Lena Dunham Admitted It Was ‘Hard to Understand’ Why She and Jack Antonoff Stayed Together
Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff were together from 2012 to 2017. The couple broke up as she was navigating problems with her health. She admitted that things should have ended long before this point, though. From the outside, she said it was likely hard for anyone to understand why they were still together.
Lena Dunham admitted her relationship with Jack Antonoff wasn’t easy to understand
Dunham was diagnosed with endometriosis when she was 26. As she dealt with health problems, she said her relationship with Antonoff began to unravel.
“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,” she wrote in her new memoir Famesick (per People).
She admitted that they both wanted to keep the relationship going more than they actually wanted to be together.
“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.
