Opinion: What Do You Do If You Can’t Get Over Your Ex?

Trying to find life after love

Photo byAI image, generated by author

There are many sadnesses that can befall us in life. We can endure poverty, ignominy, and failure after failure; we can suffer from injury or illness in such a way that we spend the rest of our days incapacitated and in pain; and we can lose to death, at nearly anytime, our life or the lives of those we love. Yet, there is a specific circumstance that seems, to me, sadder than any other, and, unfortunately, I’ve encountered people who have experienced it quite a few times now.

All of these people reached the tail end of their lives, many of them with children and grandchildren, and having been married for decades, but they hold in their heart a longing for a person they were once in love with. Some might call it “the one that got away” or their “true love.” It’s not uncommon to miss those we’ve loved and separated from. Every person at some point in their youth thinks they’ve met their soulmate, only to recognize the obvious flaws in that match when looking back on it, but the scenario described above is something else entirely.

If you’ve built an entire life with another person, traversed decades by their side, raised children with them, and given your youth to them, but you still feel in your heart that you were meant to be with someone else, was that someone else not indeed your true love? Imagine all the seasons that have passed, while your skin withered and wrinkled, and your beauty fades, and your energy leaves you, and day after day is followed by year after year, and the only thing that endures without change is that love you carry for the person who you separated from so long ago.

It would haunt you without end. You take your kids to school, but they’re the wrong kids. They’re not the fruit of you and the person you’ve longed for all this time. What would those people have looked like, how would they have been? Where would your life have been directed with that other at your side? With their signature mode of expression and thought acting upon on your choices, and leading you to places you’ll now never know of, how different would life have looked?

All of those missed moments together are replaced with stunted versions and allusions to what could have been. They still go on summer walks, but with the wrong person — or no person — at their side. Those moments lying in bed, skin against skin, every one of them lost to a cruel destiny. The smiles exchanged, the long hugs, the small gestures, and the hard times endured together — all pushed aside by this imposter reality.

To those who might argue against my sentiment that this is sadder than anything else that might befall us in life, let me explain myself: Worse things can happen to you. However, what serves to magnify this pain is the knowledge that they were out there all the while. If death takes the one we love, what can be done about it? If injury or illness rout this body, how could it have been avoided? Suffer in light of my current state? If I must. But regret that my whole life was spent in error? Please, spare me such a fate.

Distant places sometimes feel like imagined places, but the truth is that person the heart longs for is out there. However many tens, or hundreds, or thousands of miles away, they started their day and continued on living, navigating the world around them, experiencing small pains and pleasantries as they moved about, and the hours will pass in uniform motion for both persons no matter how far removed they are from one another. What joy they could know if they only shared in space what they share in time. To just be by their side would be the answer to so much of what ails one in life. Yet, they remain apart.

Well, we’re here to address a question, not simply wade in the misfortune of a life apart from our beloved: What do you do if you can’t get over your ex? There’s too much to live for to commend one’s self to death, and besides, that’s always the outcome in the end, so the question is what to do between now and then. The obvious, and typically implausible, answer is to do what you can to get them back.

If it was a childish fancy or anything fleeting, there’s no reason at all to feign that it was more than it was. Let time run its course. However, if it was that real love, the deepest love, the one where you’re attached at the soul, or the nervous system, or whatever component of your being lies at the core, then you need to go to them. Throw it all aside, do what you can, and fight with tact and reason to regain what you have lost because with it went everything, and there is no ground left to stand on here.

If, however, it cannot be regained, then you are an exile, banished from paradise like so many before you, and this presents yet another conundrum. You have two options: 1) try to love again, knowing that you cannot, or 2) live in your sad truth.

Will you go through the motions and pantomime your way through life as you try to love again? There will be intervals where you actually believe it, but somewhere inside the truth is forever watching you. Seldom will you ever be entirely present. The eery feeling that you’re stuck in some sort of banal unreality will haunt you like a ghost. You sit on the couch, surrounded by family, but some part of your psyche is always elsewhere, always refusing to commit itself to this path you’ve selected.

But you will be loved, and you will wish you can return that affection in full, even if you are incapable of doing so. Have you now robbed that person of a life just as you have been robbed of your own? Somehow it seems no one plays that role without being predisposed to it. Maybe they lack awareness, or depth of feeling, or simply want someone — even if it’s not the one — and though they’ll inevitably be able to see that part of you is missing and unhappy, it seems they’re made for this lot. However, this doesn’t make their position any more enviable. One is separated from true love; the other was always incapable of it.

As our alternative, we have the more principled approach: They left with your heart, and you won’t deceive yourself or others about it. So long as they’re gone, you cannot love, so why try? Abandon that endeavor entirely, try to find some joy in the other aspects of life. Praying to God is the most uninspired way to communicate with that universality, but in the music, in the books, in nature, in new cities — God is always there ready to talk.

They stole your capacity for love but not your capacity for happiness. As long as you live, no one can ever take away your ability to feel joy. The answer then is simply that, to live. An exile has been restricted from accessing one portion of that which exists, this leaves all the rest of the universe at your beck and call. Go, go on and live.

I want to conclude with a final point, about the other, which is that I believe true love requires reciprocation. This may have read like the story of one person and their woes following the loss of love. However, somewhere out there in the world, their other half is going through the same thing. The part of you that’s with them has been paid for in kind; a part of them has remained with you. If you believe you loved someone who did not love you, you don’t understand love.

In someways, this is our silver lining. Let all the cities between those two hearts be reduced to nothing. Condense the space of a thousand miles until two parts of the globe touch as if one folded over the drawings on a map. This is exactly what’s happening on the mental plane. You both spent your lives apart, and you squandered this small glimpse of existence away from that other which the universe so generously tied you to, but did you really?

Perhaps, you were not there in the morning to see them wake, and it was not your lips that pressed against theirs to bid them to sleep. You could not laugh with them over tea in the golden morning light, nor could you walk along the coastline sharing a perfect moment hand in hand, but where was your heart? It was with them through every breath, through every setting sun, through the long years, as your body slowly decayed, and it will be with them until the moment of your last heartbeat. How silly to think that any of us, in the face of such a force, ever really had the power to resist or move away from it.

We were with them all the while.