Recently I ran into an ex by chance, my first ex. We chatted for the first time in thirteen years. The atmosphere was friendly, funny even. However, if I remember correctly, I had got rid of him rather clumsily at the time. No, my termination of our relationship had not been very neat. Fortunately, he was gallant enough not to say anything. Oh well, we had been muddling through teenagers back then. Not that we have completely risen from the swampy banks of the relational swamp today, but we have gained a number of instructive, albeit sobering experiences.
The subsequent ex had also unexpectedly reappeared in my life. The spoiled bourgeoisie scion of yesteryear had turned into an enlightened one soul searcher. Nowadays we sometimes take a yoga class together.
With my last ex, on the other hand, it is not yet possible to be on good terms. Maybe more years have to pass, or maybe some fractures are just too painful to fully recover from. Still, it took me a long time to accept that radio silence. I thought it was a moral deficit, a defect of character on my part. In the meantime I think differently regarding that, because why would it necessarily be a shame never to speak to someone who was once your partner? Could it not be that such a conscious negation of each other’s existence indicates an all-crushing meaning rather than the lack of it?
“You were my everything, and now I have nothing,” sighed a former lover in those first, unreasoning months following the dissolution. A few weeks later he had a new lover. Yet I quite believe that his words were sincere at the time of his pronouncement, or at least he thought so. I too have already committed similar boasting and then fell in love with someone much faster than expected.
Lovers possess, to paraphrase the late philosopher Patricia De Martelaere, a passionate kind of indifference. It allows them to cling to love, fervently believing that their loved one is unique, knowing deep down that everything will come loose. It is a matter of chance rather than predestination that this beloved and no other is in our bed. But that thought is so maddening that we prefer not to allow it.
Who knows, that may be the most depressing part of every love break that isn’t the first: the memory of the repetition, the realization that you have to do everything all over once more from A to Z. Although of course you have to tell yourself with the next lover that there will be no more Z this time. Otherwise you are lost in advance.
By way of incantation, my current partner and I recounted our breakups at length before our relationship began; as honestly as possible all our mistakes and other misfortunes committed to each other. Whether it will protect us from that cursed banishment to shadowy exendom is impossible to predict. Yet I believe in it passionately.
