This is part of Breakup Week. We just can’t do this anymore.
My ex-boyfriend and I were always into cults. It was our No. 1 interest. Not, like, in a religious sense—we weren’t Scientologists or anything. Instead, we simply loved taking the edge off a long day by settling into a documentary about some weird neo-religious movement. It was a constant topic of discussion. In fact, during the pandemic, we collaborated on some music together. One of the songs we wrote was about Shoko Asahara, the leader of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo—best known for the 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system.
We had been together for three years, and as far as I could tell, everything was going well. It felt like we were on stable ground. Maybe we’d even get married someday. But everything came to a head in the spring of 2022, when I went to visit my dad in Washington for a month.
Around that time, he grew closer with a co-worker of his. They started hanging out a lot, and her name kept coming up in our communication. I didn’t really think anything of it. This co-worker already had a long-term partner, and she was a musician as well. It made sense to me why they bonded, and I’m not an especially jealous person. It’s funny with breakups—sometimes you look back and you’re like, “There are so many red flags here! I should’ve known all along!” But that wasn’t my mindset at all. I was more than happy to welcome her into my life.
Well, after visiting my dad, I drove back home—all day and night, across the country—because my boyfriend and I had a wedding we needed to attend the following morning. When I arrived home, he sat me down at our table. All of his possessions were packed up. He told me that he was leaving, because he “couldn’t do this” anymore. I was unable to make heads or tails of anything he was saying. It was a complete shock to me. The whole breakup only lasted a minute, and he wasn’t forthright about his emotions at all. I guess it had been building for a while? Eventually I told him, “Hey, that’s fine, but we still have this wedding on the calendar. There are placemats with our names on them.” So, the next day, we white-knuckled our way through the ceremony, driving in complete silence to and from the chapel. After that, he was gone.
Naturally, I did some internet sleuthing. I thought that in all likelihood, he had left me for someone else, and there was a good chance it was that conspicuous co-worker of his. I looked her up on Instagram and, lo and behold, it turns out she was pretty heavily involved in this new-age religious group. I recognized it from one of the documentaries I’ve watched. It was a cult. It felt like I was being pranked.
I don’t want to name the cult outright, but suffice it to say it has all the trappings of a bizarro spiritual movement. It fashions itself as a school of the occult, pulling from all sorts of disparate esoterica. Kabbalah is involved, as is Zen meditation, martial arts, and astral projection. The cult’s intended goal is to teach its participants how to be divine healers. At certain thresholds in the hierarchy, they’re granted magic wands. Of course, in order to get there, you must first engage in some classic MLM trappings—recruiting others to the cause, spending a boatload of money on miscellaneous classes, navigating a dense org chart, and so on.
I was heartbroken about my ex, and furious with how he treated me. But I still cared enough about him to be worried that he was getting mixed up with a woman immersed in some dangerous ideas. I could tell from their social media feeds that they were officially an item, so I gave him a call and laid out my concerns. “Hey, this girl you’re seeing is a member of a cult, please tread carefully.” He responded by essentially saying that he was trying to “rescue” her from the group. Good on him, I guess? I’m not sure why a rescue mission required a devastating breakup, but whatever, at least he seemed to have most of his brain intact. But alas, a few months later when I saw him again, it was clear that the indoctrination had taken hold.
Remember, this was the boy I’ve spent endless nights with laughing about all of our favorite cults. We’ve bonded over NXIVM, and Heaven’s Gate. But now he’s telling me that while his new girlfriend’s cult is relatively new, its teachings are rooted in ancient philosophy; how it can be traced back to King Solomon and hermeticism. He told me he made an altar. He said he was doing meditation practices. He was fully bought in. I couldn’t even recognize him anymore. I mean, this dude was working at a fucking carhop diner. I knew he couldn’t afford any of this stuff. She had him hook, line, and sinker, and I’m fairly certain they’re still together to this day.
In some ways, I guess you could say I dodged a bullet. The way my ex enthusiastically took to this woman—and her cult—depleted my jiltedness pretty quickly. When you go through a breakup, you tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what you weren’t able to give the person who has just dumped you. But within this context, it became abundantly clear that we were never going to be a match. And for as much as it messed with my self-confidence, it was its own kind of wake-up call. I had to have a conversation with myself like, “OK, you know what? Maybe it’s time to stop dating these shitty dudes.” For so long I prioritized men who had similar interests as me. Guys who liked the same music, or movies, or whatever. Going forward, I set all those questions of taste aside and started dating men who were kind above everything else. In a related matter, I got engaged last year. Our wedding is scheduled for the summer. And no, we won’t be bringing wands.
