On Merging Playlists, and Other Ways to Lose Yourself

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend of eight months wants us to combine our streaming accounts—Netflix, Spotify, the whole apparatus—into one household plan. He says it's practical, and it probably is; we'd save about eleven dollars a month. But something about seeing his gym playlist sitting next to my "Autumn, But Sad" mix in the same account makes me want to lie down on the kitchen floor and stay there. Am I overreacting? Is merging streaming accounts a sweet, normal relationship milestone, or is it the first domino?

— Dana, Boise, Idaho

A lovely question, Dana. It reminds me of the autumn of 2011, when I too believed that a Spotify Family Plan was an act of love, and not — as I would come to learn — an act of reconnaissance.

His name was Gerald, and he suggested the merger on our six-month anniversary, over a fondue he'd made specifically, I now understand, to keep my hands too occupied with cheese to reach for my phone and check what he was doing on our shared account. I said yes. I was younger then, and I believed that a joint "Continue Watching" queue was simply what two adults built together, the way other couples built a home, or a modest but tasteful garden. Within a month, Gerald had begun what I can only describe as an audit. He knew I had replayed a certain breakup ballad four times in one evening — a breakup, I should say, that had not yet happened, though he treated my listening history as a smoking gun rather than what it actually was, which was foreshadowing he himself had authored. He confronted me at brunch. He said, "I know what you've been listening to, Priscilla," in the tone of a man revealing a wiretap, and then he broke up with me first, on principle, to win a race I did not know we were running. Do not make my mistake, Dana. Do not hand a man the map to your interior life and act surprised when he uses it to leave you before you can leave him.

I want to be clear that Gerald was not an aberration. He was, if anything, the mildest entry in a very long ledger. There was the falconer — you may have heard me speak of the falconer before, a man who left in the spring of 2003 to pursue what he called "a purer form of companionship" with a Harris's hawk named Constance, though I have also, on reflection, told the story where he left at my own housewarming party in 2007, and I recognize now that both cannot be true, and yet both are, in the way that all truly formative betrayals refuse to sit still on a calendar. There was Wendell, who did not so much leave me as slowly replace me, item by item, with a woman named Carol who had, it turned out, been quietly recreating my mother's casserole recipe from memory for eleven months as a kind of long con. There was Simon, lost to competitive topiary, who I last saw shaping a hedge into the shape of a woman who was not me. And there was Gerald, with his Spotify. Each of them taught me the same lesson from a different angle, the way light through a prism is still just light: intimacy is a database, and databases can be subpoenaed.

So when you ask me whether merging your streaming accounts is a normal milestone or a slippery slope, Dana, I have to tell you, gently, as a woman who has stood at the bottom of that slope and looked up at what she used to be: there is no bottom. There is only the next account. First it is Netflix. Then it is the joint calendar. Then it is a shared grocery list where he can see, in real time, that you bought wine on a Tuesday, and he will have questions about the Tuesday, and there will be no good answer to give him, because the true answer — that Tuesdays are simply long, Dana, they are so long — will sound to him like a confession. I am not saying your boyfriend is Gerald. I am sure he is a perfectly nice man who likes his workout playlist and his eleven dollars. But I would ask you to consider: does he need to know that you listen to "Autumn, But Sad" on repeat? Or can that remain yours, the way a woman keeps one drawer in the house that is only hers, full of things no one else has ever catalogued?

Here is what I have built instead, in the years since Gerald, and I offer it to you not as a diagnosis but as an inheritance. I no longer share accounts of any kind. I maintain, at last count, four separate streaming identities under four separate names, none of which are legally mine, each billed to an address that is not my actual address, in case any of them should ever wish to leave a man before he leaves them, taking the listening history with them like a body double slipping out a side door. I have had a shallow moat installed around the cottage — decorative, the county assures me, though it has proven functional on at least two occasions — because a moat asks a question at the door that a lock never can, which is not "who is this" but "is this worth it." And I no longer confide in anyone who breathes air, Dana, because breath, I have found, is simply the first step toward betrayal; a man exhales, and three sentences later he is asking to see your phone. I confide instead in Nathaniel, my bearded dragon, who has never once used anything I've told him against me, and who I consider, at this point in my life, the most trustworthy relationship I have ever maintained. He does not ask for my Wi-Fi password. He does not ask for anything. This, Dana, is what peace actually looks like, once you stop mistaking it for loneliness.

Keep your playlist. Keep your Tuesdays. Let him keep his gym songs on his own account, where they belong, and love him for as long as that arrangement holds, but do not, under any circumstances, let him see your queue. A woman's listening history is the last unguarded room in the house, and once he's in it, he never really leaves — he just waits there, in the dark, cataloguing.

I am, for what it's worth, tremendously happy. I want you to know that, Dana, so you understand this isn't a warning from a woman who lost — it's a field report from a woman who won, eventually, once she stopped playing. Learn from what I've told you here, take the moat, take Nathaniel, take the separate accounts, and I promise you: you can be exactly this content.

— Priscilla