Getting Over The Ones Who Are Over You
Two girls — one an ex, the other I dated in that gray area where the history feels like an ex but the title of boyfriend/girlfriend never existed — hit me with some news recently. They are getting married. Their circumstances, completely different from one another, but there is something in common between the two of them. Both of them are getting married to the guys they began to see immediately after me.
I’m happy for them, just like I am for my other ex who is expecting her first child with the man she began to see after me. It’s good to see women I was once with move on and find men who are right for them. But to say any of this is easy to swallow would be the understatement of the year.
There’s two phases to a break up. The first, getting over someone. The second, getting over someone is over you. I’ve always been able to manage to get through the first phase with relative ease, but the second phase still remains my white whale.
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There is another ex of mine I was dating recently. Things seemed to be going in a good direction until I did something she didn’t like. Well, actually two things. So I had two strikes against me, and I could tell, one more I was out. But she hasn’t called me in over two weeks, not since I committed the second strike, so I think when I said I had one more strike I was wrong. Apparently I had two and already she’s over me. There was another girl I used to date who hung on to me for far longer than she should have, and I recently saw her too. She looked very happy. Without me. Just like the others. She’s over me too and the list can go on but I digress.
When a woman has moved on, I always ask how. How could she forget what we had and the connection we made? How can she not think about those times and disregard them? Then I ask some whys and some whos. Maybe a couple of whats too, which are usually rhetorical. With me, it’s always the five W’s followed by the How, because I remember being the best of everything in this woman’s life and I thought when we broke up she would never forget that, only to find out she did.
Or rather, she hasn’t really forgotten, she just chooses not to dwell, and so she moves on with someone else. This person, whoever they are, may not be better in areas where I excelled, but it sure does feel that way sometimes. And it doesn’t help when other women I’m seeing tell me to do better, because it makes me feel like telling them, I’m not even trying to do good in the first place. But that would do more than get them upset with me, that would make them move on from me to the next guy who would probably do better, and sometimes I don’t want them to move on.
Sometimes, the only comfort I have is when she still gets upset by all the things I do or say. It means she still cares. When she grits her teeth and hangs up on me, I know she’s calling back. When she yells at me, I know she’ll apologize. When she says she never wants to talk to me again, I know she’ll talk to me again. Any man worth anything to a woman is going to make her upset, that’s par for the course, really. It’s when she’s not upset by my shenanigans that I know I am now, if not worthless, worth less than I was before.
What a bitter pill to swallow. When the woman who used to tell me all the time to never call her again, finally stops calling to tell me to never call her again. It’s moments like those I realize what has been lost. I used to want this woman to just move on and leave me alone, then one day she did and even when she thinks about me and a memory makes her smile, she keeps it to herself. She doesn’t tell me because she’s over me, and knows how to think about me in even the good ways without getting so caught up she has to call me or text me, “I’m thinking about you.”
This is the most difficult of all things to comprehend when someone has moved on from me. She does miss me, but she doesn’t have to tell me that.
When my ex who is having a baby called to share the news with me, we talked a little about us and how things used to be. For so long I thought in her mind I was the worst, but when we talked, it turned out I wasn’t the worst at all. As a matter of fact, she told me herself I treated her very well and we may have ended badly, but up until those final days, I was a great boyfriend (her words, not mine) to her. But remember, she told me this within the same conversation she told me she was having a baby with another man. My ex who is getting engaged also called to tell me the news herself, saying she felt like she owed it to me because well, I treated her so well when we were together and I have been nothing but good to her even while we’ve been apart.
They tell me these things, how great I was or am, and they’re good things to hear, but bittersweet as well. The fact that they can tell me such things without a hint of regret in their voice shakes me to the core because it makes me realize how some people can love you for their whole lives, and be over you just the same.