The First Time I: Appeared on the Coldplay Kiss Cam

This is The First Time, a column where Zach either 1) writes about the first time he did something specific in his life and talks about any pop culture connections surrounding it, or 2) tries something for the first time ever in 2025 and writes about it—sees a new movie, eats a new food, etc. etc. etc.

Let me make it clear that I've never been to a Coldplay concert. I liked Viva La Vida. I liked their earlier stuff well enough. Coldplay is fine. I'm not a Coldplay fanboy by any means.

Everyone anywhere near the Internet saw what happened on the Coldplay Kiss Cam recently, whenever it was. There were memes. There were jokes. The Philadelphia Phillies parodied it at a baseball game with a bit where the Phanatics pretended to be in love, then separated quickly when they realized they were on camera.

I'll never forget when I did the Landmark Forum for the first time in 2015. It's a kind of group therapy session, but it's so much more than that. If you've done it, you know. If you've heard about it but haven't done it, you probably don't trust it. If you haven't heard about it... well, it's hard to explain.

The leader of the forum had just shamed all of us into feeling bad for not acting with true authenticity. He berated us. We were pushing back on him. My defensive side kicked in. I guess that was the whole point. I wanted to prove myself.

I got up in front of the room. There were 150 people there, all strangers as of two days ago. But we'd gone through a lot together in those two days. 

"I'm ready to be authentic," I said. "I've cheated before."

Later, people came up to me. They thanked me for sharing. I was expecting them to come at me in droves and in anger, accusing me of being a terrible person, of branding me a cheater, someone beyond saving. I'll never recover from this, I had thought. But it was the opposite. Everyone looked at me with compassion.

"Most of us have been there," one guy said to me.

The next year, when I did the Landmark Advanced Course, the leader asked the room, by a show of hands, how many people had cheated in their lives. More than half the room's hands went up. And those are just the people who admitted to it!

I have to say, I was shocked. Maybe I'm naive. But I just didn't know it was so prevalent.

And I thought back to that day in San Francisco when S and I finally broke. 

I had gone on the cross-country bike trip, having left behind a girlfriend in New York. We had agreed to make it through the trip long-distance, and she would come visit me in San Francisco when we finished.

At the beginning, when the group was still in Florida. I missed her. A few weeks in, I resented her, and the fact that I had to give her attention. Six weeks in, I went drinking with S and K, and S put her arm around me. I already thought she was interesting. She had a cool blog (heyo! once a blogger, always a blogger). She was older. She had done Ironman Triathlons. She defended me in a tense group meeting. She was from Louisiana and was a firecracker.

One week later, after the sexual tension between had risen considerably, we went on a walk together to the Grand Canyon South Rim at sunset. There was alcohol involved there, too. We ended up lying together in the grass and watching the sun set. We had crossed a line, and we kept pushing the boundaries of that line for the next two and a half weeks, a kind of beautiful and magnificent torture. We fell asleep next to each other for most of the rest of the trip. Everyone else noticed. And everyone knew I had a girlfriend back home.

We didn't kiss. That's how I justified it to myself. We gave each other late-night full-body massages in the church playrooms, and we cuddled endlessly. But we didn't kiss.

My girlfriend flew out to San Francisco for the end of the trip. She was very excited to see me. I know I was standoffish towards her. I didn't want her to be there, and it goes without saying that neither did S. My girlfriend only saw me for a few hours that day, at the church and at the farewell dinner, before she had to fly back east. We had a tearful goodbye—tearful on her end. I just wanted her to leave already.

And S and I drank heavier than we ever had. At some point we made our way to an alleyway somewhere, then to a park nearby. We kissed, and we kissed some more, and there were no justifications left.

After a month of torture and a "will I, won't I" situation, and a supposedly platonic trip to visit S in New Brunswick that obviously ended in us hooking up, heavy conversations with both parties and sneaking around a bit and feeling complete shame and disgust in myself, I finally broke up with my girlfriend. It was awful. She was devastated. And S and I started a relationship that remains my longest to this day—two years. 

I was never meant to be with my ex beyond that summer. She's married now (they're both married). The cheating definitely accelerated the breakup process. That doesn't make it good. That doesn't make it right. And yet, so many of us cheat—more than half, according to the informal Landmark poll.

I don't have kids. I don't have a family. I'm not the CEO of an AI company. I wasn't fucking my head of HR.

But who's to say the root of what I did was any worse than what Andy Byron did? Who's to say that anyone who raised their hand in the Landmark room deserved some kind of moral absolution? I don't feel bad for Andy Byron. But I do know that we all do these things. Most of us get away with them way better. And, yet, we all have that darkness inside of us. I don't think mine will ever go away.

It could have been me up there, on the Jumbotron. I'm really no different from anyone else. We all have our quirks, but we're all mostly just as flawed as the next day. We make the Andy Byrons in our lives sacrificial lambs without examining our own behavior. It's easier. It's dangerous. It's harmful.

The first time I appeared on the Coldplay Kiss Cam hurt a lot. It makes me feel better that I'm not the only one who was up on the scoreboard. It makes me feel worse that I can get away with pretending I've never been on it.