His Ex Was Always the Problem. Until I Became His Ex.

I used to like hearing bad things about my boyfriend’s exes. that is probably not a very generous thing to admit, but i did. whenever an old relationship came up and i heard about something one of them had done wrong, there was a small sense of relief in it. i was the person sitting beside him now. whatever had happened between them belonged to a relationship that had failed, while ours was still alive and, at least in my head, different.

There was also something flattering about it that i didn’t recognise at the time. if an ex had failed to understand him in some important way, i could believe i understood him better. hearing about a relationship where he had felt unloved made the way i loved him feel even more significant. i was learning about the women who came before me through the person who had chosen me after them, so of course i liked believing his version.

Still, whenever he spoke badly about an ex, a thought would appear in my head that- if we ever break up, is this how you’ll talk about me too?

I never stayed with the thought for very long. imagining yourself as somebody’s ex while you are still in love with them feels unnecessarily morbid. i also assumed that if our relationship ended, the story would somehow be different because we were different. this is probably what everybody thinks while they are still the current girlfriend.

After our breakup though, i started understanding those conversations differently. the frightening thing about being deeply loved by somebody is how much evidence you give them against you.

A stranger can dislike you, but their material is limited. somebody who has lived close to you knows exactly what you are capable of on your worst day. they have heard the sentence you immediately regretted saying and they have also watched you become jealous over something embarrassing.

None of this feels dangerous while you are in love. intimacy is probably the only situation where we willingly hand another person huge amounts of compromising information about ourselves because we trust them to understand it properly.

That last part matters.

Understanding somebody properly requires context, and context is very easy to remove. a person can tell a completely factual story about you and still make you sound nothing like yourself. i know this because there are things i have done in relationships that would sound awful if they were presented as isolated facts. there are also things done to me that become much easier to excuse once enough context is added. almost any relationship can be edited in either direction if the storyteller knows where to cut.

And that is what started bothering me about the way we talk about exes. we worry a lot about whether somebody will keep our secrets after a breakup. i think there is another kind of trust we hand people without ever discussing it.

We trust them with the context of who we are.

They know why something happened. they know what came before the ugly argument everybody else will only hear the ending of. they know the difference between a terrible thing you did once and the way you generally behaved for two years. then the relationship ends, and they become the only person in certain rooms who knows the whole story.

Now, you have absolutely no control over which version they tell. that is such a fucking weird consequence of intimacy. somebody can stop loving you and still retain the authority that comes from having known you closely and a new partner is the fucking easiest audience in the world.

I know because i was one.

When i heard stories about an ex, i rarely wondered what the story sounded like from the other side. why would i? i loved the person telling it. my loyalty had already been decided before the story began. there was also another reason i didn’t interrogate those stories too much.

I enjoyed the comparison.

Being told somebody else had been difficult made me feel easier to love. hearing about old incompatibilities made ours feel unusually compatible. every failed relationship before me became evidence that this one had finally worked out correctly. the ex could never compete with that because she wasn’t there. she had become a character in somebody else’s memory. i think this is one of the strangest positions an ex occupies. you can be discussed in rooms you will never enter by people who know intimate things about you and people who have never met you at all.

I wonder how many people i have disliked without ever meeting because somebody i loved gave me their version first. that thought makes me uncomfortable now. there are probably people walking around with completely reasonable explanations for behaviour i once heard described as incomprehensible. there are conversations where both people would tell the truth and somehow produce two entirely different relationships.

Breakups do something specific to memory. once you know how the relationship ended, everything before it starts reorganising itself around the ending. the irritating habit becomes an early warning sign. an argument that was resolved three years ago suddenly becomes proof that the problem was always there. moments you forgave while you were together are brought back because forgiveness no longer has much practical use. eventually a relationship containing thousands of ordinary days can become a surprisingly neat story.

i loved them.

this happened.

they hurt me.

i left.

The neatness should probably make us suspicious. most relationships are not experienced neatly while they are happening. i think that is what i would pay attention to now when somebody talks about an ex. the actual criticism interests me less than what happens to the other person’s humanity while the story is being told. anger is understandable. resentment can be deserved. some relationships leave people with very little kindness to spare but there is something revealing about whether a person can tell you they were hurt without needing you to despise the person who hurt them. there is something even more revealing about what they do with information they were only allowed to know because somebody once trusted them.

Intimacy comes with access that should probably have an expiry policy, but it doesn’t. you cannot retrieve everything you told somebody once the relationship ends. you cannot take back the night you explained exactly why you were insecure about something. i had never thought of dignity as something you could continue giving an ex.

I do now. you can be furious with somebody and still leave parts of them untouched. you can tell the truth without selecting the version of the truth that humiliates them most. you can accept that the person you loved became unbearable to you without deciding they were always unbearable and the ability to do that tells me more about somebody than hearing that they treated every girlfriend perfectly ever could.

Because eventually i did become an ex. that was when i finally understood why those old conversations had made me uneasy even when part of me enjoyed them. i had been listening to stories about women who once occupied exactly the position i occupied then. they had once known his routines, been included in his plans, had private jokes with him and probably believed whatever existed between them could not possibly be reduced to a few sentences later.

Then time passed, the relationship ended, and i met them as stories. i have no idea what story gets told about me now. strangely, i don’t think knowing would help. what stays with me is the fact that i once sat comfortably on the other side of this arrangement. i heard one person’s account and felt lucky that i was the woman being loved rather than the woman being remembered. i thought those were two completely different kinds of women.

Eventually i learned they are often the same woman at different points in the story.