Tag - A note about exes

A note about exes

I’ve been thinking lately about my exes. No, it’s not that I want to get back together with any of them…their ships have sailed thankfully into other harbors (no pun intended). But I do think about setting the record straight.

I am a Libra, so I constantly like to weigh both sides of an argument, and I like to see justice when someone is wronged. I hate movies like The Last Seduction where a character like Bridget can get away with deceiving men, and not feel guilty at all. But mostly, I hate it when I am not heard, or when I am misunderstood.

And of course, when there are break-ups, there are misunderstandings.

I’ve written emails that I haven’t sent, I’ve crafted brilliant conversations in my head that I’ve never spoken aloud. I really really wanted to pull the drunk at midnight calls just to have an excuse to list all of the ways in which I think I’ve been wronged without seeming like a crazy girl. I felt my exes (two specifically) needed to know the particulars of how they had wronged me.

There was a guy I dated years ago who dumped me without warning, letting my calls go straight to voicemail while he ran off to Hawaii with his new love. In response, I pathetically called him for weeks afterward, begging for a closing conversation. I wanted to know from him what had happened. What had I done wrong?

But the closure call never happened. He just vanished from my life. And I really wanted to let him have it. I was right in feeling betrayed, and he needed to know how he’d wronged me.

Then there was the guy I dated who wanted things to continue despite the fact that they weren’t going well at all. When I broke it off with him, he went on a 30-minute rant about how I didn’t really know what I wanted, how I’d led him on, how I didn’t deserve a good man in my life. I was too stunned to fight back, so I just took it. By the time I knew what I wanted to say back to him, he was no longer listening. I didn’t get to have the closing conversation with him either. This made me angry. He had no idea who I was or what I wanted!

And as a side note…there was also a guy from eHarmony who stood me up for our first date, and then sent me a nasty email and closed communication. I never even got to email a response back. I was so pissed, I called eHarmony to rant about him and how he didn’t even know me well enough to write such a crazy email. The operator on the other end of the line just kept saying “uh huh” and “sorry about that”. Then they offered me another free month.

As much as I would have liked to use Facebook as some kind of weapon to post my feelings about being shut out, about feeling powerless, about not being heard or understood in these situations, I didn’t. Mostly because I only joined Facebook two years ago, and these break-ups happened before. Now I realize this was fortunate.

If I did have the chance to rail against the exes now, to give them a piece of my mind…would I do it?

I was sitting at CoffeeBean this afternoon, and listening to two women next to me having an argument. They weren’t dating…one was a client who had hired the other for a job, and didn’t like the result. Instead of having a rational conversation so that they could move forward and figure out how to solve the problem, they got personal and mean. I’ve never been witness to such a hostile working relationship…one of them even stood up to yell at the other, to make sure she was heard. Of course, they were both right in their own minds. They both made convincing arguments in my opinion, even though they weren’t rational. I felt like I was watching Jerry Springer live. In fact, I was worried one of them would hurl a chair at the other…that’s how intensely they were arguing.

It got me thinking. I have felt the same rage. I have felt wronged on many occasions…career, men, etc. I have stood up and screamed and let the other person have it when I felt it was necessary to my sense of self-preservation. I was right, and I knew it. But the ironic thing is, it didn’t make me feel better. In fact, it left me feeling a little “less than”.

This is when I discovered that being right didn’t necessarily have a place in my relationships with others. It didn’t help me learn. And it certainly didn’t help me feel more understood.

I’m not advocating being submissive in some way. I just think that at some point, I had to realize that no matter what I thought or how I felt, my ex had his own version of the story. One that didn’t include my opinion. No matter how inaccurate, I was never going to get them to change their minds about me. So at some point, I had to stop trying.

I’m still struggling with feeling misunderstood. But now, I’m finally learning that someone else’s “truth” about me doesn’t have to be mine. I am responsible for my own life, and my own thoughts and feelings…nobody else’s. I have no control over them, only myself. If I try to “make” people understand me, it is a losing battle. I can only convey what I think, and they have the choice to accept it or not.

Have felt misunderstood by an ex? Did you argue your point? Did that work for you?

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