Welcome to Just Break Up, the podcast about love, heartbreak, and all the relationship advice you don't want to hear.

My name is Sierra DeMolder.

And I'm Sam Blackwell.

And today we're going to answer a letter from somebody who's wondering how much to disclose about a painful moment from their past.

But before we begin, we just want to give you our Surgeon General's warning, which is that Sierra and I are not licensed mental health practitioners.

No, we are not professionals. We are not trained in any of this. So please take our advice as you see fit. We're just here at the brunch table with mimosas. You know what I mean? Like that's where our advice is coming from, not from like a degree or any like advanced knowledge.

So please take our advice as you see fit.

We're only here to offer our humble musings.

So hopefully shed some understanding and maybe some laughs about the incredibly rewarding, but mostly confusing experience that is love.

All right.

So today's letter is coming to us from guilty, anxious, conscious, whose pronouns are they, them, who is writing to us from a very messy small world.

Hi, Sierra and Sam. I've been listening for about a year and never saw myself as a writer, but here I am feeling complicated, secret feelings.

I deeply appreciate your vulnerability, more specifically surrounding your imperfection past

and the crunchy things that come up with being human that are often hard to acknowledge or

admit.

I am going to try my best to keep it short, but here's some backstory.

Me and my partner are part of the same music scene in our small city and have been since

we were teens.

We're now in our 30s, non-monogamous, and have been together for five years.

At the time of this backstory, we were friends, but not together.

I was 21.

I had just started dating a very long-distance person and was an absolute drunk mess a lot of the time.

...