A Sure Way to Get Over Your Ex: Imagine You Could Have Them Back

There can be few pastimes more compelling than ruminating on an ex: how extraordinary they were, what beauty they had, what happiness it would bring to have them back. Anyone who has searched for advice on how to get over your ex will recognise the grip such thoughts can exert. They can intrude on new relationships; they follow us into workplace meetings; they cause us to cry at certain moments in films; they come between us and the beautiful places we have travelled hours to see; they cloud our attention when we are trying to listen to a friend. Vanished lovers are the most insistent of ghosts. 

There might be one rather counter-intuitive way of dealing with the trouble: to take very seriously the one thought that we have, until now, probably been resisting – that we could, in fact, get them back. This is likely to sound, at first blush, entirely implausible. They said they were done. There have been months of silence. We had a rather cold meeting back last year. They might be with someone else, for all we know.

But let’s look at things squarely. Very often, in many cases (far more than we assume), there could be a path back. We could show up at the door and do this properly. Lay out the case, make a giant play for them – and maybe, just maybe, they’d say yes. And even if we can’t directly assume this, let’s at least allow ourselves a thought experiment.

The crucial thought experiment

The key move is to push our ideas to the next stage: what then?

Not being able to have them back prevents us from ever exploring the truly salient issue: do I actually want them back? It prevents us from analysing, with sufficient energy and realism, whether a return is truly a good idea.

So long as we think a return impossible, it is safe enough for us to say a firm ‘yes’. There is no cost to our pained but addictive imaginings. We can pick out the very best bits of the film, which almost always lie near the start of the relationship. The trip to Athens, the cosy nights in Marrakesh, the amazing three weeks on the coast in Wales… our minds circle the tender foundation points of love.

Imagining them back, properly

But we must direct our syrup-soaked minds elsewhere: to the cold light of dawn. Now they are back. The person who has grown to mythic proportions in our mind has returned. We could move in with them tomorrow. They’re with their bags in the hallway. Their train is coming in this morning. It’s not beyond imagining – and now we must imagine it.

What would it be like? Really like? We’ve been picturing them as hazily beatific. But think of those cheeks, those eyes, those hips… Think then of their character. Those habits, those ways of complaining, those enthusiasms, those values, those compulsions…

Then there’s the history. Given what happened, if they were here, we’d hate them so much for what they’d done – the time they’d wasted, the humiliations they’d meted out, their clumsiness and shiftiness – we’d want to shout at them more or less all the time. We couldn’t bear to touch them; they would be – if we look at the matter frankly – radioactive.

How to get over your ex

It’s one of these moments when the mind shows its limitations as a reasoning machine. We see that it’s prone to hold two entirely contradictory truths without colliding them. One part of the mind knows full well that they are putrid. Another insists on their perfection. We need to make some introductions to our varied parts. We need to show the impossibility of the tormenting dream by making it live as a possibility in our minds.

We stand to come face to face with a sobering truth: we don’t actually want our ex back. We want what we had at a certain time – when they were kind, when their complexities and disappointments hadn’t come into view, when we didn’t know them too fully, when we still harboured illusions. This person we loved a lot.

The person now – the person after the awful silences, those messages, the news of the betrayal, the chilly farewell – we couldn’t have them. They would disgust us within minutes. We’re crying at the pain of missing someone we’d immediately ask to leave us alone.

The route is simple. The best way to get over your ex is to think, in pedantic and clear-eyed detail, about what it would be like to have them firmly back in your life.