The other day I wrote a long and rambling mess of a post about indifference as a form of accepting uncertainty (Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference). Or at least that’s what I was trying to write about. I was also trying to touch on what it’s like to try to live without expectations and how starting over in a job, or a city, or a relationship requires both an assessment of the past and movement towards some horizon (maybe). Not having been settled these past few years and with the prospect of starting over in all three domains (job, city, relationship), I’m prone to this type of reflection/visioning/dithering: “where have I been and where am I going and does any of it really matter?” Despite the premium the outside world places on certainty and decisiveness, I’ve gotten more comfortable with not having the answers about the future, not knowing where I’m going or how I’ll get there. More troubling for me is the shapeshifting and slippery nature of the past in which revisions tend towards making us heroes or victims in our own stories. We’re experts at deceiving ourselves and honest assessments can be hard to come by. I probably could have written this first paragraph as that blog post and been done with it. I’m seldom that succinct (as you’ll see).
A little later that day, I opened Twitter and the first tweet I saw said “be a better you, for you.” The tweet felt a little on the nose considering I had just mentioned in that post that I sometimes hold on to my past as a way to build a better me for the people no longer in my life and the people yet to come. As a part-time people-pleaser and practicing self-flagellating masochist, it’s far easier to look to the past and “correct” for other people’s criticisms than it is to self-identify issues and self-correct. I’m probably not going to call myself needy or anxious or depressed – those things require outside evaluators. And of course, the very nature of self-adjustment is a reactionary process that requires some form of validation. How do we know if we’ve gotten less controlling, or less argumentative, or kinder, or better at listening without testing our progress? How can we manifest our future by learning from our past if we don’t have proper benchmarks? This is why I believe relationships and the mirrors they hold can be so important. They hack away at self-delusion.
Later that night, at dinner, I opened up my news feed to an article published in The Atlantic: “What Second-Chance Couples Know About Love.” Because that’s my kind of rabbit hole, I dove in. I am, at heart, a sucker for stories of renewal and triumph, but also deeply curious about how people grow (both in and out of relationships).
A few weeks ago, when I told a friend that I was looking to move out west, and that I’m a candidate for a position in a city where an ex has moved, she responded by asking, “are you still in love with her?” I didn’t answer directly – I think my gut response would have been, “how would I know?” Instead, I shared the story of how a woman I dated in Memphis asked me a similar question when we started seeing each other: “would you get back with her if she came back?”
By the time the woman in Memphis had asked me that question, I had spent over a year trying to work through the cognitive dissonance of what was and wasn’t real in my most recent relationship, my engagement… and months trying to train myself not to ask those types of hypothetical questions. Playing with such questions seemed counter to my attempts to live in the moment. In trying to understand the dissonance, I had gotten comfortable with not trying so hard to reconcile two versions of reality, “it was real on my end, and it didn’t matter if it was real on hers – both could be true and independent of each other.” This way of thinking helped frame my understanding of unconditional. It gave me a way to think about that particular relationship and other relationships going forward.
I think I answered my friend in Memphis by saying, “you know, I’ve been trying not to think about whether or not it’s even a possibility.” I liked spending time with this woman and I wanted to see if our friendship could develop into something more. I wasn’t looking for a relationship, but I wasn’t not looking for one either. In my attempt at being indifferent to the outcome, I found myself unwilling or unable to say what she wanted to hear. It was both a fair and unfair question back then, and I didn’t have an easy or clear answer.
Love and its after effects are strange in that way. It tends to complicate our thinking by introducing varying levels of nuance. So often, love is about more than just one thing. Sure, it’s about the other person, but it’s also about how they make you feel, the circumstances and activities you enjoy together, how far you’re willing to go, how you fit together, and also very much about your view of yourself. It begins with a type of innocent and enthusiastic view of the other person which can, if we let it, be chipped away by disappointment, resentment, and hurt. It also begins with an enthusiastic and hopeful view of the self (which can also be chipped away). The challenge, then, is to always assume the best, to always return to those initial, innocent views. Honesty in my answer about reconnecting, then and now, requires more nuance than a simple yes or no. The real question (in my mind) wasn’t about getting back together, but was, instead, could I still see that person (and myself) as I initially did?
The thing for me, a combination of my conditioning and genuine belief, is that I don’t believe in giving up on people. I fight hard to retain my initial view of people. In some respects, to give up on what I had hoped for us then, felt akin to giving up on what I had hoped for myself. What I tried to tell the woman in Memphis was that I had already lost too much time wondering about things over which I had no control. That I was trying to do for myself what this other person had done for me. That I was trying to follow some sage advice which was to live and love without hope or expectations. There’s no need to rule anything in or anything out – life is unpredictable and often beyond our control – doors open and close on their own…. or some variation of that. Understandably, no new romantic partner wants to hear, “I don’t know, or I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it.” Understandably, they prefer certainty. And for a long time now, I’ve been unable to deliver on certainty – somewhat intentionally so.
I still try to follow that mindset and advice. As such, I struggle with how to integrate that part of my story into where I am today. Dodging the answer this last time when my friend asked was as honest as I could be. I think my friend assumed that my answer was yes because in her mind, anything other than a firm no is a yes. But my world isn’t that black and white, and for a few years, I have very deliberately tried to embrace ambiguity. If I struggle with hypothetical situations, it’s because I don’t see much value in them. To me, asking those questions is like pointing to a stranger and asking if I could love them. I don’t know, maybe? I’m on dating apps where I ignore all but a select few maybes… Or asking if I still like a food or activity that I used to enjoy but haven’t tried in a while. Perhaps? I understand the line of questioning. Literature and music are full of heartache, reunions, betrayals, rejections, and forgiveness. If the sentiment weren’t common, The Atlantic wouldn’t be writing articles on it. From that article:
Reuniting with a past partner is, for many people, a deeply appealing prospect. In a 2021 Match.com survey of 5,000 single Americans, nearly a third of participants said that they would get back with an ex if they could. If that proportion seems high, consider this: Falling in love changes us physiologically, even permanently. After a breakup, the brain’s functional architecture doesn’t always go back to the way it was before.
I can attest to those physiological changes. I don’t think my brain has been the same since 2019 – though I’m not sure I’d count myself in the third who would get back with an ex. I’d probably answer the way I answer most questions: it depends. While my engagement was brief, there was something radically different about the way I saw the world and how I was learning to move in it. I had a deeper sense of wonder and awe. And afterwards, as I spent time trying to cultivate that vision or feeling within, I was developing a deeper appreciation for having some sort of veil lifted. Be the person I wanted to find… be the person I thought I found. This change, while very much a part of who I am today, isn’t something that I can easily articulate – at least not without referencing how I got here, and that’s when things seem to get muddied.
Not too long ago, I went out for drinks with someone I met on a dating site. We talked about our views on relationships and things like “success” and boundaries and effective communication. I shared the cliffs notes version of my past. Was married. Have a step-daughter. Dated a lot. Was engaged – that ended. Took some time to try to figure things out and practice solitude. Might still be trying to figure things out. I think I’ve had my fill of solitude… now, here I am (mostly)…. In these conversations, I tend to speak positively about my past relationships. I can’t think of anyone towards whom I have animosity or hardened feelings. I try to own where I could have done better – which is in a lot of areas and situations. At one point in our conversation, she asked if I regretted the engagement. I wasn’t sure how to answer other than to think that I’m pretty sure regret wasn’t the right word. I probably should have asked the clarifying question: regret getting engaged or regret that it didn’t work? No to the first, sure, to the second. Her question and whatever answer I gave led to a conversation about whether or not people enter our lives for specific time periods and reasons – a concept I can’t fully buy into. I suspect our sense-making happens after people have come and gone and that rationalizing their temporal presence as having had a purpose is just one way to dull the sting of loss. Furthermore, I often wonder how many of these encounters are casualties of timing and circumstance? As the article I was reading suggests, “If the timing can be wrong, though, it can be right again in the future.”
And this is what I mean by trying to integrate my past with my present. People (friends and potential dates) will ask if I hold out hope or if I’ve moved on or if I still have feelings, and I seldom have straight-forward answers. So many of the authors and thinkers that I read espouse the notion that love doesn’t go away. The more I’ve tried to practice non-dualistic thinking, the more I’ve come to appreciate answers such as “yes, but” or “yes, and” or “no, but” etc. The older I get, the less certain I become about anything and everything – especially what the future holds. The truth is, I have good memories of people from my past and I try not to have a lot of negative regrets. We can regret something that didn’t work or last, but I don’t think we should regret the experience or attempt. The story of Icarus is always the caution of overreach, yet what gets lost is that he flew in the first place. In the case of my engagement, I have fondness for that person and how I felt when we were together. When memories come up, they make me smile. I figure at some point, I’ll make new memories that also will make me smile (which all seems reasonable, healthy, and hopeful).
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why some people try to kill off those parts of their past or try to rewrite them with a negative spin. You’d be amazed at how many people claim to have dated or escaped narcissists (a term I suspect is being over-used). The past is funny in how it haunts us. Some of us run from it. Some of us bury it or try to forget it. Some of us demonize it. Some of us regret it and some of us revere it. A true assessment, one in which we sit with our past, recognizes that the line between regret and revere can be quite thin. Depending on our feelings towards our past, our memories will almost always be skewed in one direction or another: favorably or miserably, and I prefer to be less miserable.
What we can’t do, is undo our past. We can’t make it not have happened. I was married. I was engaged. I had certain jobs. I dated certain people. I went to a specific college. I have had certain friends. These things happened. That’s how the article in The Atlantic begins: “so many regrets in life are impossible to rectify. You can’t go back in time to study for a failed exam, or take a job offer you declined, or tell someone you care for them before they die.” And so, my new acquaintance’s question of regret was an interesting one. One that sat with me as I wrote about indifference and as I read about second-chance relationships.
In it’s exploration, The Atlantic article tries to distill the nature of second-chance relationships. It states that researchers who study “cyclical relationships” find them troubling: “Those cycles are linked to worse relationship quality and more depression and anxiety symptoms. The more times a relationship ends and begins again, the less likely a couple is to be happy in it.” I’ve been in one or two of those – constant break-ups and reunions… but I think the author, Faith Hill, is looking at a different type of cyclical relationship and looking for the exceptions to those findings. She cites, “One 2013 study found that more than a third of cohabiting couples and one-fifth of married ones have broken up before.”
Quite honestly, I’m surprised that number isn’t higher. Breakups are often a result of miscommunication, old baggage, and pushing on each other’s boundaries. This may sound flippant or antagonistic, but I suspect if a couple hasn’t broken up (or come close to it), they’re not trying very hard to genuinely know each other – they’re not risking showing their authentic selves. I think every serious relationship I’ve had has had at least one break in it. Usually, if we returned, we did so with more gusto – we returned more determined and more sincerely than before. I don’t know that authentic relationships can exist without forms of renewal and rebirth, differences and discovery, failures and forgiveness. To me, that seems to be where some of the magic is. Longevity is about choosing, over and over again – and sometimes those choices might be the ones that yank us back from the edge of collapse or bring us home after an absence. It seems like in the best of circumstances, we’re fated to act out our best and worst selves in front of the one person who we hope to be our favorite and most forgiving audience member.
The truth of the matter is that love, like grief, doesn’t really leave. Time passes. People might leave and circumstances might change, but if we can learn to love without possession (a difficult proposition), then it becomes far less about an object of desire and more about a state of being with an ever-changing other. In that respect, it has a stickiness to it and a bit more padding. From Hill’s article:
With love sticky in their memory, it’s easy for exes to envision how things might look if only the past had gone differently. That’s called counterfactual thinking, and it goes hand in hand with regret. According to Daniel Pink, the author of The Power of Regret, regret over lost or broken connections is one of the most common types. Usually, there’s no way to know whether the rosy scenarios you imagine are just hypothetical. But getting back with an ex, Pink told me, is a “rare chance to actually live a counterfactual.” Reunited partners can test whether their regrets are only speculative, or whether they signal something to be salvaged.
If I avoid regret, then my hope is that I also avoid counterfactual thinking. None of my relationships have approached perfection. None of them have been entirely rosy. They’ve had spectacular moments and produced affectionate memories. I haven’t known how to answer these questions when they’ve come up, and the fact that they come up indicates maybe I need a better answer? I avoid the speculative questions because I’ve worked hard to practice a type of surrender. And to speculate runs counter to that. I avoid the speculative questions because I don’t think I would know the answer unless I saw/felt/experienced it. I avoid the speculative questions, because I’ve always tried to be a realist – good times are are seldom rose-colored. Despite my ex being a catalyst, I have made an earnest attempt at being a better me for me and also for anyone else who might enter my orbit (friends, family, co-workers, and partners). And while I am looking for a number of things in my next relationship, including things that I might have lost along the way, I also seek a measure of how far I’ve come. Am I better for my losses? Have I become softer and more forgiving? The article ends:
To return to old love might be wonderful. Even better is to walk out of the [time] machine into a new world, to find your partner and yourself both transformed and fundamentally the same, and to know, having lost each other before, that you wouldn’t want to time travel with anyone else.
I felt that level of certainty in the midst of my best relationships… I knew who my time-traveling companion was. The fact that none of them worked doesn’t change how I felt in the moment – that would be a type of revisionism, which to me feels dishonest. And so when people ask about regrets or reunions, I can only acknowledge that through this process, I’ve been both transformed and remain fundamentally the same – about the rest I can’t quite say.
In my readings today, I came across a nice quote from Henry Miller that helps explain my attempts to keep an open heart and mind to the unpredictability of flames (old and new), to memory and aspirations, to wonder in the world in whatever form it might appear.
If you can fall in love again and again, if you forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.
Cultivating indifference might not have been the best way to describe how I’ve tried to approach life these past few years. In the face of difficult departures (hers then mine) and some deep soul searching I wanted to not only avoid growing sour, surly, bitter, and cynical, but I wanted to reposition where I might find joy and wonder… and I feel especially fortunate to see it residing in warm memories, in the quiet of present moments, and in a future woolly and untamed. Anything else is just wild speculation – to which I can only echo the closing lines of Stephen Dobyns’ poem “How to Like It.” I don’t know where the answers are kept, or what comes next, or how to like it.