all was golden

Part 1: Ryan’s high school girlfriend, S—

Part 2: Jac Vanek

Part 3: Keltie Colleen

Part 4: Kate Marie Thompson

Part 5: Cape Town

Part 6: Z Berg (TBA)

Part 7: Helena Vestergaard (TBA)

The Tragic Love Life of Ryan Ross is an ambitious seven-part series exploring the different women in Ryan’s life from 2004 to now. Using a combination of lyric analyses, blog posts, tell-all autobiographies, interviews, photographic evidence, and more, we hope to explain how and why these women have affected Ryan (and his career) over the years and clear up some misconceptions in the fandom.

We’re going to update this table of contents with each new post, but we also thought it would be helpful to have one concise location to find them all for the time being. If you want to be notified when we post the other parts, feel free to drop us a message. :)

courtesy of me and @a-detuned-radio

we’ll keep it to events related to ryan & b or we’ll have a never ending post and I don’t think anyone wants that.

2004 - brendon meets ryan, becomes lead singer of the band. we know very little of this period of time so i couldn’t say for sure if anything happened between that and 2006 but.. safe to assume that brendon was starstruck & probably developed some kind of crush on ryan.

2005 rolled by, and so did afycso. nothing much there either, but then came 2006.

2006 started off as the year of jac vanek and audrey kitching, girlfriends of ryan and brendon respectively. they’re known to have exchanged messages about how one of them turned the other gay, though I can’t vouch for the veracity of these screenshots.

either way, both relationships were short lived and ended in early 2006, which means that in the summer of that year, they were both decidedly single. ryan was probably still recovering from his break up, and brendon rekindled his flame for ryan (ok, i say flame but god knows how infatuated he was)

and then, june 24th, 2006, it’s myrtle beach. we all know those interviews

from greta, who was on tour with them:

Q: Tell us about your craziest touring experience.

A: On the 2006 Panic Tour, we played the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach [JUNE 24TH]. After the show, most of the bands and crew walked a mile to the beach and, having not brought our swimsuits, decided to swim in underwear or totally nude. Bob and I opted to skinny dip and, at one point, he was trying to get back to the shore but the waves were crashing over him and he was gasping for breath. I yelled to him, ‘Bob, are you going to live? As much as I want to help you, we are both naked so I can’t.’ (Would have been far too awkward). Thankfully, he survived in one glorious piece.

or dream, one of the dancers:

Sat, June 24th, 2006

It’s our last night in Florida and let me tell you… this finally turned into a crazy rock tour… lots of shenanigans happened tonight… but I’ll save this story for the memoirs! Every night I stand on stage and tell the crowd that Brendon is a virgin… let’s just put it this way… it ain’t true!!!!

and more famously, two of ryan’s lj entries.

Sat, June 24th, 2006

I’m the ghost in the bed.you can touch because i can’t rest. and the lights are always off so I can mold you in the dark.i can shape and pretend.”i just want to have a good time, just like everybody else, but i don’t want to fall apart”

Sun, June 25, 2006

The moon bred new Atlantic life tonight.the salt burned you right out of my eyes.and secrets we’re not proud of were taken with the tide. We were all newborns with blurred vision and no sense of direction.

Today I saw cancer, cigarettes and shortness of breath.

this is why I walk to the ocean.swim with jellyfish.I may never get this chance again.

this is why if you want to kiss you should kiss.

If you want to cry you should cry, and

if you want to live you should live.

You don’t have to love me. You already did. At least enough to keep me smiling from South Carolina to Virginia.it’s for lovers (orjustfriends)

This is why I do it.

now, i’m not saying it was about brendon, but ryan definitely had a fling with someone then. the first post suggests that he wants to forget about his recent breakup, and that someone can help him do so by, well, you know, sleeping with him. he doesn’t seem to want to be emotionally involved, though.

from this point on, they could’ve had a friends with benefits situation going on all through the summer, which would make sense with all the summer references throughout panic’s discography. (namely “in the middle of summer,” “summer’s on its deathbed,” etc)

on we go to late august 2006, their triumph at the vmas. that’s where ryan met keltie for the first time, immediately sending her a note inviting her backstage. brendon’s performance was shaky that night, either because of the pressure on him, or the fact that he could tell ryan was interested by keltie. (or both!)

in august 2007, on ryan’s birthday, keltie throws him a tone deaf party in new york city, which is famously followed by him flying to seattle & a fan getting a picture of him and brendon together. now, what’s important to know is that they did have a show on september 1st, and getting there made sense because the rest of the band already was.

however, my theory would be that that’s where ryan finally told brendon just how serious about keltie he was, and that their casual relationship would have to end there. - which would coincide with this video  of brendon breaking down in seattle during the song casual affair

over the course of 2008 - nothing in particular to say, apart from the fact that ryan was becoming increasingly dependent on keltie and that their relationship clearly wasn’t healthy.

kerrang! interview from 2008 (ew)

and something from keltie herself, from her 2010 autobiography “rockettes, rockstars and rockbottom”

“I was a girlfriend and a taskmaster. I kept him focused, and I sewed his clothes and managed his calendar. I made sure someone came to clean the house. I did his laundry, I paid his bills on time, and I paid my bills on time but for a completely different address. I called his family with updates and sent birthday cards when necessary. I did this because I loved him and he needed help. I did this because it was only after all these things were taken care of, that [Ryan] and I could snuggle up and just be ‘us.’” (RRR, p126)

this.. made ryan feel like shit, like he was pretty much useless and unworthy of love - hence, she had the world. (who could love me? i am out of my mind)

what’s important to note is that even though she was probably in love with him by this point, she remained very much in love with her previous boyfriend at the beginning of their relationship and knew ryan was more infatuated than she was.

on brendon’s side, he had met sarah (who was dating someone else at the time) in 2008. one theory could be that he liked her so much partly because he knew ryan wouldn’t move on from K.

in february 2009, ryan and keltie broke up. to me, this is when ryan and brendon fell back into old habits, brendon probably was just happy about it and didn’t question it too much.

and then, somewhere between then and july 2009, brendon realised that ryan was still trying to get keltie back - and he couldn’t understand why. she’d made him feel shitty, made him dependent and had disappointed him time after time.

this - the fall out. this was when it couldn’t go on anymore, when brendon realised that ryan could never see him, love him like that. he probably started to grow distant & ryan started writing songs with jon, which ultimately caused the split of the band in july 2009.  

cape town wasn’t necessarily the breaking point, although ryan’s fling there mustn’t have helped.

and that’s all i have for you today, folks. the information i have lines up with this.