Unresolved, unjustified, and unfair – a letter to my ex

[healingwords]

Dear Ex,

My emotions are so conflicting when I recall your former presence in my life.

I developed feelings for you so soon, so deeply that it feels unfair that I’ve been left with the short end of the stick.
From day dot, from before we met, I had already made so many accommodations for you. I assumed the best of you, gave you the benefit of the doubt, always looked at you in the most positive light that I could, even when it was not easy for me to do so.

As time would have it, the reality of who you were began to show and the rosy glasses began to fall off, yet I chose to accept who you are even when I began to see that you weren’t the perfect woman who I imagined you to be. I chose commitment and acceptance over perfection. I gave of myself to you. I made sacrifices of my own for us. I stood up for you, I comforted you, helped you to value yourself and learn to stand again on your two feet. Time and time again I gave of myself, I cared, I put you first, so that you wouldn’t have to cry. So that you wouldn’t have to carry your burdens alone, feel burnt out, overwhelmed, anxious, and misunderstood, even if it came at the cost of my own sleep, even if it cost my own energy, my own time, and my finances. I went well out of my way when I had to, so that you had at least one person who you knew would always have your back when you suffered.

When your situation started to improve, we were able to laugh more. You started integrating yourself in my church community, met my friends, and we started to integrate our lives with each other. We made exercise and self-care priorities for our lives, and activities that we shared. I looked out for us, and at times, you would look out for me – usually when I least expected you to. You’d catch me off guard & I’d be moved at how sensitive you were to me in those moments when I didn’t even think I needed the attention that you gave. I was sure that you would be my one. Even though I knew you weren’t perfect, even though I knew the relationship would require me to give more than I had ever given. So, we made plans. I would propose to you, and your father had even given his blessings. We would go on a road trip, and I would propose to you with the ring we had resized for you – the one you never got to see in person because I always had you wear a silly sleeping mask so the ring would remain a surprise until the day! I’d have the photographer I arranged in secret take photos of the proposal. Then 6-months later we’d be married, as we had planned. Just how we had it locked in with our pastor and our families. But here we are today.

You’re probably at your own home with your puppy, while I am at mine. We are no longer having those after-work dinners where we’d catch up, laugh, and talk about our day – the highs and the lows – over some good food. We aren’t worrying about your puppies needs together anymore. We aren’t looking forward and planning a future together, texting each other throughout the day, planning dates for the weekends. We aren’t going to church together anymore and planning catchups with our families and friends. I don’t know what you’re doing with your time, but I can only imagine that – or maybe I’m too optimistic – that you miss some of these moments too, some of these routines, plans, and shared activities we once did. I feel like part of you would.

Yet I know that a part of you despises me, because you expressed your negative feelings towards me when you decided to breakup and to also not follow through with any couples counseling. You told me we had differences, differences we both knew, but were unequally committed towards resolving. You’ve labelled me again as someone I am not, wanting to be understood but yourself being unwilling to understand. Wanting to be right but prioritising your own sense of victory at the expense of a loss of a relationship that had every potential to be something more. Compromising your own values for the sake of putting on a strong front, blind to the hurt that you cause when you twist and skew objective truths to suit what is convenient for you, instead of acknowledging that both of us have areas that we need to work on and collaborating to see how we get past the immediate problems in front of us. Your true colours really showed in the end.

Now more than ever, I’ve begun to feel anger, resentment, regret, hurt, betrayed, and more than anything a deep sense of sadness and pity for you. Pity because your unwillingness to acknowledge and work on your character flaws will inevitably continue to negatively impact your future relationships until that unwillingness changes. Sad, because every opportunity is there for you to minimise that, but you’ll undoubtedly be left to your own vices unless you change. Pity, because you continue to lie to others through telling half-truths, eventually deceiving your own self by minimising your own flaws instead of owning up to them. I hardly recognise the person you’ve become. Your appearance is the same, but your behaviour completely opposite to the person I fell in love with. You’re definitely not the person who I once dated anymore. You’re definitely not the person I hoped to marry.

Just tell me though, what did you do with her?

• This topic was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by healingwords.

Topic

[healingwords]

I feel deeply frustrated. Grief; the loss, the overwhelming sadness that cannot simply be lathered over by fleeting joys lingers on days where I wish that my life had followed a completely different plan.

[healingwords]

Grief is something that can be a bit of a shock. A roller coaster of emotions.
One day, I feel love and affection. Other days, I remember how she would make statements of how she would avoid conflict to maintain the appearance of a good relationship with her dad; to manage the relationship so that she could enlist his financial help to place a deposit on a house for her.
I remember her lack of mental strength and grit, her insufficiency to support me, as much as I loved her and cared for her.
It was a truly imbalanced relationship.
I remember the way she would say some things that would really shock me; emotional things, immature things, unkind things that she would later deny when asked about, no matter how kindly such as this. I gave in initially to support her, seeing my stepping in as a kindness, realising that assisting her and reaching in during those times instead of leaving her to solve the problems herself only enabled her to continue behaving herself in that same way instead of confronting her about her immaturities.
Eventually, I gave in because in spite of my lack of respect for her, we were physically and emotionally attached at a deep level.
Perhaps that is what they call trauma bonding. Unhealthy attachment.

[jc8rw8]

Dear @healingwords

Thank you for continuing to share your reflections with great depth and thoughtfulness.

I see parallels in my situation with the dynamic you’ve outlined in your reply, and I admire your courage to be able to state the truth of the situation as you had seen it, but without the bitterness and regret that it had turned out the way that it has.

Unfortunately, I had the major complication of developing psychosis after my ex and myself parted, which led to some regrettable actions that unfortunately affected my ex, my family, and the broader community around me.

Six years after that happened, I’ve started to make peace with a mental illness I had no control over. Like you, I still hold great affection and love for my ex partner but knowing my psychosis drove her away and marked me out as a dangerous person, I’m not in a position to be able to reconnect with her at all.

Instead, I have managed to form a loving relationship with a wonderful woman for the last 2.5 years, and am now on the path to recovery from my mental illness. It would be quite the headache if my ex did choose to reconnect, as I have accepted that I had lost her forever with my actions, and her reappearance would certainly make it tricky trying to manage my current relationship.

But perhaps a reappearance to reflect on how we have grown, learned and healed from our experiences during our time apart, would go a long way to rekindle a possible connection as friendship, as we never got to really know each other properly, even as we did care for each other. But this isn’t up to me to initiate it and it isn’t something that I’m expecting at all as I don’t want to have false hope of something that may never happen. I want to stay grounded in the reality of what is happening right now, something that has been an ongoing challenge with my mental illness.

I love these two women in my life for different reasons. I accept that my ex will always have a place in my heart but I also have to accept the reality of the situation that she is not in my life at all right now. I am doing my best to learn from what went wrong and to cultivate the much healthier, honest, balanced relationship I have now. It isn’t perfect but the way my new partner and myself have addressed issues in our relationship is far healthier than what I did in the past with my ex, notwithstanding that I was a quite a different person years ago not knowing how to have a healthy loving relationship as I am learning now.

I wish you and your ex all the best in healing yourselves as part of this journey. Thank you again for sharing, as your words have been very helpful in processing my own situation. 🙂

[healingwords]

@jc8rw8
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to read, interact, and share the parts of my reflections that have been resonating with you.

This morning, I had an interesting reflection on how my ex and I are both trying to do the same things though we’re apart. We’re both reflecting, both trying to learn as many lessons as we can from our experiences, both trying to grow, heal, and make sense of our lives although we’re apart. I find a strange comfort in that while we are no longer together, the thought that we’re still connected in a parallel path makes me think that we’re still doing life together, just as individuals.

When my ex and I were together, I had recently experienced a big success in life and was both proud and guilty. Proud that life had gifted me with an experience I never thought I’d have in a thousand years, and guilty that this goodness had come to me. When I met my ex, that pride though quieter in its manifestation than most, was still there and fueled impulsive decisions. It also was what contributed to much difficulty in this relationship as well as others. However, my ex was also “in need of fixing”. She was carrying a lot, had gone through a lot, and my serving her, helping her was my way of easing my guilt for the good hand that had been dealt to me in that season, and eventually became a form of support that she leaned on, and eventually depended on.

However, I believe that dynamic was not good for either of us. It was not good for me to feel guilty for something good that had come to me, and I was too hard on myself in feeling like I had to do something equally difficult to deserve the good that had come to me. Likewise, it was not good for her to stay in her season of grief and hardship permanently and depend on other people such as myself too much without addressing the problems and the discomfort head on herself. I believe sincerely that when my ex and I made our future plans together, part of us both didn’t want to go ahead because we didn’t want to make a lifetime commitment to stay in a dynamic that for us both was difficult. We didn’t want to make our temporary season our permanent dynamic, and the choice to seriously pursue a lifetime commitment brought those uncomfortable feelings to the surface, creating the hard conversations that followed.

Days like today, I admit with much difficulty that I still care for my ex like I did when we were together. It may be true that I may never want to reconsider her as a partner – if, assuming change happened and problems were resolved, she was willing to do so – however, the desire to (or maybe the wish to) have the kind of conversations that could result in us one day having a friendship again still lingers and lingers strongly. I pray for her on occasion. I pray that our God is caring for her, looking after her, supplying all her needs, even though I don’t know what they are. I understand that our healing may be better done individually than together. So, on days like this, I simply pray. I feel all the hurt, the pain, the heartache, and when all I’m left with is the part of me that still cares for her, I say a prayer and I let my worries go. I’ve prayed – and so, I’ve done all I can given where we are today.

[jc8rw8]

Dear @healingwords

Thank you for your latest reflections, I do appreciate you sharing it with us. I’m really glad to hear in this difficult time for you, you have learned to validate these feelings and accept them as part of the grieving process.

I also appreciate you sharing that perspective shift as well, in how you chose to take away the option to avoid the problem and continue with the relationship, and that your ex just made the decision to avoid and end when you set the boundary. I now realise that ex was me in avoiding the problem when she stood up for herself because of how I mistreated her. And unfortunately I now realise it’s a problem I’ve been having for a while and people were telling me and I wasn’t listening.

I am sorry for that, and regret it deeply, although there’s no way for me to contact her to tell her that now. I take solace that perhaps now I am finally able to read this perspective, digest it even though it is deeply uncomfortable and feel a sense of relief and sadness that while I can’t change what happened, I hope I have grown enough since to be able to learn what I need to learn to be able to make peace with my own grief, guilt and shame and have hope for the future.

I don’t mean to hijack your post to talk about my issues though. I just want to express my gratitude for your sharing of this perspective which is really helping me. I guess just because I was very much at fault with how the relationship ended doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to grieve the end of it too. So thank you to you and everyone for helping me find the courage to start participating in the reflection and learning process to help me move through this grief.

You sound like a really insightful and thoughtful person, and I do wish you all the best in achieving that healthier, happier version of yourself.

[healingwords]

Hi all,

I want to take a moment to say thanks to those who have replied so far since my recent reflection.
I was surprised to see people responding to this thread though the original post was long ago.

Honestly, about an hour ago I was praying to God that this grief could serve a greater purpose than the suffering that it has repeatedly caused me. I’ve been deliberate over recent days to spend time grieving, and being sensitive to what my body is telling me. These times have honestly been so difficult. Mentally, they have required so much of me to process (i.e. be aware of, think through, and navigate). Feeling my feelings for what they are, giving myself time to do so, and confronting them head on instead of running away have too been some of the hardest things I’ve experienced. I noticed the grief was stored within me, in my body, as if I was a saturated sponge that was filled with tears that wanted to overflow from my whole body. I realise that the grief is deep, and I let myself feel it. All of it, and where the tears came out of my eyes, I let it. And in those brief moments, I find relief.

What I’m learning is to validate my feelings. I’m giving myself the permission and the space, the time, to be truthful. To be human. To reflect and think, no matter how long it takes. And when I need to pause and come back to it because of practicality, then I do it.

I realised recently that I’m not the victim of a breakup. I made the choice to confront an issue in the relationship, that left my ex with the option to address the problems together and continue the relationship or to avoid the problems and end the relationship. I took away the option to avoid dealing with the problems and continue with the relationship. She just made a decision to avoid and end, when I set the boundary.

That’s a perspective shift for me. It’s proof that I respect myself enough to set boundaries, even when it’s with someone very close to me, and even when it’s extremely tough to do so. I’m powerful. I’m strong. I’m compassionate, kind, and gentle enough to give warnings and options. However, I know that I know how to protect myself when I’m being mistreated and I can lean on that strength everywhere in life; at work, at home, with friends, and family, just as I’ve started to do.

Here’s to a happier, healthier version of me one day.

[jc8rw8]

Dear Healing words,

Thank you for being brave enough to share this letter. I admit, your post brought me to tears at first because it felt like the things the person I lost wanted to say to me but couldn’t at the time. But after re-reading it today, I feel so grateful that you have chosen to share this experience, because it has really helped me begin the process of finding the closure that I have been missing for the past six years since I lost her.

I’m sorry to hear that recently processing your grief has been tough for you though. I may be just another stranger on this forum, but you are definitely not alone going through this.

Your most recent reply in this forum about regaining those good parts of yourself when you were with her really resonated with me. I am quite early in my grief process but I have found taking small steps to regaining the good parts of me that I was with her but sharing that with other people in my life today has been one way to turn a lemon into lemonade, so to speak.

Whether it is watching a competition show about knitting with my current girlfriend, or attending one off low key volunteer events, or just having a lovely conversation with people’s company that I enjoy, I’d like to think those efforts do add up. That they remind me joy can still exist in darkness and there’s always hope things can get better, even if the grief continues to come and go in waves.

I don’t know if that is helpful for you or not (because honestly there are some days where it feels impossible to feel that kind of joy again) but I thought I’ll share anyway.

Thanks again, and I hope this difficult time right now will eventually pass and you find some light back in your life again.

[VM-Serenity66]

Dear @healingwords,
I too often wish that life’s blows were not so harsh. That is, of course, why we need to support each other. I wonder if perhaps instead of losing those noble properties of yourself, you have temporarily lost touch with them in your pain. They are, of course, an inalienable part of you, or you would never have been capable of them at all. They wait quietly to re-emerge at the proper time. Grieving a past relationship is a very important part of making oneself emotionally ready for the rich and satisfying things that may exist in the future.

Your reflection that you are much better overall than 3, 6, or 9 months ago is a very important one. It brings into relief the upside of the impermanence of all things: emotions, possessions, culture, people. While this can be cause for grief, it can also be cause for hope, since suffering and bad conditions are also impermanent. In my definition, hope is confidence in the possibility of change. Since change is inevitable, therefore perhaps hope is inalienable.

[healingwords]

@VM-Serenity66
Hi, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me. Thank you for reading through my posts. You’re absolutely right that I still struggle with this, the feelings have come in waves and while I’m much better overall than I was 3, 6, 9 months ago, the feelings still weigh on me heavily. I desire to be understood and heard out and develop some kind of healthy relationship with my ex. I may not honestly be able to say that I don’t have any lingering feelings or hopes that I wish there could be hope for us being back together, however, I’ve already committed to a life path that takes us apart and would be enough to keep us both from going down that path again anyway, and I’ve seen and been able to reflect on the many differences we had and comfort myself for all I gave and carried in the relationship.

I also want to regain those parts of me who I was when I was with her. Confident, caring, generous, assertive, empathetic, and courageous. I didn’t just lose her, I lost parts of me as well. I lost vision for the future. I lost a sense of greater purpose for my life beyond myself. I lost someone who knew me intimately, and who I could be completely vulnerable and safe around in spite of all the fears and insecurities I had of myself, even though sometimes she couldn’t understand or agree fully.

I wish that life didn’t deal us all with such harsh blows.

[VM-Serenity66]

Dear @healingwords,

I hear that this is still a struggle for you. Where there is still grief, there is still love in one form or another. It’s hard, sometimes, to find that love a home. In grief, our relationship to the lost one does not go away, but changes form. When the loved one has died, it is much clearer how the relationship must change. When the loved one is still alive, but estranged, it is much less clear. When a relationship ends, it is natural to want the same level of connection and commitment to come back. This longing, or expectation, can cause much unhappiness.

Most of my old loves have completely disappeared. One remains in my life as a trusted friend, our connection safely redefined. Not lost, but transformed. To achieve this, it was necessary to relinquish my desire for anything more. Had I not relinquished it, I would not have kept anything of her at all. This turned out to be nicer somehow.

I don’t know how it will turn out for you, or what is right for you in your circumstance. I do hope though, that you are able to find a way to transform what you feel into something warm and self-compassionate that adds to your life. Do keep checking in to let us know how you’re getting on.

[Author]

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