Earlier this year I was sitting on the train, looking at my friend as she was telling me about a breakup. She was in a lot of pain. It wasn’t because of the reason for the breakup itself but because she was coming to the realisation that, really, she would likely never see the person she was breaking up with again—at least not on good or loving terms. If she were to see this person, she said, she would only ever feel bad or bad adjacent.
I am someone who has always been of the belief that it is no good trying to have a friendly relationship with an ex. I consoled my friend and told her she was better off not barking up the impossible ex tree. Two days later I met a lover, who, later on, broke up with me over a cup of fresh mint tea (very poly vibes, deeply aesthetically displeasing, but he was hot). He was a good guy, and the relationship ended because he didn’t feel like he had the space to develop feelings for someone in London since he was moving to Berlin. Once again: very poly vibes.
And then he landed the punch line. You know the one: the lie we tell to soften the blow, the deception we accept to ease the pain. “I’d love it if we could still be friends…” and—wait for it—“maybe we’ll find ourselves together in the future.”
Of course, I agreed with him: Yes, let’s be friends, sure, we might be together in the future, blah blah…. Get me out of here before I cry or die of humiliation. As someone who has both fooled with and been fooled by the easy-out breakup routine, I knew better. And that’s okay: I am an adult, I am in a committed marriage, some people don’t want to be with me, and that’s okay, I tell myself. I don’t want to be with lots of people, I tell myself.
Time passed. My friend and her ex got back together. Some more time passed, and they broke up again—and thank God because the way we all shit-talked him did not make for easy dinner-party chats.
And then my ex messages me: “Hey, I’m in London. Do you want to grab a drink?”
I rub my eyes: Is he…serious?
I ask my husband whether to go for this drink, and he says go for it. Enough time has lapsed that I don’t feel the need nor the want to have sex with him; the pangs of missing his presence in my life and on my phone screen have all but gone, but there is a warmth that rings through me when he messages. So I message back.
And over a year, we will see each other six times: twice in Berlin, the rest in London except once at Glastonbury. We will kiss once, we will hold hands once, we will tell each other we could have loved each other once. We will cry once, we will laugh loads, and we will come to the very movie-of-the-week realisation that we are now friends, that we are better off that way, and that this feels like a different idea of love, of connection—something truly platonic: intimate and affectionate but not sexual. We learn together that we can retract from each other in some ways and grow toward each other in others. And to me this is a somewhat revolutionary idea, afforded to me in part because of the open nature of my relationship. Our future would not be conventional unless I left my husband, which is not in the cards right now.
I grew up on rom-coms and celebrity gossip: People were in and out, all or nothing, cheating or faithful. The worst thing that could happen, the ultimate failing in a relationship, was its end. That’s what my friend was mourning on the train, and it’s what led me for so long to imagine I was a failure in love because I’d had so many technically failed relationships. But within them, as I am reminded by some of my ex-lovers now, there was a lot of love, a lot to be cherished and savoured and developed. We didn’t work romantically for various reasons, sure, but a lot did work between us.
Now this is not an excuse to text your ex. Some, if not most, must be kept in the past. A comfortable relationship with an ex is not always possible. In my experience, a lot of the hurt that occurs at the end of relationships is irrevocable, and reconnecting with this person only reminds us of how we failed each other.
But I used to think this is how my future would go: Try to find a forever person, fail at it lots, until one sticks. Then, with them, it’s only success! But even that seems absurd: There are so many moments in a monogamous relationship or primary partnership where we fail each other, where we fall out of step with each other, where the nature of the love changes and grows. To me that’s an exciting future in love, one which includes forgiveness, reimagining, and maybe even some old flames. And who’d have thought that an ex would teach me that?
This article first appeared on Vogue.com
Also read:
A rebound can often be the best thing to happen to you—here’s why
How to break up with someone over text after a casual relationship
