Two interesting questions came up at work today, although don’t ask me how. I was straining to hear the Phillies game on my little radio over the hum of the vent above my desk, which as of April 1st has mysteriously and suddenly switched from blowing air so hot your skin threatens to melt off, to Arctic-tinged air that leaves me in suspended in a permanent state of goose bumps and shivers. The Phillies were down 6-1 at the bottom of the six, when by some miracle of miracles, they get nine runners on base and take the lead 7-6. I shouldn’t get so excited while at work, but it’s hard not to. It’s been several long months since football season ended, and now I have a team to root for once again.
The two questions that were posed were as follows, and the relationship roles are gender specific here only because everyone in the conversation happened to be a woman currently in a relationship with a man. Substitute the male pronouns with female if that floats your boat, and it’s still the same question.
1. If you could talk to your current boyfriend/husband/fiance’s ex flame, on neutral turf, with just the two of you in the room, what would you say to her?
2. If you could talk to your ex-boyfriend/husband/fiance’s current flame, on neutral turf, with just the two of you in the room, what would you say to her?
Both of these questions seemed really easy to answer, until I actually opened my mouth and started to answer them, at which point I completely changed my mind about what I’d actually say, given the opportunity.
The first question was the easiest. Jeremy and I have a pretty solid understanding about past relationships. They’re over and there’s not really any need to re-live them in any sense of the word. It’s not like there is a Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy around our house – on the contrary, we’ve both spilled the beans on previous relationships as part of getting to know each other. There were things that when I first met him were still emotional sore spots for me, and he needed to know about those things in order to be the fantastic boyfriend and soon-to-be-husband that he is. Beyond all that, it’s probably better not to go into details. I don’t need to know their inside jokes or favorite songs or the story of their first kiss. Neither Jeremy nor I has ever had any kind of weird jealousy regarding each other’s exes. We’re both really confident in our relationship and each other, so what’s the point? From what little I know, they all seem decent enough. They don’t bother us and we don’t think about them.
So I guess I’d probably just say “Thanks for dumping him! I win!”
The second question was the hardest for ALL of us to answer, even those who had been happily married for a decade or more. All of us admitted that we’d thought about it before, although in most cases it was years ago. One person admitted that she had confronted the current girlfriend of her philandering ex-boyfriend. Balls of steel. Seriously.
It was easy to view my ex as the enemy – a weak man who always saw the grass as being greener on the other side, and although his current girlfriend was the other woman, I tried not to view her as the enemy as well. I absolutely hate it when women turn on each other when the man is actually the one to blame, where is the sisterhood in that? I mean, I wasn’t dating her. She had no allegiance to me, he did. He was the one who made the promises and talked about our future even as he planned his escape.
As miserable as I was, I didn’t want company. I figured that she either knew about the way he treated me during and after the breakup (sordid details of which I won’t go into here- suffice to say there were a lot of broken promises, lies, and general spinelessness…) and didn’t care, or she was completely unaware of how everything went down, in which case it wasn’t my place to tell her. If he was happy with her and she was happy with him, then what was there to say after all? I knew who she was, it wouldn’t have been all that hard to contact her, had I truly wanted to. It wouldn’t have been hard to tell her things he’d said to me years later that might have completely destroyed their relationship. But I never wanted that. I just figured that if you enter into a relationship with a man, knowing that he had to completely trample all over another person’s life to be with you, then you’d better hope that he’s completely changed and will treat you better than the person he left, or you should just be prepared that it will inevitably happen to you at some point down the road.
And what would I say to her now? Nothing. It’s been a long time, and I’m a forgiving person, and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he’s changed. It felt awful having so much negative energy pent up inside for so long and at a certain point I just let it all go. I didn’t realize I was doing it, but one day something made him cross my mind for the first time in a year and I didn’t feel angry. Maybe he grew up, maybe he became the person that I once thought he was. We haven’t spoken in years, so anything is possible. I highly doubt it, but who knows? And if they’re happy, they’re happy.
I’m getting married in three weeks to a fantastic guy, so to say that he did me a favor would be an understatement. The point being, I think I did the right thing by never saying anything, and if you’ll listen to a small piece of unsolicited advice, I’d highly recommend it to anyone elsethat may find themselves in my situation. The universe usually rights itself without us interfering.
