Single in the City: Should you Text your Ex?

I was sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant on a Sunday with my best friend, nursing a horrific hangover from Friday night. Maybe the banging headache and feeling of nausea contributed to my weakness that day, or maybe I'm pointing fingers everywhere but at myself. She looked at me and made the exact joke my ex used to make. The look on my face must've seemed like I'd been shot or witnessed a horrific traffic accident; I'm talking an 8-car pile-up with a lorry full of explosives thrown in. Pathetically, or maybe in my defence, not pathetically, I started crying. Horrible scene for all of the families trying to enjoy their Sunday lunch. Yep balling. 

It planted the seed in my clearly unstable head.

Text him.

You need to text him.

Text him. 

Tell him you're sorry for all of the morally grey things you've done and did. Text him and say you miss the friendship the two of you had. Text him and confess that you hope he's doing better.

I fought it. Or at least I tried to. I fought it for maybe 8 hours until I found myself sitting outside on a bench, knocking back too many cigarettes to count at 1 am.

I found myself typing and deleting. Editing and redrafting. Finger hovering over the send button.

I stopped and lamented- yes, lamented- that the person I once never hesitated to speak to, to confess to, to tell everything, I couldn't even find it in myself to speak to now.

Suddenly it felt so loaded. It felt inappropriate. It felt wrong. Risky. Taboo even.

I still sent it.

I’d like to pretend it's because I have the balls of a Navy SEAL. But I didn't. Weirdly enough, it was that cheesy line from Call Me By Your Name that ingrained itself into 16-year-old me’s mind that made me do it.

‘Is it better to speak, or to die?’

I chose to speak. I mean, who wants to die?

But a million questions flooded my mind the second I saw that message turn blue.

And they all had one thing in common: Is this fair?

Is it fair to him? I didn't know how he’d respond. What feelings it would stir inside him. If I was somehow crossing a boundary. Was it fair to do that to him?

Was it fair to me? Was it okay for me to reopen that door? 

Was it fair to us? 

Was it selfish? Was I only reaching out because guilt was eating me alive?

Was I providing either of us false hope?

Was it fair to the man I was dating when this happened? How would I feel if he sent an emotionally loaded text to his ex at 1 am? 

I guess I questioned the ethics of texting your ex.

Now, ironically enough, to be fair to me, the message was simply an apology and well-wishing. That's it.

No ‘please take me back’, ‘remember what we had’, ‘I miss you’.

Because the truth was I didn't want or mean any of that. I just wanted to let him know I was sorry and hoped life was going well. And is that not normal? Is it not normal to want to reach out to the person who was your best friend for years and check in, to atone, to just touch base?

I think it is. But does that make it right?

I’m not sure.

Like at all.

Is it ever okay to text your ex? Is it advisable? Is it ethical? Is it manipulative? Is it emotionally damaging? Is it some sort of betrayal to everyone involved?

I think, after many cigarettes and much mulling, it is all dependent.

For me, it depends on the context. Have they asked you not to contact them? Then don’t.

That’s probably the easiest one. Whatever you need to say doesn’t suddenly become more important than a boundary they’ve explicitly put in place.

Have they got into a new relationship? Probably don’t, to be honest. Not because having an ex makes you permanently radioactive, but because sometimes the kindest thing you can do is recognise that your presence might complicate something they’ve moved on to.

How long were you together? What did the relationship actually mean to you? What is the content of the message? And, perhaps most importantly, what are you expecting to happen when you send it?

Because “I just want to apologise” can mean very different things depending on whether you’re genuinely prepared for no response, or whether some tiny part of you is hoping they’ll reply with everything you’ve secretly wanted to hear.

And maybe, what will this do to your emotional state? Will it destroy you to find you're blocked, or if they never reply? Will it hurt you to hear them say they do or don't want you back? Will it reopen old wounds, or even wounds that never healed?

I told my best friend about it a few days later, reading her my message to him aloud.

‘That's the worst apology I’ve ever heard’, she said.

‘Were you doing that for him, or for you?’

Ouch.

But good points nonetheless.

The truth is, breakups are painful. I’ve never known pain like it. I found myself unable to eat or sleep. Awake for days. Long nights spent wandering around aimlessly. Constantly needing to surround myself with people. My heart ached. I buried the feelings. I couldn't be at home, our home. It consumed me. It ate me whole and spat me out as an angry, inconsistent, unmotivated, distracted version of myself I had rarely met before. 

And then months later, I found the feelings I had run from hit me all at once. On a random Sunday. At Pho. Unfortunate. 

Yes, it wasn't entirely ethical, and clearly, my apology wasn’t great. But did it make me feel better? Oh, it did.

I got off my chest the things I wanted to say to the man I used to say everything to.

Was it selfish? Yes. But does that make it wrong?

And perhaps that’s the uncomfortable bit. Maybe reaching out was partly for me. Of course it was. I wanted relief. I wanted to stop carrying around words I hadn’t said. But does doing something partly for yourself automatically make it selfish? Most things we do for other people make us feel something too. We apologise because we want someone else to know we’re sorry, but also because we want to be forgiven. We tell someone we love them because we want them to know, but also because keeping it inside hurts.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether contacting an ex is entirely selfless. Perhaps very little human communication is. Perhaps the question is whether you’re asking something of them in return.

I think, though, in the question of whether you should text your ex, it’s important to say I doubt everyone will experience the same feelings of relief. Or even any nice feelings at all. You might send the message and immediately regret it. You might be met with silence, anger, indifference, or a response that hurts considerably more than you anticipated. You might reopen something you’d spent months trying to close. And perhaps most painfully, you might realise that the words you’ve been carrying around for months don’t actually make anything better once they’re finally said.

There is also a difference between getting something off your chest and getting closure. One is something you can do for yourself. The other may depend, at least partly, on what the other person says back. And if you’re texting an ex because you’re hoping they’ll give you something only they can give you, you’re putting an awful lot of emotional power in the hands of someone who may not want, or be able, to give it to you.

Yet, there's something so human about the need to speak. To speak up for ourselves, to communicate with others, to express ourselves, to say what has boiled up inside us. To scream and cry and protest. To apologise. To confess. 

Can you live with the words you speak? And can you live with never speaking them?