How We Help Our Exes Have a Lovely Future

One of the most galling and drily comedic things about relationships is that many of the struggles we had with our now ex-partners – though they appeared circular and fruitless at the time – are likely to be precisely what will help them to become, in the future, ideal partners … for someone else. It’s the very difficulties we had – the arguments, blind spots and stalemates – that will prepare them for unions filled with insight, harmony and serenity next time around. Unbeknownst to us, we may, for a long while, have been in the business of helping someone else to be very happy.

There will typically be few signs of our unwittingly selfless groundwork. The fraught closing stages of the relationship are unlikely to have seemed like an emotional finishing school or a forum for psychological maturation. There might have been a succession of seemingly sterile fights when we questioned why they spent so much time obsessing about their brother or expecting their mother to rescue them. There might have been a variety of tense conversations about certain friends or their approach to work. We might have been accused of being ‘mean’ or ‘overly critical.’ Perhaps there was a sulk that lasted twelve hours, and a moment when they called us a blockhead and we told them we wished we’d never met them (even though, or precisely because, we loved them so deeply).

We can be charitable towards these choppy moments. Relationships typically involve sincere attempts by both partners to raise the other’s levels of self-awareness and empathy. None of us is perfect, and the arena in which these imperfections are first identified and grappled with is in the close-up conditions of love. The problem isn’t our mutual educational intent, but the terrible way in which it’s generally carried out. We are, on the whole, very poor ‘teachers’ and equally bad ‘students’. In the ‘teaching’ role, we spot multiple things in our partners but are so worried that they won’t understand or change that we almost guarantee they never will. We address them in high-handed, urgent moods. We forget that no one has ever learnt anything by being humiliated. We try to get them to see a vital point in the middle of the night, when we are both exhausted, or on the way to the airport or a doctor’s appointment. We forget to deploy humour and reassurance. We think it will help things if we spice up our lessons with phrases like ‘and everyone knows this about you …’ or ‘you’re exactly like your dad …’ And when we are in the ‘student’ role, we are equally unimaginative, brittle and hasty: we swiftly resent the partner for spotting something complicated in our characters that we know, deep down, needs addressing, and disingenuously complain to our friends that our partner doesn’t love us ‘as we are’ (as though anyone should ever do such a thing). In fear, we regressively equate true love with boundless approval. We cannot allow that someone should both be deeply on our side and justly want to criticise us.

Nevertheless, once the heat has gone out of the moment, once we have taken the decision to part and cried alone in our apartment over many weeks, some of the things we most wanted to get across to our partners (and they to us) will finally have a chance to be absorbed. When the other is no longer in the vicinity, when a point isn’t being made with vehemence or insistence, it can become easier to think that yes, perhaps, there might have been something to reflect on – about one’s relationship to a sibling or a parent, a friendship or a professional matter. Pride is no longer on the line. Dignity is no longer ruffled. When the ‘classroom’ has been blown up and the teacher dismissed, homework can finally begin.

And so, months or years later, our erstwhile partner may arrive in a new relationship with the fault lines we fought over with such agitation now substantially healed. In their attractive outfit (which we bought with them), gazing into the middle distance, they may casually remark: ‘I had some problems with my brother a while back, but that’s all sorted out now …’ Or they may, as they pour themselves a little more white wine, explain with uncommon sagacity that ‘making time for personal life is very important to me, however much I enjoy my job’ – and the new partner will take delight in how extraordinarily grounded and poised their beloved appears to be in so many ways.

It could sound like the grounds for bitterness – were it not for one redemptive detail: the process is likely to be two-way. With any luck, we too will eventually meet someone who appears, entirely naturally, to have a deep understanding of themselves, a mature way of relating to their flaws and a deft way of sailing over the complexities in their character. They will apologise before we even think of saying anything, they’ll seem miraculously open to feedback over certain topics, and their insight into the complexities of their past will awe us. We’ll think that this is the way they were born. No one will know –  and everyone will feel – after so many tears with their tricky ex, hugely blessed.