Dear Fuck Up: I Thought I Was Over My Ex
I was wrong.
Dear Fuck Up,
I was so excited to see that you're writing again. I've read both your pieces about getting over an ex, and I'm hoping you can talk me down here. Everything you've told other people makes sense, but I keep believing my ex and I deserve special pleading.
We started dating in high school, but this wasn't just a teenage fling. We stayed together all through college, even though we didn't attend the same school. We traveled together for weeks at a time, we visited her family at Christmas, we cooked Thanksgiving dinner together in empty dorms. She was my first love, but we grew up and matured together.
Our last semester in college, I was awarded a grant to work on a project overseas for a year, and I accepted. The terms of the grant allowed bringing a spouse, and I half-seriously proposed to her (she did not accept my marriage-of-convenience, but I would have done it). Realistically, I felt like maybe the relationship had run its course. I was young and stupid and thought I could get off with exotic international women. We had a weird bittersweet dénouement after graduation, and then I left. We chatted online intensely for almost the whole year, maintaining a close friendship while we both tried to act cool and pretend it was not a romance. At the end of the year abroad, I moved back to her city. We reconnected: sleeping together again, but not 'officially' dating. What I failed to appreciate was that she had been building her post-collegiate life for a year without me, and it was arrogant and impossible for me to assume I could just slide seamlessly back into her life. After a few months, she let me know that she was seeing somebody else, and she was choosing him instead of me.
She never cheated on me or betrayed me; I was careless with her feelings, but really I can't blame either of us for the way it all ended. Still, I was absolutely devastated and went through all the normal post-breakup angst before eventually (after a year or so) reaching some feeling of peace about the whole thing.
That was over ten years ago.
Since then, she's gotten married, and I've had a long-term partner for more than half that time. My partner is brilliant and kind and thoughtful and deserves better than what I'm feeling now.
October last year, I was back home visiting my parents, cleaning out my old room and I came across photos and letters from my ex; an old computer with our emails and chats saved on it. Seeing her — seeing us — I felt ripped wide open again. Like the last ten years meant nothing. Like I've lived everything since then in black-and-white. We were so damn young and so good together. The casual, easy way we talked, we made each other laugh, we were honest and vulnerable with each other in a way that I'd never been before (or since).
In one of your earlier replies you wrote, "The plain fact is I no longer know that one ex who managed to get stuck in my brain. I have not known him for years and years. Has he read any good books? Who did he vote for in the primary?"
At some level, I wish that were true: I wish I could meet her again and find her a stranger, unknown and unattractive to me. Maybe I would see that we could never work as an adult couple. But in my heart of hearts, I can't accept that's the case for us. I may not know the details of her life now, but I know her. I know who she is at her core. Surely I know her politics and her taste in literature?
Against my better judgment, I emailed her — a casual, slightly sentimental message. She replied the same day — funny, but cooler than my missive. She gently omitted mention of the husband.
I haven't written back. She didn't ask for my drama. But when I was at the airport, waiting for my flight home, I kept thinking, "If she messaged right now and said: 'come see me', I would get on that plane instead. I would abandon my job, I would forsake my partner. Without hesitation, I would blow up my life for her." My certainty scared me then, and it scares me now. I know there's no fairytale happy endings, and no realistic scenario where we ever get back together. So why can't I get her out of my head?
Since then, I've gone into a ridiculous, masochistic spiral: listening to music that reminds me of her, re-reading her old emails, searching online and clinging to whatever scraps of her life I can find. I recognize this isn't healthy, but I also find it hard to resist.
In a previous column, you suggested, "your obsession has catalyzed positive changes in your life as well...seize on motivation where you can find it," but isn't it perverse and Gatsbyesque if I orient my life around becoming the ideal man for a woman I haven't seen in years? How can I get to the point where I feel about her the way I do about my other, more trifling, past crushes — a fond memory, but nothing more? Alternatively, what if she really was my one great love? How do I live the rest of my life without her?
Sincerely,
A Decade Later Still Gutted
Dear Gutted,
When I was a teenager, one of my most acute fears was becoming one of the miserable adults I would encounter every so often: the teacher who kept a bottle of scotch in his desk drawer, the mother of a friend who looked constantly harried and bedraggled, the receptionist at my doctor’s office who had such a persistent air of malaise one began to question the qualifications of her boss. Because I was both fanciful and arrogant at that age, I would tell myself little stories about these sad people and how they became that way. I remember giving the teacher a background as an aspiring novelist, and picturing him coming home each night to some suitably ill-kept apartment, revising and revising a work of total mediocrity and drinking himself into oblivion.
Because I was young and stupid, I assumed that all miserable people were keenly aware of their own misery. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered how easy it is to live for years in complete denial — to the point of obliviousness — about your own condition.
Do you like anything about your life, Gutted? Do you find your job even a little bit fulfilling? Do you live in an exciting city? Do you have friends? The absence of any details about these things in your letter, save the (frankly alarming) passing reference to a kind and brilliant partner, leads me to think the answer is no. The ease with which you imagined walking away from all of it would seem to confirm that. One measure of a good life, I think, is that you feel very enmeshed in it. A good life gets its hooks into you, and to abandon one would be wounding.
What I’m trying to say is that I suspect your predicament has more to do with the profound flaws of your current life than the perfection of a past love. After all, by your own admission you had achieved a kind of peace following this break-up until that trip home made the last ten years “feel like nothing.” Until, that is, you were reminded of what it felt like to be 18 or 22 and full of promise and the expectation that the next decade of your life would feel like a great deal of something.
Which is not to imply that you are misremembering this person, or that your love was in any way less real by virtue of being a young one. I am simply pointing out that while you became adults together, you were never really able to be adults together. In fact, she has chosen to be an adult with someone else. Whether or not she was your one great love, it seems pretty clear you were not hers.
I’m sorry to put it so bluntly but the only way to ensure she doesn’t remain the one and only great love of your life is to take a clear and merciless stock of your situation. You claim that you still know this person at her core. Sure, maybe you do. My bigger concern here is that you do not know yourself. You have somehow drifted into a life — a life with another (kind, thoughtful) person — that you feel very little attachment to. Obsessing about being with your college ex is to indulge a fantasy that you can run back the clock on all of it.
When I wrote, in that previous column, about how these kinds of obsessions can sometimes catalyze positive change, it wasn't to suggest that you should create a version of yourself that the object of your obsession will love or respect. What I meant is that the initial, grubbier motivation can grow into something more durable: The desire to create a version of yourself that you can respect. A man who would not be in anguish wondering how to live his life without a woman other than the woman he is with. You are right that she deserves better than this.
I think you do have to blow up your life, Gutted. You need to blow it up because in truth it would be easy and that should not be the case given how long you’ve now lived it. You have to blow up your life not to realize some fantasy of reuniting with your one great love, but to have even the smallest chance of experiencing a second.
Love,
A Fuck Up
What lovely, gentle advice. I didn’t even know I needed to read it until I did.