The story at the heart of The Jack Stallings Project is true. It is my account of what I lived, what I knew at the time, what I learned later, and how I understand it now. When I have records, I make them available. When I am interpreting what those records mean, I try to make that clear.
The man at the center of the story does not appear here under his legal name. I call him Jerry. That is a pseudonym I chose for him. Jack Stallings is not his real name either. It is the name he uses publicly, and the distance between the person he presents as Jack and the man I knew as Jerry became one of the questions at the center of the project.
I met Jerry in late 2024, when I was entering midlife dating after a long marriage. He was thoughtful, funny, articulate, and unusually comfortable talking about many of life’s biggest questions. Over more than a year, I learned that important parts of the relationship I thought I was in had been shaped by information he withheld, delayed, or distorted.
I started writing about Jerry because I wanted to understand what had happened to me, and what surprised me was how much of it I understood only afterward.
I was not young, naïve, or inexperienced, and I was not unfamiliar with the terrible things people can do to one another. That was part of what made this so alarming: I had experienced a significant amount of harm without recognizing it while it was happening, and I could not fully see it even afterward until I looked very carefully. That was terrifying.
One of the things that helped me understand my own experience was reading someone else’s story. Her circumstances were different and the details were different, but I recognized enough familiar patterns that I started seeing parts of my own relationship differently. Things I had thought of as isolated incidents looked different once I saw similar dynamics playing out somewhere else.
That experience is a big part of why I decided to tell my story publicly. If sharing something this personal helped even one other person make sense of something happening in their own life, then it was worth it. I also wanted to take some of the shame out of talking about harm that happens in situations we voluntarily participated in.
I chose Jerry. I wanted him and trusted him. I went back, initiated things, and enjoyed things. There are experiences from that relationship I am genuinely glad I had. None of that is inconsistent with having been harmed; in fact, it is part of why some of the harm was difficult for me to understand.
And honestly, much of my story is painfully familiar.
Strip away the specifics and it is easy to hear some version of another bad boyfriend: he was inconsistent, important information came late, boundaries got blurry, and I spent too much time trying to understand him while continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt. We know that story so well that “another bad boyfriend” can sound like the end of the conversation instead of the beginning of one.
That bothers me more now than it used to. I have certainly been guilty of thinking that what happens inside somebody else’s relationship is mostly their business, and I think a lot of us have. We are taught not to interfere. We are told that relationships are complicated, people make mistakes, men and women misunderstand each other, and some amount of disappointment and dysfunction simply comes with the territory. There is truth in some of that, but common and unavoidable are not the same thing.
A lot has also changed in how we are able to see these experiences. I grew up before people could compare notes with strangers all over the world in real time. Things that happened inside relationships were much easier to keep private, and patterns were harder to recognize when every story stayed behind a different closed door. Now we have access to other people’s experiences on a scale that simply did not exist before. That comes with plenty of noise and its own problems, but it also allows us to notice similarities that once might have remained isolated.
The longer I worked on my own story, the bigger the questions became.
What do we actually mean when we say someone was harmed?
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Why are some kinds of harm obvious while others are much harder to recognize?
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When does a mistake become a pattern, and when does that pattern start doing real damage?
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How much harm do we accept as normal because we have been taught to expect it in relationships?
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Why do similar patterns keep showing up in the stories of people whose lives otherwise look nothing alike?
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Why do we care so much about whether someone meant to cause harm?
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What does accountability look like when the harm was not intended, is not understood, or is not acknowledged?
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And if some of these patterns are bigger than one person or one relationship, what would actually have to change to make them less common?
Those are the questions behind this series.
Closing the door on my relationship with Jerry made sense. What I did not expect was that everything I learned while trying to understand it would come with me. After I began recognizing certain patterns, I started noticing versions of them elsewhere. Understanding how difficult harm could be to recognize from inside a relationship made it harder to assume that something obvious in hindsight must also have been obvious while it was happening. Seeing how easily familiar behavior gets dismissed as ordinary also made “that’s just how relationships are” stop feeling like much of an answer.
I could not help feeling some responsibility to do what I could to keep other people from going through what I did and to prevent the kind of harm I feared could continue through Jerry—and far beyond him.
At the same time, I felt honestly pretty helpless. I cannot control Jerry. I cannot control what anyone else does or make another person choose differently. I do not have a neat plan for fixing relationships, dismantling patriarchy, or preventing human beings from hurting one another.
But if I can’t control individual choices, where does that leave me, or anyone else for that matter? Surely some kind of meaningful change can happen beyond one person maybe deciding to make different choices.
So I started wondering how we got here and why harm like I experienced is so common. Where can change happen? What helps people recognize harm sooner? What makes harmful patterns less likely to continue? What are we teaching, rewarding, excusing, or treating as inevitable that does not actually have to be?
I cannot accept that this is simply the way things are. I don’t have the answers yet. I just refuse to believe this is the best we can do.