On Seeing an Ex’s Profile on a Dating App

There will have been versions of this in other eras, of course. Seeing their name on the board for the evening dance. Spotting them on the boulevard, arm in arm with a stranger. Glimpsing them on the avenue, waiting for the nightclub to open.

But we might say: the modern world has generated a properly distinctive contribution to the canon of romantic suffering – the ache of seeing your ex (the one who became so very much against your will) on a dating site.

They used to call you ‘my lovely’. You looked after them when they had a fever. You talked them through a succession of panics around their career and their social life. You imagined a forever. Until they made vague excuses about spreading their wings and went off with friends to Oslo – and never returned.

And here they are again: polished, born anew, looking for love, without any history.

The Modern Ache of Digital Love

How different they are. What do they do on a typical Sunday? Go to the gym (no mention of their tears, chronic illness or insecurity around their sister). The way to their heart? A spaniel. Because you did something very bad in a past life, they might have used the very picture you took of them the night you tried to reconcile in that implausibly expensive Japanese restaurant.

As the whole package looks irresistible, soon enough, some innocent (a doctor or a civil servant, a broker or an art dealer) will press ‘like’, and the two will end up in a little place central or east. Over tuna cheeks and peppercorn steak, they’ll ask them about the past, and they’ll say: oh, I was going out with this person for a long while, they were great but a little heavy. They wanted too much. Perhaps I wasn’t ready. It was intense but not forever.

And they won’t be pressed for more – because we generally let these things go, especially if someone is charming and speaks gently. We imagine people might be every bit as simple as they suggest they are.

Five years will become a few sentences, just as in the history of nations hundreds of years – filled with detailed moments, the raising of the banners of the Capetians against the Plantagenets, the siege of Acre, the coronation of Charlemagne, the peasants’ revolt, the Concordat of Worms, the Black Death, Abelard and Heloïse, the burning of Jeanne d’Arc, the carving of gargoyles on the roof of Chartres Cathedral – may simply disappear into that indistinct moniker: ‘the Middle Ages’. So a whole relationship may become a brief allusion to ‘a person I was together with for a while after uni’, as a waiter sets down a bowl of olives.

Forgetting, Starting Again, and the Price of Freedom

They left because – deep down – they thought it wasn’t to do with the inherent paradoxes of love, or the resistant nature of existence, or anything to do with the tangles of their own character. It was about fit and chemistry – and, at heart, about you: your particular brand of obstructiveness and demandingness.

Who can blame them for this interpretation? Everything encourages it: the restaurants, the apps, the songs, the friends. One would need a very steady hand indeed, and a lot of weary experience, to hold on to a more sombre set of truths: stay the course, demons will follow you into every relationship, there is no getting away from challenges, stick with what you have unless it has grown unbearable for reasons you understand at depth, only dismiss love as a last resort. Who has courage for any of that?

So we regularly burn down emotional knowledge equivalent to the Library of Alexandria. We tip the whole lot of it – those conversations, nicknames, therapy sessions, diary entries and desperate pleas in the early hours – into the sea, buy a new outfit, show off one’s muscles or a hint of one’s underwear, and head back into the field, eventually winding up in a new Argentinian small plates restaurant near Covent Garden with someone whose name one momentarily forgets when they go to the bathroom. The gall of it. The hope of it.

Of course, people must be allowed to leave; we must cherish the hard-won right to start afresh, at any age, any number of times. But simultaneously, we must be able to explain – to ourselves and possibly the community – why we are doing it. Why are we dynamiting the castle? Why are we destroying five years of effort? There may be good reasons; we should be able to spell them out. We should be allowed to be free, yet only once we have displayed a thorough understanding of our contributions to disaster, once we know – fully know – what trouble we are bringing to love.

It will never be a great day when we spot our angel on an app. But the pain can be diminished when things have ended for the most intelligent, self-aware and necessary of reasons.