Why contacting your ex is never a good idea
It might give you a short term boost, but long term it will only lead to more heartache
Whenever I am feeling really, really down about myself, I read through the emails my ex sent me after we’d broken up. He was the guy who was perfect on paper and I was the gal that he fell for big time after ending a stale long-term relationship.
We only dated for three months, but they were probably the most intense three months of my life. I blew hot and cold throughout the entire thing — sometimes I was so lovely to him that he thought we were going to be together forever. Sometimes I was the model of a perfect girlfriend, sending him cute messages and kissing his hand.
At other times, I was so cold that I left him feeling anxious and sad and unworthy. I’m not proud of my behaviour during that time. I didn’t lead him on on purpose — there were genuine moments where I thought he was the man that I was going to marry, but it took a lot of courage to admit to myself that it wasn’t right, and even more to admit it to him.
He found it difficult to accept the breakup and sent me a barrage of WhatsApp messages and emails over the following weeks and months. His tone was always unintentionally pompous and arrogant in those messages, trying to tell me how much he’d changed, how much he’d grown since we broke up, and they did nothing to make me want to get back with him, despite that being their intended purpose.
He would look for any excuse to send me a message — he wanted to take yoga classes in the same centre that he knew I went to, he walked past my house one day and thought of me, he wanted to wish me a merry Christmas and so on. My responses varied from angry, to impatient, to friendly depending on what mood he caught me in. He always had to have the last word about something and I felt as though I had to be hurtful to get him to stop messaging me.
For the months immediately after our short and doomed relationship ended, I felt liberated — lighter, and I did not look back. His almost constant communication felt like a ball and chain that he wanted to drag me back with. Then, after one particularly blunt message on my part, he finally stopped making contact and the dust settled.
About nine months after breaking up, I made the mistake of sending him an email. It was short and concise and basically told him that I was still thinking about him.
This was true, I was thinking about him, and I still am to this day, almost five years later. But the reason why I sent him the email wasn’t because I wanted to get back with him. It was because I was bored and lonely.
In those nine months, no one more interesting or kind had come onto the scene. There was no one around to make me feel special in the same way that he had done.
For a while, I rationally thought about the email. It sat in my drafts for days as I considered how wrong it was of me to open up this can of worms again. Yet I didn’t delete the draft.
One day, in a moment of extreme frustration with life, I sent it. Almost immediately he responded and wanted to meet up. He read between the sparse lines I’d written and knew that I was reaching out. After all, my last communication had told him to never contact me ever again, and here I was asking him how he was doing as if nothing had happened.
As soon as I sent it, I regretted it. The stark honest truth sat there in front of me — I had been looking for him to massage my ego, to make me feel a little less lonely.
Of all that happened between us, that email is the thing that I regret the most. It was selfish. It was gratifying to send, but dangerous to receive. He insisted that we meet, despite the emails that I sent afterwards saying what a mistake it had been to send it, that I sent it because I was feeling bored and lonely, that I was sorry to have done it to him, that nothing had changed. That I did not and would not want to get back with him. He said that it was something that could only be talked about in person, and so eventually I gave in and met him.
We had planned to get a coffee together, but as soon as I saw him I knew the futility of the situation and I told him that I was leaving. I apologised again for reopening old wounds and left. Of course, he couldn’t leave it at that and a new set of messages arrived shortly into my inbox. This time I didn’t respond and eventually, they stopped. I had hurt him yet again. I felt terrible and determined to learn from my mistake this time round.
I sometimes still read back through his emails when I’m feeling particularly insecure and they do make me feel better, but nowadays I know better than to contact him.
If you’re tempted to make contact with an ex, I’d encourage you to really grill yourself as to why you want to do it. Do you genuinely think something has changed and there might be a future for your relationship? If you say it’s just because you want to know how they’re getting on, really, really look deeply into your heart to see if that is true. And if it’s because you need a boost of self-esteem, take it from me — it isn’t fair to put your ex through that.
