Lena Dunham spills on shock split from Jack Antonoff
News that Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff were ending their five-year relationship stunned fans. Here’s what led to the heartbreaking decision.
Home is where Jack Antonoff isn’t.
Lena Dunham says it was a struggle to cohabitate with the rocker, who she dated for five years, and she’s better off in her own place following their 2018 split.
“Life happened and I fell in love and whispered those terrifyingly vulnerable three words: ‘Let’s buy something’,” the Girls creator wrote in a Domino essay of their Brooklyn home. “And soon I was pounding the pavement looking for a place where we could build a future, consider children and install that much fetishised Sottsass shelf.”
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While the 33-year-old actress felt she and Antonoff, 35, were ready to take the leap and shack up, she started to realise their taste in decor was very different.
“My man was afraid of dust. So we bid on an apartment that hadn’t even been built yet, and I spent the year making obsessive scrapbooks just like my mother before me,” she wrote.
Dunham meticulously planned every detail for their home together, down to the wallpaper, pillows, art and dishes, but she said Antonoff wasn’t having it.
“He hated it,” she said. “He didn’t want to hate it. He tried not to hate it. But he didn’t like living among the insides of my mind.”
She continued, “I thought I was giving him a gift … But he wanted a Restoration Hardware couch and a giant watch to hang on the wall.”
The HBO star said she “felt sick” every time she made a design decision that countered her own taste with his, saying “love can only survive so much”. That’s when she knew they needed to end their living arrangement as well as their relationship.
“The last time I saw that apartment was when we agreed, with love, that someone had to go,” she wrote. ‘‘‘You can finally eat in the bed without anyone getting mad at you’, he said through tears.”
Quickly looking for a solution, Dunham impulsively made what she called a “massive real-estate mistake” and bought a Williamsburg, Brooklyn pad she never moved into and ended up selling for less than she paid.
But Dunham didn’t give up on finding a home she loved and has now moved into a second-floor rental in Manhattan.
“The space isn’t big but it’s perfect for pacing, and every day I do laps through all the doors like I’m in a slapstick comedy from the 1930s, amusing myself,” she wrote. “When the people on 8 tried to floor-shame me, I told them what I love about 2: If you’re an introvert and often homebound, by illness or sadness or both, it feels like the passers-by on the street are right there with you. They are my built-in friends.”
Dunham and Antonoff split up in January 2018 after dating for more than five years.
This article originally appeared on the NY Post and was reproduced with permission
Originally published as Lena Dunham spills on shock split from Jack Antonoff