We’ve all been there—even Anna Kendrick. She shares her heartbreak story in this exclusive excerpt from her new book, Scrappy Little Nobody.

The summer I turned 21, I dated a musician named Connor. Well, I thought he was a musician and that we were dating. He thought he was a screenwriter who occasionally played music and that we were “hooking up and not labeling things because labels cause drama.” He was 28 and something of an introvert. I took this to mean that he was deep and artistic and probably judged me for talking as much as I do. Once we broke up, I realized it just meant that he was kind of boring—and probably judged me for talking as much as I do.

But before that, I actually had conversations with friends that sounded like this: “Do you think I’m coming across as overeager?”

“Maybe? Why don’t you just not call him for a while and wait for him to get in touch with you?”

“Well, if I didn’t call him at all, we’d never talk again.”

(Oh. Sweet Anna.)

When we first started hooking up, I was 20. He played in bars at night, which meant that he’d spend most of the night without me and then invite me over once he got home. I reasoned it wasn’t a booty call since it was just the law that was keeping us apart; a fake ID was out of the question, since I looked like a fifth-grader on my best day. So at a certain point, my only goal became to not get dumped before I turned 21—because then I’d be able to really get my hooks in. Oh God, it hurts to write.

Looking back, it’s hard for me to understand what I was doing. Why on earth would I pursue someone who had no interest in me? It’s not like we had fun together; the man didn’t like me so much as tolerate me. I suppose the easy answer is that I hadn’t had a decent relationship yet, so I thought bagging a “cool” and attractive male was the whole objective. We would have made a terrible couple, but his indifference blinded me to all the red flags. He drove a BMW but slept on a futon. He watched the History Channel like it was a reliable source of information. Part of me knew I was only determined to bring him around because he was resisting, but the idea of acknowledging the rejection hurt more than pretending the relationship might be going somewhere.

I’d been so nervous when we met (and only got increasingly nervous as I tried to win his affection) that as a result I have no idea what I was even like around him. If I could see tape of us interacting, I doubt I would recognize myself. Who was I trying to make him fall in love with? My strategy was to just be agreeable. I had this fantasy of a braver parallel-universe version of myself, but around him I became the most sterile, inoffensive version instead.

When he said things to me like, “You use humor as a defense mechanism,” I should have said, “Yeah, and you use pithy proclamations that let you maintain your sense of superiority as a f--kin’ defense mechanism.” Instead I made a plan to be more serious from then on.

We saw each other sporadically. Sometimes I’d send a breezy text and spend the day staring at my phone until he invited me over. Our group of friends got together a few times a week, and I’d invariably end up going home with him after, so I didn’t miss one group hang-out that summer. At the time this group seemed impossibly cool; now I know their allure was wrapped up in my desire to stay connected to Connor. Also, I don’t know if being motivated by amazing sex would have made my desperation more pathetic or less, but I cannot say that was part of it.