How to Get Over Your Ex (Even If He Is Not Sorry for What He Did)
This season is all about mental health. You can keep your inner Alex Forrest in your closet.
I was a late bloomer. I gave my first kiss when I was 18 years old — don’t worry, it was just as terrible as the one you probably gave during a spin-the-bottle game in middle school — and I had my heart broken for the first time when I was twenty-one. Of course, I had been disappointed by some dudes before, but until then I had never felt what it was to really be neglected and deeply hurt by the one person you — very irresponsibly — chose to fall in love with. To be honest, what I had with this very ex, it was such a cliché, I must admit now that I am able to put it into perspective and realize that I committed a mistake, too, by letting him into my life and my heart.
We both had moved away from home at the very same time, this male person who hurt me and is not sorry for what he did and I. But our backgrounds were slightly different — I was a rebellious 21-year-old only daughter and aspiring writer while he was a 36-year-old divorcé and former indie rock musician. (Full disclosure: I actually listen to some of his old songs from time to time and I think they are not bad. But I am not into what he does nowadays, to be honest.)
We met at a party. We both experienced that Mamihlapinatapai-thing that Tumblr warned me about in 2014 — we exchanged looks, but neither of us was willing to make the first move until I got brave and approached him, not with words but by dancing nearby, you know, like, “I’m here, but I’m just dancing. But if you want to talk to me, you totally can. I am approachable. I mean, not to everyone, but to you. Get the hint!” I remember I wanted to have sex with him that night and then never speak to him again. But we were all at this party and, you know, TV series sometimes are more optimistic by setting these scenarios for their characters to have an active and healthy sex life, but that rarely happens in real life.
We exchanged numbers. He lent me his cell phone and I — under the effects of some cheap wine we drank that night — saved my number on his phone under “Kiss Her Now.” My drunk-ish self considered this a super romantic gesture, but now I see that I may have seemed a bit desperate.
We kept texting until the morning. He found me on Facebook and immediately added me — so, I guess it was his desperate move in response to mine. I remember I felt kind of euphoric. I mean, I had my opportunity to be this badass who had sex with this older indie rock musician and then never called him again. But there was something about him and me — us — talking that kind of got me excited. In a non-sexual way.
We had our first date on a Sunday night, so most restaurants and cafés were closed. After a couple of failed attempts, we decided to just go to the park and sit on a bench while contemplating some David statue over a fountain. That’s where it started, the first crack.
He told me all these crazy things about himself so fast that I just couldn’t react on time: He was divorced. He saw sex as a means to recover from his divorce. But he had already gone to therapy in order to treat all this, so he was fine. But he couldn’t be my boyfriend. But he wanted me to kiss him.
It was too much for me at the time. Too much on my plate.
Of course, it was a red flag! That was like a dark red flag, you know, more intense than a red flag. But I was twenty-one and all those things came out so quickly from his mouth that I just needed to take a second to analyze the situation, you know. But he wouldn’t let me.
“Kiss me,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“No.”
We sat there in silence and I tried to remember all the previous statements he had emitted. But I couldn’t. And as soon as he placed both his arms around me, to be honest, I think I didn’t want to anymore. There was something about being into his arms that, ironically, made me feel safe. It was as if when he was surrounding me with both his arms, nothing, not even himself, would hurt me.
“Kiss me,” he insisted.
I can’t quite remember if I did, but I know I eventually did. Thank God, memories from that night are becoming a bit blurry already. I can still recall that there was something moving from the bushes and he got scared, which was a turn-off for me, but then it started raining and he kind of took off his jacket to cover me up, and we kind of seek refuge below the façade of an old building. And we definitely kissed once more. Right there, underneath that old façade.
We went to my place, but after what had just happened, I was totally sure I didn’t want to sleep with him and we were going to stay friends. Because it would have gotten awkward. He said he didn’t want to be my boyfriend, so it was either an anonymous one-night stand or a monogamous relationship — all or nothing, go big or home. I personally find anything in-between a bit unfair for women.
Somehow, after we kept talking when my multiple roommates went to sleep, he felt the need to say, “I love you.” I was a 21-year-old girl who was a virgin to this thing that men do of lying even with an ‘I love you,’ so I thought, “Okay, then all that bullshit you said back in the park is over. Because you love me now. After just 12 hours of meeting me for the first time. I mean, when you know, you know!”
Of course, it wasn’t like that, which is why I am writing this a couple of years later. We had some other date and many meets that weren’t cute at all, but I think it is worthless to keep on talking about the good stuff. Trust me, it is the bad stuff which really stuck around. It is bad stuff which prevailed inside my head and inside my mind killing all of my confidence as a woman and also as a writer.
After those romantic moments, out of the blue, he was very, very cruel to me. Yes, out of nowhere. He treated me like a stranger when I thought that at least I could count on him as a friend, you know, as he had repeatedly told me that he loved me. He turned into this narcissistic prick who even dared to publicly say in one of his venues that everything I had written over the past few years was nothing more than a teenage love letter dedicated to him.
I cried that day. Not out of sorrow but out of anger and hate. I hated him. I think I truly got to hate him at some point. But he was turned into such a horrible person, that I knew that if he knew how bad I was feeling, he would just feed on that. It was as if he truly feed on my pain and on how bad he could make an innocent girl 15 years his junior feel.
I remember he once texted me something, like, “I know you went to the bathroom to cry for me last night when we ran into each other at that restaurant you like.”
He was a monster! Seriously.
Could you have seen it coming? I mean, this was the man who told you that he loved you and that he was not going to hurt you, and now he just wouldn’t care if you were to go crying in the bathroom because of him.
One of my ex-boyfriends once told me that I had the ability to hurt others with the words I choose to speak. I didn’t consider it an ability at all and he would only say so because I had very strong arguments whenever we debated the benefits and disadvantages that women have in this world. I always won the debate, but he would take it personally and get offended by some of my arguments.
I guess we can call it karma, because the gun that killed me inside consisted only of a couple of sentences I can still remember perfectly, “You are not special. You think you are special, but you are not. And people can see that, that’s why they laugh at you […] I have met a lot of people throughout my life, and I have met a couple of special people, too. So, I can tell you are not one of them. Trust me on this.”
My eyes still water whenever I remember this. Such simple words that may seem stupid to everyone. After all, who wants to be special? It’s okay. We are all pretty average. But we were talking about my dream of becoming a successful fiction author in that conversation.
Yes, I have watched Nocturnal Animals (2016, dir. Tom Ford) several times. And I actually spent all 2017 trying to write something that might get to hurt him. I wanted revenge. I wanted him to feel the pain I felt while reading what I wrote.
But I couldn’t. I actually stopped writing for a couple of months. Many months. I thought that everything I wrote was stupid. I started to feel stupid. I looked at myself in the mirror and I felt… unspecial. I truly felt as if I was worthless. I felt as if any guy who would meet me could see right through me and immediately discarded me, immediately decided that I was not worth it, that I was average, that he could hurt me and just put me away because there were thousands, millions of girls out there just like me. Because I was not special. I bought it. I bought it when he said he loved me, and I bought it again when he said all that hurtful stuff.
I even passed through this horrible self-destructive stage where I went out with random dudes and just let them have sex with me. I let a couple of dudes use my body for their own pleasure. And whenever they had sex with me under their own terms, I remembered about him. I remembered about all that he had said and how the person with whom I had shared very tender memories had turned into a monster and had wrecked me in the process.
I was so sad that I would call my father for no reason and I would pretend that I was sad just because we hadn’t seen each other in a week, or something. (Tears of anger, always tears of anger.)
I tried to seek comfort with my friends, but that was when it hit me. When I told them what was going on, they would just say things, like, “yeah, it happens all the time,” “men are like that,” or, “but you know he was divorced, you saw it coming,” or even, “well, it’s not like he raped you.”
Huh. Weird. He didn’t rape me, but I felt just like that, you know. I felt just as if he had raped me in the heart. And it was legal. It even was acceptable. It was normal for them, for my friends, for the women I decided to call my comrades back in the day.
I took some distance from my friends, I couldn’t stand to surround myself with people who thought that what I went through was normal. I got away from everyone. I would just go from work — I worked in something that wouldn’t require me to write creatively under my own name — to my bed. I was a living dead person. I was dead inside, but somehow I was still breathing.
And meanwhile, he was so good! God, he was smiling at all times. He would even sing these pop songs about how he loved too much. I felt so sick. Before I met him, I thought I was really going to make it, I was writing a lot, I would get my inspiration out of anything, and then… nothing. I was so sad and bruised, and he was there with his annoying guitar singing, “I love you,” blah-blah-blah, and then naive 21-year-old-and-under girls would say, “Oh, look at him. He is so romantic.”
And that is when I decided to go to therapy.
So, girl:
Step 1. Go to therapy.
My therapist helped me out a lot. Now at least I never low my self-respect bar when I go out with some guy — they still are all assholes, but they don’t get to sleep with me, so that’s okay. They go be assholes somewhere far away from my body.
In therapy, I come to realize that, well, it wasn’t my fault. When a man — older or younger — is an asshole, the innocent girl who gets her heart broken by him is not to blame. However, she has to take responsibility as to why she let someone like him into her life.
So…
Step 2. It was not your fault… or, was it?
His actions are not your fault. It is not your fault that he is a liar. But it is your fault to keep on believing someone who is constantly lying to you.
It was not my fault that he turned into this horrible person. But it was my fault to still be around, to still be listening to all of his bullshit and, moreover, to believe it. This occurred because, yes, he is an emotional psychopath, but I am, too, very easily bruised. I believe what anybody else would say about me because I am afraid to stand up for myself. There, I said it.
No matter how horrible this man you had the misfortune of running into is — unless this was an assault, of course — if this is about a relationship where you were abused continuously, well, you somehow let it happen. So you have to learn to respect yourself enough not to let another person do that you ever again.
This emotional abuse was a reflection of something that you have to learn about yourself. He still deserves to die! But most likely, you put yourself through this because you need to love yourself more.
Step 3. Put it into perspective.
Romantic comedies have damaged us so much! And not because of unrealistic expectations, no — actually, you shouldn’t settle for less than what you want and deserve — but because we tend to put a little bit of drama in every situation. Not just girls. Everyone does it. (Actually, I am pretty sure men do this more often by believing they are these leading characters of a movie and everybody else is just a supportive one.)
Remember things in the Normal filter, not in the Look-At-How-Happy-We-Were one. For example, yes, I was twenty-one, but he was divorced and he used sex as a means to forget about the grief he had over his lost marriage and his ex-wife. This is not a healthy background. This is not a true I’m-not-going-to-hurt-you background.
I bet there were red flags in your experiences, too. Take out the filter. See things for how they truly happened. It may actually lead you to the answers you are looking for.
Step 4. He is canceled.
Of course, he is canceled. I mean, block him. You can tell your friends what happened. You can tell his friends what happened. You can tell the girl he is on a date with what happened. You can tell the worldwide Medium community what happened.
Girl, we are living in the #MeToo era. Stand up for yourselves! Don’t keep quiet. This is not a dirty little secret. This was emotional abuse. And trust me, if someone had warned me about this man, she would have prevented me from a lot of pain and I would have thanked her. #SheForShe.
This doesn’t mean you can’t get over him. “I am over you, but I don’t forget what you did. If you hurt another woman, then there is an antecedent.”
Step 5. There is a way in which you can totally get even with him. Spoiler: You have to move on.
“Grief is comfortable,” my therapist said in one of our sessions. She was right. Sometimes we stay into the darkness for so long because we are afraid to come out into the light. You know, we are afraid to take responsibility for our actions and move on.
We have lost a lot of time. We are afraid of what’s out there now. We are like these people who were frozen and then woke up in the future and are scared of cars and computers.
Eventually, ain’t no matter how hurtful it was, you have to move on. If you have lost three years over this or even if you have lost your work over this, you have to go back to your normal life.
Which is what I’m trying to do right now by writing this. In the name of all the previous pieces, drafts, and scripts that I deleted because I thought they were not good enough. I would have had deleted this piece if I had written it before. Time is key.
Step 6. Say no to patterns. Plain is just better.
Don’t repeat the same mistake twice. No, he is never going to change. And no, if another guy does the exact same thing to you, it is not a message from God for you to know that not all men are the same. I actually think God is trying to tell you that they actually are.
Learn from this experience. Never let anyone hurt you twice. Love yourself enough to settle only for the one who actually fulfills your expectations. Because you deserve it.
Step 7. Get as far away as possible from that which (or he who) hurts you.
Going back to my story, I blocked him.
And I gotta tell you, I find so much peace in the idea of never seeing him again. Unfortunately, we are still living in the same city and I have had to avoid some places where I might run into him even when I like them. It’s the worst, I tell you, but I try to be at peace with myself, and the idea of him laughing and texting me, “Oh, I know you were there just to see me,” it just totally perpetuates that peace. So I won’t let it. He is canceled. He doesn’t exist in my world.
My therapist says I shouldn’t care. I should just go to the bars I want to go and not care if he is around. But I do. So, I’m actually planning to fly away from the country.
Not just for him, obviously — I think it is always good to change your scene and meet other people, meet new people. The fact that he won’t be around at all is just a plus.
Fingers crossed.
Well, then, that is how you get over your ex even if he is not sorry for what he did to you. Basically, getting his toxic ass out of your life.
I still think that what men — especially older men — do to women, what they do just to get some self-satisfaction out of having sex with us — or just getting their dicks inside our vaginas for a minute — or even just to play with our feelings in order to relieve some trauma, is not okay at all. We have normalized to be treated this way: to be lied to, to be mistreated, to be traumatized, for what? Just so he can think that you are ‘the one’? It’s bullshit.
Oh, and to the girls who are ‘the one’ to one of these men: Beware. He might not do the same to you, but remember what he is capable of. He already did all this to someone else.
