Do we ever get over our exes?

On giving up the ghost, letting go & past love. Since we're all friends here ...

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If you asked me what I’m afraid of, I’d tell you it’s heights and needles. Being suspended in the air with no soft place to land, or being jabbed by something sharp enough to delve into me are both scenarios I feel totally out of control and helpless. The same feeling was recently stirred up in me by walking down the canal paths that snake around Victoria Park one weekend. If you date in London, you might know why.

As prams pushed by the Lululemon yummy-mummy parade scooted past me, whilst small dogs in jumpers and coats that matched their owner’s sniffed my ankles and a continuous stream of attractive, well-dressed people flocked together, my heart suddenly jumped up my throat and sat in the back of my mouth.

My hands tensed around the handles of the tote bag adorning my shoulder with such intensity that my knuckles turned white. I tried very hard not to vomit directly onto the back of the man’s tiny beanie-adorned head in front of me. This was, in my mind, the only plausible reaction to suddenly locking eyes with your ex you haven’t seen in nearly 2 years.

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I'll admit that the term “ex” can be used loosely here. But it’s far easier to use that label than to divulge every detail about why what I called a ‘relationship’ then doesn’t come close to how I’d describe it now. It was more of a year-long car crash in slow motion, which took months to get over.

It dawned on me that I had no escape here. I couldn’t fling myself into the canal, I couldn’t scale the shrubbery on my left and I certainly, categorically, could not say hi to him and make small talk.

In the haze of my rabbit in the headlights impression stare that felt like it lasted years, not a mere 30 seconds, I clocked that his hand was grasping someone else’s. My heart went back down my throat and landed in the pit of my stomach this time instead, blistering and burning in the acidic dwelling as I realised I was about to walk past not just my ex, but my ex with his new girlfriend.

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When we did call things quits for good, a year after our ‘official’ break up where we had been flailing in and out of each other's lives feigning friendship, it was abrupt. We had prodded and poked each other’s boundaries for too long, chipping away at them until the cracks turned into a full-blown collapse of our foundations. Our once naively tangible threads of chance at remaining in one another’s lives had overnight been severed, over a disagreement that to anyone else would be small, but that told us both we had gone too far.

As I stared down at the ground, it felt as if a truck had run me over and spat me out in a mangled heap. My ears felt as if they were ringing, my mouth suddenly dry, I chanced a glimpse at this goddess-like creature who was in his clammy grasp. How does a narcissistic man with commitment issues manage to wrangle such a catch of a woman? I pondered on what people must have thought when they saw us walking hand in hand all that time ago.

Exes are inevitably the ghosts we never let go of. Feelings can change, granted, but sometimes the imprint they’ve left on us is far too deep to forget about altogether. Their presence can hang around for longer than we intended, sometimes making their way back into our beds even when we know it’s wrong. We knowingly, but secretly, hurt others as we do it for the sake of a final taste of what we let go of. Or do we do it to test whether or not we’re really done loving them?

Perhaps ghosts isn’t the right term to use. Because they’re not spirits we debate the reality of, we can’t question their existence. They’re made of flesh and bone that we once held and cradled adoringly. They walk among us, like the living dead, reminding us why we moved on and why it didn’t work whilst they carry a piece of our old heart on their sleeve - if we ever truly gave it to them, that is.

In the long run, our exes shape us into who we are in the next relationship we form. Our ideas of what it means to be loved are moulded by them for better or worse and our time with them shows us, like a mirror we don’t want to face, the things we must work on within ourselves to be happy.

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In an act of big girl bravery, I looked up, ready to lock eyes with the man who would have to email me to get in touch if he wanted to. I took in the details of him to prepare myself. The beard, the stature, the piercing eyes, even down to the monochrome outfit and the laces on his shoes. It was like looking back at an old painting, dusted off from the attic of my mind having been hidden in the back for so long.

My mouth curled up into a small, mindful smile as if my face were waving a white flag of surrender and peace. I would take the high road, I thought, and if he chooses to simply stare through me as if I were made of glass, then so be it. At least I tried.

But as he drew closer, I realised that like a mirage in the desert, I had conjured up the very thing that had knocked the wind out of me. This imposing figure in front of me wasn’t the man I had spent my energy pining over, the man I had emptied my cup for in an attempt to keep what we both agreed was a palpable, intense kind of adoration that one could say was love. He looked just like him, but it wasn’t the same person.

I sighed out the anxiety with deep relief and brought myself back down to earth, refocusing on the conversation I had become disengaged with. As the mystery doppelganger passed us by, I grabbed my friend’s arm and said, “Gosh, I really thought that was -”.

She turned around promptly, checking for me without being asked to see if it was indeed he who shall not be named. “If it was him, at least he’s walking the opposite way to you now.”

Holding onto our former ties too tightly can be detrimental. But no matter how good or bad the breakup was, letting go of the idea of them is what sets us free. The people from our past only continue to haunt us if we let them.

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