Ruminating on One’s Ex

We can spend a great deal of time – years, perhaps – wondering why certain people, whom we loved very much and who hurt us very deeply, were the way they were and acted as they did.

There can be hours in which we wonder: why did they disappear in that way? Why did they never speak up? When it would have been so easy to do X, why did they choose to do Y? Why did they not simply…? Could they not just have…? Wouldn’t it have been at once so much kinder and so much more logical to…? Was the rot there from the beginning, or did it set in later…? What was ever true, and what was a lie?

There can be an infinity of angles from which we may approach their harmful and perplexing behaviour. We pore over a timeline of events. We try to chart key moments. We appeal to a formal psychological language in the hope of defining the origins of their immaturities. There are times when we can gain immense relief from unwieldy terms like ‘borderline’ and ‘avoidant,’ ‘dismissive’ and ‘performative.’ We repeatedly inveigle well-meaning – but by now understandably weary – friends into our fevered speculations. On meals and on walks, we hijack the agenda in order to return, once again, to what are in effect fanatical seminars on the elusive, shadowy personalities who wrecked a portion of our lives.

But there comes a point, deep in the process, when we may gradually realise that it might be kinder to ourselves to declare defeat once and for all in the face of these ceaselessly tormenting psychological conundrums. Perhaps, despite all the very clever – and at times angry – theories we have marshalled, we will never know quite what drove our person’s odd and damaging behaviour. Was it disguised sadism? Was it plain infidelity? Was it a lie they couldn’t get out of? Was this an echo of their mother’s treatment of them, projected onto the present? Was it a transference from their vain sister or closed-off father? Was their entire personality based on performance and inauthenticity? Were they, to put it colloquially, simply and substantially ‘mad’? Or was it all basically fair enough – an adequate response to our own eccentricities and demands?

Alongside these questions, another priority comes to mind, more primal and more important: to look after ourselves. Perhaps it doesn’t, in the end, matter. We may conclude after months or years that what was finally up with them will never be known. We are not their therapists or their interpreters. We are not diagnosticians or seers. We are merely, first and foremost, very vulnerable. We are poor things. We can get easily hurt, and we have – here – been devastated by their unpredictability, their mystery and their evasiveness. There is, in the light of this, after yet another seminar, perhaps nothing more that we need to know or think about. These people have not done right by us. They were not ultimately on our side. They caused us entirely unnecessary pain. That is all that we can ultimately know, and all that we ultimately need to keep in mind.

It will be for others to work out precisely – if ever – what was ‘wrong’ with them. Maybe nothing much, really, or an immense amount. It’s not for us to keep up the investigations. The answers may come within a decade or two, and we won’t be the central actors anymore. We will, hopefully, have largely forgotten them by then. In the meantime, we have a far greater priority: to bandage our wounds, to care for our sorrows as a kind parent would for those of their frightened child. Enough of the exhausting psychological enquiries. We’ll never know why they were as they were. It’s a matter for the gods. All we know is that we suffered far too much – and that we have had enough. This has gone on for far too long. At this point, the task is more fundamental and more important: to put everything aside in the name of sitting quietly and compassionately with our tender, wounded selves until the ache passes. We know all we need to know already.