case for reconciliation. It sounds to me like he’d most prefer her to be truly happy and completely fulfilled by returning to him, and if that can’t be the case then let this most awkward wedding day toast stand as a permanent record of all she’s leaving behind in choosing to marry a new man.

Anna North of Jezebel picked up Cohen’s story and wrote a sarcastic deconstruction of it. She also posted Cohen’s petulant reply to Politics Daily contributor Lizzie Skurnick, who wrote a response to Cohen’s original post. One of Jezebel’s commenters, someone who publicly passes as “Ms.Frost,” described several men in her past having made the same morose claims of great lost love.

“They didn’t love me,” she (presumably) wrote. “And I wasn’t the ‘best thing that ever happened to them;’ we didn’t work out for good reasons. But now they’re sad or lonely, or feeling romantic about their lives and the narrative that there was some perfect woman out there for them who ‘got away’ is so much more interesting than their reality. It’s a show and it’s about them. It’s so unbelievably self-absorbed.”

So it is. But I know the instinct well enough, having failed intimately, left with only myself in a space that once felt very differently, filled with a hope and purpose that, for a few moments, had the shape, touch, and voice of another person. Someone who chose not to stay.