How Do I Know the Worst Excuses for Keeping Your Ex Close? I’m Guilty of Them All
The Long Con: Play it cool and win him back later.
The Long Con: Play it cool and Win Him Back Later
Is the number one worst reason I’ve ever come up with to stay in touch with an ex. Sure, getting rejected hurts, but maintaining contact with someone who turned me down was a relentless soul-crushing cycle. It also meant I was living in a world of self-delusion.
This guy and I hit it off amazingly. We were party buddies, I got to know his friends, and I loved the endorphins rollercoaster we were on. It was clear that both of us were cool to keep dating other people, but once I met him, I lost interest in the endless tinder-swiping.
A month or two later, a message popped up from him. He explained he was seeing someone, and things had progressed to a point where being intimate with others (meaning me!) wasn’t cool anymore.
Reality check: this is over.
But my delusional bubble painted a completely different story. My notion of “let’s be friends for now and rekindle things later” meant that I stopped myself from moving on. In my mind, we had just hit pause on our story as opposed to ending it. I chose to interpret his message as: I’d love to see you, but can’t right now. So I essentially never acknowledged the rejection, while patting myself on the back for being so mature and detached.
Lo and behold, they only dated for 3 months and we ended up in the bedroom again. Triumphantly I thought: “Ha! See?? I knew it!”
But on second thought, I realised that while I had been (subconsciously) waiting for him, he had moved on. For him, it was rebound territory; for me, it was supposed to be a reunion, full of unicorns and glitter.
My entire game plan rested on the notion that their relationship was doomed, and I was just too irresistible for him not to come back.
Okay, perhaps it’s time to recalibrate my self-esteem a notch?
I won’t lie, I didn’t regret the rebound sex. But I did regret not having had the strength to deal with the rejection head-on.
The “Post Breakup Insta Story Likes” — are we done, or are we addicted?
The first one is hands down the worst excuse to cling on because it ended up undermining my self-respect. Now, this one, led me down a path of disrespecting someone I genuinely cared about — all because the high of his attention was too damn addictive.
He was the kind of guy who unleashed my wild side. Our escapades included dates like autumnal skinny-dipping, not to mention a few other less-than-legal things best left unspoken. He considered himself an “alpha male” and could not deal with the fact that I was non-monogamous and had a boyfriend. We could share an intense moment and out of the blue, he’d toss out questions like, “What does he give you that I don’t?”
It naturally ended for exactly this reason.
But neither of us really wanted it to end. Which is why we were both having trouble staying away from the other. When we stayed in touch it was mostly him texting me, wanting to know how I was doing. Was I missing him, too?
Honestly, show me a woman who doesn’t feel a little flutter when someone confesses they’re missing her. Each time I responded, I was fully aware that I was keeping the connection alive for all the wrong motives. Admitting to myself that I was becoming someone who relished attention, even if it came at another’s expense, was painful. I wasn’t prepared to face the truth that I was, well, being a jerk.
But eventually, I did admit it to myself. We cut off Insta and stopped the banter. Occasionally, he still crosses my mind, and I ponder if fate will ever decide to throw us back into the same orbit. Here’s to hoping, for both our sakes, that it doesn’t.
The “Just Curious About His Life” Alibi
Perhaps the least justifiable, yet remarkably self-deceptive among the bunch. It wears a mask of harmless curiosity while hiding behind various pretexts I come up with. After all, it’s just a “friend” I’ve moved on from completely, a solid 120% over him. Honestly, he barely crosses my mind these days.
“I just need his advice on something. It’s his intellect I’m after, not his attention.”
Is there really no other person at all that could help out in his place?
I’m well aware that this was my go-to excuse, whenever I knew we wouldn’t get back together, and he wasn’t messaging me because — well clearly — he wasn’t thinking of me. So I’d go ahead and I message him, with some semblance of a question or justification. All the while, I secretly knew those fleeting endorphins would surge the moment those three telltale dots materialized, announcing that yes, indeed, YOUR EX is typing…
It’s almost absurdly wild. It’s as if I got a twisted sense of validation from his response as if his reply signified I still held his attention. What a convoluted way to make a complete fool of myself.
The genuine takeaway isn’t about compiling an exhaustive list of justifications. For me, it boiled down to recognizing the underlying patterns of self-deception and using that insight to break free from it.
Detecting self-deceit before (not after!) stepping into it, is one of them. Another crucial lesson is cultivating acceptance, actually embracing the realities instead of sidestepping them. The most effective one, however, is probably to detach my sense of self-worth from the sting of getting rejected. In all the above examples I wasn’t the one who ended it. So naturally, I took the rejection more personally. In a way reaching out to them, was my way of taking back a little control over a situation that was long in the past.
Ironically, it really only affected my self-esteem because I let it. Once I dug deeper into why I felt compelled to resurrect these connections, the supposed “satisfaction” of reaching out vanished.
