Heart on Ice
Most days I’m fine. I have found some sense of peace. Contentment. Even the occasional flashes of happiness.
But there are moments—never predictable—when the pain and the loss come crashing through, and I am back to That Night. When I heard the love of my life telling another woman that he felt nothing for me and loved her now.
The nights are the worst.
**********************************************
I protect myself in the ways I know how.
I work long hours because work gives me something to focus on and leaves me exhausted. This does not cure the longing I still feel after all these years—when I climb into the bed alone and have to face the fact that he will never again curl his body around mine and whisper how much he loves me.
I haven't slept well since the split. Meds help, but most nights, TikTok lulls me to sleep now—sometimes playing over and over for hours and inserting some random video in my dreams.
I only go to Walmart when I absolutely have to, because the Muzak will inevitably be playing songs that send me into a panic attack if I can’t get out of the store pronto. Songs that were the background to my longing for David in the years before we came together and then became the soundtrack to our love story.
That passionate love that healed parts of me I didn’t even know were broken. And then shattered all of me.
Of course, I rarely watch movies or TV shows now because I avoid romance/love stories at all costs. And I don’t read novels anymore for the same reason.
But recently, my daughter talked me into watching the HBO Max sensation that is Heated Rivalry. We watched all 6 episodes of the first season* on Holy Saturday.
And I haven’t been okay since.
*******************************
If you don’t know the story, it’s about two young hockey stars on rival teams, Canadian Shane Hollander and Russian Ilya Rozanov, who are attracted to each other from the moment they meet.
They sincerely do not want to be attracted to each other. They know the price they will pay if their teams and their fans find out they are gay/bisexual—and, even worse, that they are sleeping together. In their world, that would be the equivalent of treason.
If you are a sports fan, maybe you will get it when I say that the rivalry between their teams is on the level of the Chiefs vs. Raiders in football or the Celtics vs. Lakers in basketball. Epic levels of vitriol—fanned by a press corps that can’t resist ginning up a “cage match” theme every time the two teams play each other.
They are expected to despise each other. And in some ways they do. Their competitiveness with each other becomes legendary. And nothing changes that.
But their attraction to one another is so strong that they embark on a nearly decade-long…“situationship.” There are some pretty intense sex scenes between them. To listen to some people talk, your might think Heated Rivalry was a gay porn show. It isn't. For the record, I found those scenes to be tastefully—even exquisitely—filmed.
(Full disclosure—I did spend over 20 years as a public health communicator educating people about sex, of all varieties. Very little fazes me.)
Over the 6 hours of the series, there is a grand total of about 10 minutes of sex. It is a necessary part of the underlying story of how these two young men fall in love with each other under incredibly difficult circumstances. The sex starts out as just fucking—but it becomes so much more than that over time.
And this is why this show wrecked me. And why I can’t stop thinking about it.
When I look back on the time when I was falling in love with David, I can still feel the deep longing I felt then. I knew there was no way we could ever be together. And unlike Shane and Ilya do in the beginning of their relationship, I didn’t have the option of just hooking up with him a couple of times a year and skulking back to my regular life afterwards. He didn’t know about my feelings for him then—and even if he had, I knew that neither of us was cut out for that.
So I yearned for him. Could feel the electricity between us whenever we were in the same room. Fantasized about a future I knew we could never have.
Watching Heated Rivalry brought all those feelings back. Times 10.
*******************************************
I don’t think it will spoil anything to say that Shane and Ilya get their happy ending.** Jacob Tierney, the showrunner for Heated Rivalry, has been explicit about his intention to celebrate queer love and queer joy, and—in some of the very best television I have ever watched—he does.
The emotional roller coaster of the first 6 episodes always includes some sign of warmth and tenderness that leaves you feeling hopeful for these young men. In the beginning they only know how to communicate via sex, but they slowly discover that there is so much more to their relationship than that.
The heartache in this series comes from watching Shane and Ilya fight their feelings for each other. From seeing each of them tormented by their growing love—something they suffer only because they believe the world will not allow them to be themselves or to have both their careers and each other.
That hit very close to home. Over 20 years later, I still carry the psychic scars of my own battle with my feelings.
Only when Shane and Ilya reach the point where each decides the other is more important to him than the world’s approval is that heartache transformed. It is not too much to say that this show has been transformative for millions of people who have watched it.
How do I know this? Go to any social media platform and search for Heated Rivalry. The passion this show has inspired in people is beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed.
And I get it. BOY do I get it.
A lot of viewers are understandably drawn to the handsome faces and gorgeous bodies of the main actors, Hudson Williams (Shane) and Connor Storrie (Ilya). I can appreciate these actors in an aesthetic way—like looking at Michelangelo's David—but I have never found young men all that sexually attractive. Since my 20s, I have loved men with silver hair and life experience. I can’t get worked up about actors who are young enough to be my sons.
It is their acting that wrecked me. They are both so good at their craft that I felt every emotion flowing between their characters.
The raw hunger for someone you can’t even begin to explain. The burning wish that you didn’t feel that hunger at all. The longing to be seen for who you really are. The pain of losing loved ones or being rejected by family. The yearning to be touched, held, and loved. The fear that someone else will draw your person away from you. The despair of believing you will never have what you really want. The terror of exposing yourself and taking the risk of saying “I love you.” The radiant joy when you discover that the one you love actually loves you back. The teasing. The tenderness. The laughter. And the waking up to find that your dream has come true and he’s sleeping right next to you.
I watched Shane and Ilya go through all that, and I wept with happiness and gratitude that they got their much-deserved “happy ending.” The writing and acting in this series is so real that I felt every bit of their emotional journey.
Because I got my transformation too—for a while. I reached the point where I could pour out my feelings to David and learn that he felt the same about me. Where I didn’t have to school my eyes and my tongue or hide my love for him anymore. I could love him out loud. And I could sleep at night, wrapped tightly in the arms of the man who loved me.
I know that Shane and Ilya have a positive story arc because I’ve read the books on which the series is based. Even if they are fictional characters, they represent untold numbers of people who long to love and be loved without fear or judgement. I identify so closely with their story because, in a way, I have been them. They deserve EVERYTHING.
We all do.
******************************************************
But Shane and Ilya are young, with presumably their whole lives ahead of them. There is so much room for optimism and hope. Mistakes will be made—but when that happens, there will be opportunities to right wrongs and find redemption.
That is where their story guts me. I am 62 now. I know that the kind of love they share—one that is built over years in the fires of fear, pain, and longing—is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I was lucky enough to get that love. But I couldn’t keep it.
************************************************
So to protect myself, I have packed my heart in ice. I have finally learned my lesson. People change. Love dies. At some point, you just have to accept that you played the game and lost. It’s either that or die or go crazy yourself. (There were points when I very nearly did both.)
But it still hurts. More than I care to admit. I still feel that electric connection to David—even though I have become the villain in his history. I don’t want to feel it—just like Ilya and Shane fight against their connection. It is exhausting and I feel ridiculous for not being able to get past it.
But that feeling is always there—like a radio transmission searching for a receiving tower that no longer exists…
********************************************
My therapist says that the only way to get through heartbreak is to sit in it and feel it. No matter how much I have tried to avoid or bury that pain, Heated Rivalry is forcing me to feel the grief of having had—and lost—the love I always wanted.
I am trying to sit in that heartbreak. Trying to remember that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And I am still grateful to have experienced that love. So many people never even get the chance to know what it feels like.
But my heart is on ice now—frozen. Like a hockey rink. Or the tundra in Siberia.
I wish it wasn’t. I would give anything to go back in time so I could bask in the warmth of my one great love and thaw it out. To bring my heart back to joyous, pounding life and find a way to change the outcome.
But not everything is possible in this life. So I sit in the dark of my living room, watching and re-watching these lovely young men fight their epic battle to love each other. This is how I will cure my broken heart, if that is possible. I will stop avoiding the pain, which limits my life in ways both big and small.
I will remember that the pain is so great because the love was too. Rather than avoiding anything that reminds me of my own loss, I will allow myself to feel joy for people who make it through the hardships to find safe harbor with one another.
To feel again, period—without fearing that I will not survive so much feeling.
And, at some point, to be able to go to Walmart again—in peace.
********************************************************
*Season 2 of Heated Rivalry will begin filming this summer and be released sometime in 2027.
**Yes—I know there are more challenges ahead in Season 2.