It works out in the movies every now and then but we need to remind ourselves that our lives are not movies or romantic situations in a TV show. The reality of the situation is that if you have someone that is an ex in your life, there is probably a very good reason or reasons why they are that way and almost all of the time it is a much better idea for us to just leave them that way.
I am doling out advice here right now and it is obvious advice that I think everyone already knows but that doesn't change the fact that so many people fall for this so often, and it only makes most people's lives worse when we decide to go back to "give it another try."
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I bring you this information today not out of some sort of soothsayer's wisdom but because I am currently doing things the wrong way in my own life and I am paying the mental toll for doing it. I'll give a little bit of a backstory without getting too much into the mushy details
About a year ago a somewhat long-term relationship of my own came to an end. It was with a girl that I had lived together with for about a year and just like most relationships that result in people living together, things were very good between us for a while. In the eyes of other people we were the perfect couple. We enjoyed the same activities even if they seemed mundane to other people and we never got into arguments with one another. We seemed to be, to everyone else and to ourselves at the time, like the perfect couple.
There was trouble brewing in paradise though and because Da Nang is almost entirely transient expats - well aside from the local Vietnamese population that is - the foreigners, which we both are, come from different countries.
Well one day my girlfriend went back to visit her family and just decided that she wasn't going to come back. This was very shocking to me and of course hurt me a lot. It took me a really long time to get over that especially when I was sad and the photos that I would see of her online looked like she was just having a great time in her home country with her friends there. Of course any time that I would see some guy with his arm on her in the pictures, I presumed the worst.
I hadn't done anything wrong as far as I knew, she certainly didn't give me any good information as to anything that I had done wrong she just said that she can no longer live in Vietnam - and I knew that wasn't true. She just decided that she didn't want to come back to Vietnam and maybe I was living a lie and our relationship wasn't as strong as I thought it was. She seemed to be a lot less torn up about the loss of the relationship than I was.
It took me a while to get past all of that... a lot of sleeping pills and too much drinking to numb the pain as well but eventually, just like with everything traumatic that happens, time did heal the wounds.
I didn't start to date anyone else but I guess you could say that I tried in a half-assed way. So when a few years went by and all of a sudden she was moving back to Vietnam I had mixed feelings. For one thing, I remembered all the good times that we had together but I also remembered all the pain and anguish that she put me through when she left.
When she contacted me for advice about places to live and what not I should have just told her to get that information from someone else, but like most people in the world, I am a jackass when it comes to my own self-preservation and I helped her out as best I could.
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Well here we are about a month after her return and we have hung out and had dinner a couple of times. There has been nothing romantic about it but honestly, even that side of it should have never happened. While it might work in the movies, I don't think that two people who used to be intimate with one another are capable of being friends again. I KNOW that I am not capable of this but I think that there was a part of me that was hoping that the two of us would magically get back together but then I started hearing stories about her being on Tinder and then one day, I found out that a person I am acquainted with and see on Sundays most weeks went on a date with her.
He was horrified when he found out the story. He didn't know about my past with her and we did not know one another when she had lived here in the past. He said the date didn't go very well and he hadn't intended on seeing her again but definitely wasn't going to now.
I don't want to interfere in other people's lives, even my ex's. I don't want to prevent her in finding happiness and I am realizing that this happiness cannot be with me. The only time we have ever argued with one another happened after I found out that she was dating and hooking up with people. Since I am an adult I realize that it is completely ridiculous for me to be upset with her for just doing what everyone does. She is not my girlfriend and apparently had no intention of becoming so.
In retrospect I am not really even 100% sure that I wanted her back in my life either but let's call it a mix of me being nice and helping a "friend" but also wanting to see if the "spark" was still there.
Now I find myself in a position where some of the really bad feelings that I had when we initially broke up years ago are back in my head and it isn't nice. Ideally, it would have been best if she had not moved back here but I have made things much worse for myself by ever letting her back into my life at all. Now I am faced with having to go through all that pain again, even though it is a much milder version of it.
I am learning the hard way that I should have never allowed her back into my life at all even though my intentions of helping her were good. I knew this was a possibility and really something very likely.
Don't make my mistake no matter how tempting it might be. Just like the first picture says: There is a good reason why it didn't work the first time and those things are very unlikely to change.
So now I have to completely cut her out of my life again but it is going to be a lot more difficult this time because we live in the same city. I could have avoided all of this by simply telling her, nicely, that we can't be friends and that is something I am going to have to do now.