Why You Don’t Want Your Ex to Date Anyone Else
Image via Nick Fewings
Even in a long gone by now golden age of men who were dandies that proudly laid out their affections as well as their fleeces, and women who moved with gilded elegance, the idea that we meet the one and fall in love has been a pervasive myth. It does sometimes happen to be the case, that the first love is an enduring one. But for most people their endurance is tested in terms of how much disappointment, and consequently, how much pain they can bear throughout the course of several romantic relationships. It is not unusual that some romantic relationships end, and there are good reasons that we should want them to. What is unusual is that even when a relationship does end, and even when we no longer love a person, we sometimes refuse to accept the idea that our former beloved will go on to care for and eventually love someone else.
We harbor the wish that our exes continue to see us in a certain light. We want them to think of their time with us as a unique and singular experience that irrevocably changed them for the better. It is oddly gratifying to know that they are forlorn without us, but this wish only reveals something about our own state of mind. When a relationship ends, even one whose demise we welcome, both people enter a state of loneliness. In this painful space of separateness, we find ourselves yearning for our former foundation. Yes, there was rot, and it was filled with cracks, but it still provided something. When we diverge from the path of coupledom, we find ourselves not knowing what comes next. The feeling of being lost is what we are trying to avoid when we cling to our exes in one form or another.
We maintain a connection to an ex by trying to transform the romantic relationship into a friendship. An effort that usually fails because we have not given ourselves enough time and space to make sense of what happened and sort ourselves out. But in another sense, it “works” because sorting out and sense-making is the last thing a person wants to do when they are reeling from the pain of a breakup.
And even when we choose to expel a former lover from our life, we still want that person to think well of us. We want to feel special in their eyes even when they long ago lost the ability to spark the same reaction in ours. It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t. It makes us feel especially unique and powerful. That I could reject a person and they could still hold me in the highest regard and still want me.
It makes sense that people are dismayed when they find out their ex has a new romantic interest. They’re moving on, and if an ex is moving on then maybe we aren’t so important after all. Maybe we never were. Those kinds of thoughts are felt more than they are formulated, and they produce an aching sensation. Of course, we can’t avoid them forever, neither by turning towards the past we had with our ex or leaping into the arms of someone else without taking time for self-reflection. You can acknowledge the pain of having your ego bruised, by the mere thought of your ex caring for someone else as much as they once cared about you and accept that in all likelihood that is exactly what will happen. Their role in your story is finished for now, or forever, and all that any of us can do about it is get back to the relationship we are always in, which is with ourselves, and slowly start to rebuild.