I rub my eyes: Is he…serious?
I ask my husband whether to go for this drink, and he says go for it. Enough time has lapsed that I don’t feel the need nor the want to have sex with him; the pangs of missing his presence in my life and on my phone screen have all but gone, but there is a warmth that rings through me when he messages. So I message back.
And over a year, we will see each other six times: twice in Berlin, the rest in London except once at Glastonbury. We will kiss once, we will hold hands once, we will tell each other we could have loved each other once. We will cry once, we will laugh loads, and we will come to the very movie-of-the-week realization that we are now friends, that we are better off that way, and that this feels like a different idea of love, of connection—something truly platonic: intimate and affectionate but not sexual. We learn together that we can retract from each other in some ways and grow toward each other in others. And to me this is a somewhat revolutionary idea, afforded to me in part because of the open nature of my relationship. Our future would not be conventional unless I left my husband, which is not in the cards right now.
I grew up on rom-coms and celebrity gossip: People were in and out, all or nothing, cheating or faithful. The worst thing that could happen, the ultimate failing in a relationship, was its end. That’s what my friend was mourning on the train, and it’s what led me for so long to imagine I was a failure in love because I’d had so many technically failed relationships. But within them, as I am reminded by some of my ex-lovers now, there was a lot of love, a lot to be cherished and savored and developed. We didn’t work romantically for various reasons, sure, but a lot did work between us.
Now this is not an excuse to text your ex. Some, if not most, must be kept in the past. In my experience, a lot of the hurt that occurs at the end of relationships is irrevocable, and reconnecting with this person only reminds us of how we failed each other.
But I used to think this is how my future would go: Try to find a forever person, fail at it lots, until one sticks. Then, with them, it’s only success! But even that seems absurd: There are so many moments in a monogamous relationship or primary partnership where we fail each other, where we fall out of step with each other, where the nature of the love changes and grows. To me that’s an exciting future in love, one which includes forgiveness, reimagining, and maybe even some old flames. And who’d have thought that an ex would teach me that?
