To Hell and Back… When an Ex-Lover Gets Married
Tune into the song that goes with the memories.
Dealing with the overwhelming pain when the one person you still hold feelings for gets married..
It’s that all-too-familiar stab in the chest. It turns into a knot in my stomach and unravels as an inconceivable feeling of powerlessness and rejection.
Two years ago I fell in love for the first time — and only time — within the bounds of my open relationship. The moment I met him, he felt familiar and I was drawn to him before we even finished our first coffee. He had the most charming of mischievous smiles and tousled blond hair. An hour later, I already felt this pull to snuggle up to him, smell his hair and feel his lips explore my collarbone, neck and ear. It was a matter of moments until lust overcame the both of us and we ended up at his place, leaving a trail of clothes from the living room, into the shower and over to his bedroom.
It ended half a year later because we lived in different cities and with both of us free to date other people, he met someone he liked (more).
So when he met her, it sort of fizzled out. The last time we had sex was a mere week before he was going on holiday with her. He was still very undecided if he was ready to jump into a new relationship and whispered into my ear that in bed, he actually preferred me. I, of course, took his hesitance as a sign of how much he enjoyed the freedom he had with me. Since we didn’t live in the same place, we were used to irregular hookups, leaving it up to chance if we’d see each other again before they’d become exclusive (if they ever would).
At this stage, I was right in the middle of this all-consuming phase where you’re just finding out who this other person is. I was completely inebriated by the endorphins he stirred up in me, and utterly blinded by reality.
So when they did finally become official, I largely took it as temporarily monogamous. I didn’t take their relationship seriously, so I didn’t have to deal with the rejection it implied — the pain that he had chosen her over me.
This was the hardest part to say out loud:
Neck-deep in denial, I had subliminally decided on waiting it out. The time would come when he would be single again and then, surely, we’d be right back at it, impossible to resist one another. Who knew how our lives would turn out? Maybe we’d even get a chance to see where things might go if we gave it a real shot. (Never mind that I’m in a happy relationship. This dream world didn’t confront any realities, it only satiated my desires. I couldn’t stop thinking about a parallel universe in which I got a glimpse at how life would’ve turned out with him in it.)
Just under a year after we’d last seen each other, I stumbled upon his new Whatsapp picture somewhere deep down in my chat archives. And there he was, a big smile on his face, swirling his new bride around a flower-adorned ballroom. They had been dating for about 13 months. She was pregnant.
This was not how it was supposed to go.
It hurt so much and so deeply. It knocked my breath away for a good few seconds. I felt an unparalleled hatred for her when I knew I should be happy for him. I was also sitting in the living room with my boyfriend and brother. My brother who doesn’t even know about the open relationship and my boyfriend who thought I’d left my feelings for this guy long behind. (As did I, until I stood corrected.) In short, it wasn’t a moment that allowed me to fall apart.
There is a 90-second rule that I revert to, whenever feelings become so overwhelmingly strong that they become paralysing.
Our emotions are driven by neurochemicals. In this case, mostly norepinephrine which is part of our fight or flight response. All my anger, the pain, disillusionment, rejection and resentment, are part of this biological response. Research found, that in a mere 90 seconds, most of these neurotransmitters will have flushed out of our system, however [1].
In a way, this is good and bad news. It means that after 90 seconds, we are not ruled by the overload of chemicals in our brains anymore. A few deep breaths can go a long way, indeed.
On the flip side, it also implies that any pain I feel after those initial one-and-a-half minutes is because I choose to be stuck in the agony.
Sometimes simply knowing about this mental trick helps me to pull myself out of a downward spiral. This time, it only got me far enough not to break out in tears in front of my family and call my best friend instead.
Spoiler, it did hurt for longer than 90 seconds. Ten minutes later, I was on my way to my best friend who happened to have plans to go to the sauna, so this is where the next 3 hours unfolded.
On the tube ride over I started to rationalize everything away.
He had just started a business, surely having a child in the first year of his start-up wasn’t planned?! They weren’t even together for that long! I mean, clearly, he‘s just getting married now, because they’re expecting. And why on earth did he hide all of this from me? I messaged him when I saw the picture, congratulating him, and wishing them all the best. When I asked when she was due, he stopped responding. It’s still the last message in the chat, to this day.
Unsurprisingly, this time around, the news were a full-on slap in the face. I thought I had long moved past it when all I had truly done was bury it somewhere deep down. But worse, I also thought I had grown as a partner, learning from the aftermath. The flings that followed in the year after him were more emotionally detached. So when the pain of rejection hit me with full force I was unsettled just by how much power he still had over my emotional world.
Sitting in the sun chairs at the spa, my best friend started telling me about his story of his lost love. And how he likes thinking back to the nostalgia of her. It’s meaningful to have loved so intensely, to have met such a beautiful person in the first place. His story helped me realize that I rather feel the pain, then to never have met him in the first place. Even if it was a short encounter I did, after all, choose all of this willingly.
The perspective also helped me to admit to myself how I had made it even harder than it needed to be.
I never accepted the first rejection. I ignored it. Which allowed me to elegantly paused my feelings instead of dealing with the breakup then and there. But I also never accepted the reality in which I was more into him than he was into me. Because it ended before we got a chance to see how things would play out, my dopamine-high left me clutching onto this belief that we would make a perfect pair in some alternate universe. And I made it worse, by dreaming up a future that still had him in it somewhere. But the reality was, that I was in a relationship that I wasn’t willing to give up for him back then and I’m still not willing to give up now.
So whilst it hurt like hell, the distance I had gained from the situation (and my best friend’s encouraging words) helped me to look past the dream world and slowly start to accept the facts for what they were.
He is married and it doesn’t matter if he is crazy in love or accidentally impregnated her and struggling to do right by her.
I loved the moments I had with him, all the growth he sparked in me and the memories I still enjoy looking back to. But I’m ready to choose acceptance over self-deceit. I don’t know how life will turn out and if we ever cross paths again, but for now, it’s time to delete his number.
So I listened to our song whilst archiving old pictures away. Read those funny messages one last time and removed him from my insta, before finally deleting the chat and banning the song from my playlist.
Having the courage to honour the truth, was liberating at last.
