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Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s relationship spanned five years, from 2012 to 2017, a period marked by Dunham’s struggle with health issues. Despite Dunham openly acknowledging that their relationship should have ended earlier, they remained together, a decision she believes was puzzling to outsiders.
Lena Dunham admitted her relationship with Jack Antonoff wasn’t easy to understand
Dunham, who was diagnosed with endometriosis at 26, found her relationship with Antonoff deteriorating as she grappled with her health challenges. This personal battle seemed to coincide with the unraveling of their once-strong bond.
Reflecting on this time in her new memoir, Famesick, Dunham writes, “Looking back, it’s hard to understand why two people with seemingly endless options, financial freedom, and almost nothing that they still enjoyed doing together besides talking s*** about the occasional third party would not simply break up” (as reported by People).
She candidly reveals that their desire to maintain the relationship was greater than their actual desire to be together. In her words, they were “acting like we had six school-aged children we were in danger of losing custody of should we end the relationship.”
Ultimately, one of the few things they shared was a belief that their ability to keep the relationship intact was somehow tied to their moral worth. This shared perception, Dunham admits, was one of the last threads holding them together in a relationship that had long run its course.
“We were acting like we had six school-aged children we were in danger of losing custody of should we end the relationship,” she wrote. “But one of the last things we still shared was the sense that our ability to keep the relationship going was directly proportional to our inherent goodness.”
They ultimately ended things shortly after she had a hysterectomy in 2017.
Lena Dunham admitted to cheating on Jack Antonoff
After her hysterectomy, Dunham reached out to a former middle school boyfriend “with impunity, saying l’d just had major surgery and I needed to be cheered up. ‘Meet me by the bridge? Bring me a stuffed animal?’ I got an answer back in less than a minute: ‘I’m already running.’”
She said they had an affair that lasted several days. Once Antonoff got home from tour, she thought she could slip back into life together.
“I tried to calm my sheer terror by telling myself I was finally home from a bad dream,” she wrote, adding, “I had fixed myself, proved I could be the freaky sexy lively young woman he fell in love with. I had exorcised the demon. In a way, I had f***ed Nick for both our sakes, to make our house a home again. It would all be better now. I fell asleep to the rhythm of Jack’s breathing, like I had been doing for almost six years.”
The following morning, however, they broke up.
She said he was possibly also overstepping boundaries
While Dunham was reconnecting with her former boyfriend, she had suspicions that Antonoff was crossing the line with an unnamed teenage pop star. Many people believe that she is referring to Lorde.
“I had never stopped flirting — I mean, I wasn’t dead yet — but I had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds,” she wrote. “If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was.”
Dunham said that she realized Antonoff spoke to the pop star with more “expansive generosity” than he’d used with her in a long time.