Why You Want to Text Your Ex*

*but probably shouldn’t

The relationships I refer to in this article are not abusive ones. I realize those relationships bring different issues, and I’m not qualified to speak to those, so my apologies for the omission.

Admit it. Since the quarantine began, you’ve been thinking a lot about your exes. I have. Not just ex romantic partners either. I think a lot about former friends. I’ve even been tempted to write former landlords apologizing for being a bad tenant.

We joke about how the pandemic makes us want to reach out to our exes as if it’s the same as drunk dialing. But it’s harder to think about why we want to do it. Is it really that these people in particular are that much a part of us? Are we trying to make amends before what may or may not be the end of the world?

I think there’s a more basic, kinder impulse. We still care about those who were significant in our lives. It doesn’t mean we want to reunite with them. We are honoring a part of our past, the normalcy in our past.

I can’t get my ex off my mind. We parted amicably but haven’t spoken since. I keep thinking how, with the pools closed, he hasn’t been able to swim, and swimming is the only thing that helps his severe anxiety. Last fall after a back injury he couldn’t swim and ended up passing out at work from a panic attack. He came over to my place afterwards and looked so dissociated it hurt my heart to sit with him and nurse him that afternoon.

I don’t want him to suffer like that right now. But I can’t nurse him again.

So what would I write him? “I’m sorry you can’t go swimming. Don’t pass out too much.”

When we randomly contact exes, especially in a crisis, there’s this idea that we do it, in part, out of masochism.

But what if we just want to do it because we care, or because we want the comfort of someone who’s been through things with us before? Why is that the aberration? Why is that more embarrassing to admit than saying a pre-apocalyptic panic made us do it?

Listen, we care about our exes. Even if we don’t love them or like them, they always embody the time we shared.

We often celebrate “getting over” exes as if the goal of healing is to erase those feeling. Why do we not strive to integrate them into our current lives?

When I’m in a happy relationship, I think back to good times with exes. Not because I want to be with them, but because being loved makes me remember being loved. It’s that simple. When we deny the preciousness of memories we carry, we’re also snubbing who we were then. In distancing from our exes, we distance from ourselves.

Whether or not it’s a good idea to actually contact them depends on more variables than any of us know. I’m sure many people will reunite during the pandemic, and I’m sure many people will restart relationships that are “totally different this time.” I’m sure people will reach out to exes and not get an answer.

The pandemic has caused an immediacy when it comes to feelings, and it’s made connection — especially touch — that much more valuable. Since we are all affected by the pandemic and the quarantine, we’re sharing the same crisis. “We’re all in this together,” right? And that includes exes we haven’t spoken to in years. The terror of this situation has fostered vulnerability in a lot of people. It seems like a good time to open up and be honest with one another. But what if I wrote an ex just because we’re in the same storm and then the storm fizzles out? What if this newly vulnerable person will close right up again just as past wounds reopen?

We have had way too much time for thoughts like these. Rumination is probably the official quarantine pastime. Even during “normal” life, it’s all too easy to pick apart your love life, reread text messages for subtext, generally obsess and overreact to things that haven’t happened yet. Take that and multiply it by the time you’ve spent getting nutty from cabin fever, and you’ll see that your attempts to make sense of past relationships have only made you crazy.

If you try to channel all of that into a breezy “Hi! I know it’s been a while but I just want to make sure you’re okay!” you may feel crushed that the breezy reply doesn’t acknowledge the hours of agonizing analysis that went into your message. If you get back ‘thanks, I’m ok,” will you be okay? The quarantine has made us anxious and grouchy about a lot of things. Past relationships probably did too. That may not be a great combo.

Is there anything your ex could say that could fill your true need? Would an apology really help? What about phone sex — would it be a happy return or a weird experiment in distanced isolation? Distanced not just geographically, but from each other. From time. Who you were then.

Who you were then, however happy or unhappy you were, is still who you are now. Only you have these memories of relationships. Really, only you. Even the person who shared them with you may have forgotten, may remember differently, may remember things about you that you never noticed about yourself.

A friend of mine once said that all we ever want is to be known. These people from our pasts knew us, some better than others, and so we were known. That can’t be undone. We will always carry the warmth of that, and we don’t need to be reminded of what we’ll never forget.

You can find me at http://www.erinlyndalmartin.com or on Twitter at @erinlyndal. Please share, click the clapping hands below, or throw me a dollar for coffee.