Yes, You Need Therapy to Get Over Your Ex (And for Everything Else)
Latest

One of the hardest things to learn about love is the fact that your narrative about a relationship is probably not “The Narrative.” The official story of any two people requires two points of view, and your version is only one: The story in your head of what happened when you met someone else and fell in love/lust/like.
Of course, relationships often don’t work out, and once the bloom is off the rose, the narrative diverges with the quickness. One person is seemingly out of love or was never in it. And yet, the other person is still hanging around, years later, sifting through all the evidence of the love story like some kind of detective on a cold case, trying to figure out where the wrong turn came and how to move on. This quest for the truth of a love story gone wrong is exemplified in so many pop songs, and it is the stuff of so many advice columns.
In a recent such column at The Guardian, a reader who has remained single since a split years ago writes in to ask if she needs therapy to get over her ex. The letter is too long to paste even—that is how we all know intuitively that she could probably use some therapy—but the highlights are as follows:
- They met seven years ago
- He broke up with her a few weeks into it
- A month later, he asked her to get back together
- Two weeks later he said he’d made a mistake; dumped her again
- Three months later, he said he was into her again
He then spent months where I would barely get a text from him, to “normal” days, with walks, a nice time together, flowers, smiles – with I love yous thrown in, too.
- Then he left to go abroad for two months saying he was unsure about them
- He got back and was kinda nice sometimes
- He bought roses
- Said they should think about the future
- Dumped her a week later
Reader, there are FOUR MORE paragraphs about his back and forth with her, and general reiterating via actions and words that he doesn’t want her to have “false hope” that they will ever get back together, but still staying in touch and shit.
Then, the kicker:
I have since found out he got married last year. I have seen the girl in photos and thought how like me she looked. So when I saw her as the bride, it shocked me because perhaps for us it was the wrong timing.
And:
I was wondering if therapy would help. I do tend to brood and obsess over things.
One: Was it simply bad timing? Yes, the bad timing that happens when you will never be the person someone actually wants to be with, because you were just an easy proxy for an insta-girlfriend. That is certainly a kind of bad timing.
The advice giver at The Guardian, Annalisa Barbieri, hits on some other good truths:
But you need to realise you played your part in all this because it’s only by accepting responsibility for our own actions that we can change things. You were upset when he presumed you still had feelings for him because you did. You do. You need to acknowledge this, because before you can undo “the knot” you need to see it. I think it’s less him you miss than the idea of what you hoped he represented. That is understandable. I think therapy would help enormously: I would try talking therapy first.
Interestingly enough, this whole dilemma is similar in spirit to a hot prob over at Ask Polly, where the reader called “Square Pegs, Round Holes” wonders if she is just a booty call to a guy who lives a block away from her, never hangs out with her anywhere but at her place, and has openly rejoiced on the stumbling-distance convenience of her location. In that relationship, there is a similar one-sided narrative where the woman is pretending to not care that much when she really does care, and then wondering why she doesn’t get more out of the situation.