Crap Email From A Partner's Ex: Someone's Wearing RomCom Goggles

While our Crap Email series typically deals with shady mailings from dudes, today’s letter comes to us from a woman whose husband’s ex-girlfriend doesn’t seem to understand why, in the words of Lady Gaga, she doesn’t wanna be friends.

Our sender, Alyson, writes:

I woke up this morning to the crappiest of all crappy emails and had to share it with you. Here’s the background on the crap email. It comes from my husbands ex girlfriend. They broke up in [a few years before we met and married]. Since then she has phoned him twice. Once she went so far as to call his international head office and managed to get his work cell phone number in order to call him SIX WEEKS before our wedding to tell him how she still felt about him. At that time I told her, in the nicest way I could muster at the time, to fuck off. Evidently she didn’t get the hint because thanks to Facebook, she’s managed to find me again and send me this piece of lovely weekend mail.

Here’s the crap email Alyson woke up to:

Aly,

Hi, I’m not sure how you will take this message but I’m riding on the fact that as an open minded gal you will here me out…

I need to discuss Paris…Matt was a good friend of mine for a certain period of my life and I thought I was a friend of his also. The falling out that insued after our obvious miscommunication has been a thorn in my side for quite sometime and your understanding in this matter could do more for my conscious than you will ever know.

I expect nothing from you, in fact I would not be surprised if you shut me down to continue grovelling, lol- considering your last statement to me was “fuck you, much love, Alyson”- or something along those lines… anyhow I would love nothing more now than to move beyond those barriers…

I still have souvenirs (of M’s), intended for his Mother, and I still have artwork intended for I’m not sure who but they were M’s and I put them in my suitcase. If Matt feels I owe him something financially (which that’s a very grey area), I am in a very good position to talk finance-enough said. If anything I wonder constantly about his car insurance 🙁

Aly- I’m friend requesting you on FB, lol, and in real life. I would love to just “be friends”- talk, perhaps if we ever cross paths we could sit and perhaps holy shit even have a martini together…I would definitely like to speak with Matt again and gain some closure and mutual respect.

Once again I would like to make it clear to you that I respect you as his wife and I have made no effort to go behind your back and contact him on my own and your decision in regards to my plight will be understood even if it is not in my favour.

Ok so I said what I have wanted to say for quite sometime, I respect your decision either way. Hopefully I will here from you soon. Take care.

Melissa

Oh, dear. What we have here, I think, is a case of Romantic Comedy Goggles. Romantic Comedy Goggles, I’ll have you know, are the accessories one wears in order to view his or her actions as romantic and heartfelt, when in reality, they are inappropriate and borderline creepy. If you accept the way people behave in romantic comedies, with their sweeping declarations of love, tendencies to never let go of old flames, and attempts to befriend the one who married the one who got away (this is really the entire plot of My Best Friend’s Wedding, yeah?), as applicable in any way to reality, you often end up making somewhat creepy moves, perhaps unintentionally, believing that you’re doing something in the name of love, as opposed to the name of selfishness, desperation, and undermining. While wearing Romantic Comedy Goggles, people tend to think of their efforts as heroic and dreamy, when in reality, they’re just kind of, well, crap.

Melissa’s letter was clearly written whilst she was wearing Romantic Comedy Goggles. As Alyson notes, the letter is filled with cutesy in-joke references to the couple’s time together, though she’s left out a few of the more unsavory plot points:

“Paris” was a trip he took her on at one point. Why she would like to discuss this romantic vacation with him or I is beyond me. The obvious miscommunication she references is what ended her relationship with my now husband, namely she left him high and dry for her BOYFRIEND when he had traveled half way across the country to rescue her from what was supposedly a bad relationship. The reference to the car insurance is about the time that she crashed his car.

Here’s a tip for you, Melissa: if you really respect Alyson as Matt’s wife, then perhaps you should leave her and her husband alone, as she asked you to a few years ago. Shut the door and walk away. Stop worrying about his car insurance. Consider that perhaps you are not the star of this particular love story, and find a romantic lead of your own. The idea of “getting closure” by having a lovely, charming dinner or martini with your ex-boyfriend (whom you obviously still love) and his wife is a romantic comedy cliche that needs to be thrown away with those souvenirs you’ve kept from Paris. Take off the Romantic Comedy Goggles and start looking at the world with a clear set of eyes. And if you must cling to any cliche, let it be this one: “If you love something, let it go.”