'I'm Happily Married But I'm Still Hung Up On My Ex!'

If you want to learn more about how you feel, you have to chip apart your fantasies of yourself and others.

Pique 1 (1959), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I feel a little pathetic even asking this question but I feel like if anyone in the universe is capable of holding this ache of mine tenderly while also holding me to account, it’s you.

I met Joe 14 years ago, when I was 21. I went on dates compulsively, almost every night. I had grown up feeling awkward and ugly then around the time I turned 21, I started feeling more confident in how I looked, I put effort into how I dressed and men noticeably reacted to me differently. It was like magic and I had a lot of fun and enjoyed the attention but it was also a way to avoid being alone with myself when the rest of my life was such a mess, when I felt so anxious and unsettled. I was failing most of my classes in undergrad due to a lot of perfectionism and undiagnosed ADHD. My teachers always told me I was smart but when it came time to actually finish and submit an essay, I kept stalling and procrastinating and often didn’t submit anything rather than submit something that didn’t live up to the imagined standards in my head. I was such a mess that I genuinely didn’t know if I would ever be able to hold a full-time job or graduate or do anything substantial with my life.

I had a new therapist around the time I met Joe. She gave me this helpful suggestion to try only saying yes to a date if I was actually attracted to the person asking (it truly blew my mind when she suggested this). I felt like I had to say yes to everyone then, like a dog who happened upon a huge bag of sugar unsupervised. Shortly after that, I met Joe. He was 24 at the time. He was so handsome, so tall, so quiet, so calm, so self-assured and funny and smart and we loved the same books and music and movies and shared the same values and both worked in the same idealistic field. We seemed aligned in values and aesthetic sensibility and love of emotional depth. We said “I love you” within a week of meeting each other. I broke off all my other situationships right away, convinced that I had met my soulmate. How could it get better than this? We talked about having kids. He said he had never felt like this about anyone else before. Before him, I had never wanted to have kids and yet with him, I was so sure that I wanted to have his baby, to have more of our love in the world.

Within a month, he started pulling away. He said he would always need alone time and space. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to spend every spare minute with me like I wanted to with him. He felt pressured by me and pulled away even more. I felt scared of him pulling away and tried to hold on even tighter, which made him want to pull away more. The vicious cycle continued until he broke it off two months later, saying that if anything were to come of us as a couple, he’d like it to come from a friendship first. He said we were both blinded in the beginning and saw things in each other that did not exist. I was devastated. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that we were meant to be.

We didn’t speak for three months then I reached out again and we tried dating again. The same problems came back almost right away. I thought we were right on track then he’d stop responding to my texts for days or cancel plans at the last minute. This only made me more anxious and I would text even more. He eventually snapped at me and broke things off again, frustrated that “we were back at the phone thing again” and that I was expecting way more than he could give. It feels like such a cliché to write all this out to you but through all this, I still thought he was my one true love.

We got back together one more time a few months later. We went for coffee and then went for a walk. He called himself a coward and told me that he’s not a good partner for me and that he can’t give me what I need. I cried because I understood and I agreed yet I still couldn’t let go. We decided to date again. Another few months pass by and I make plans to move to another city because I wanted a fresh start. I was still hoping he’d beg me to stay but instead, he said he was happy for me and he said a lot of people will be lucky to have me in their lives.

Except for the very beginning, he was always consistent in saying that he didn’t want to be more available, he didn’t want to be instantly connected, he didn’t want to spend a lot of time with me, he wanted to be able to cancel plans as he saw fit. He said he was too selfish to compromise at that point in his life. I kept saying okay to the crumbs, as long as it kept him around. I thought it was worth it because we were meant to end up together if only I could be patient enough, understanding enough, and less needy. If I’m being honest, I also wanted him to choose me so I could keep using him as the direction in my life. I would just follow him wherever he went and organize around him when I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was. He mentioned that he didn’t want anyone’s happiness to depend on him and he didn’t want attachment in relationships.

He broke up with me before I moved to the new city, saying that he’s not a good partner for me and he didn’t want to be so toxic for me anymore.

Now it’s 13 years later and Joe’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m going through some huge shifts in my life right now. I’m now 35. I’m quitting my job soon. I’ve worked for 10 years in a high-prestige and legible field that others admire but that slowly made me feel dead inside, completely out of sync with my moral values. I’m married to my husband who I’ve been with for 12 years, who has always made me feel loved and accepted for who I am right from the beginning, someone who has gone to therapy himself to work on his emotional issues, someone who has endless patience to work things out with me when we disagree or fight, someone who takes care of me when I’m sick, someone who makes me laugh and understands my exact humor, someone who I feel safe and calm with. We are talking about starting a family and yet I’m not sure if I want to. I can’t tell if I don’t want to have kids in general or if I don’t want to have kids with my husband. I love him but I sometimes wonder if he really understands me and all my emotions.

I can’t tell if I’m just grieving the passage of time, how I’ll never be 21 again, or if I really miss Joe himself. Even though I was such a mess then, I felt all my feelings and tried to embrace being a radish (I was an avid Ask Polly reader even then). I did a lot of things to try to be impressive to Joe but I also gained a lot of confidence through those things. I learned how to ride a bike safely on the streets (because Joe was into biking). I learned how to run a 5k (because Joe loved to go running). I went dancing with my friends to try to distract myself with other boys and forget Joe. I tried to become a vegan. I read loads of books about love and philosophy to try to crack the code of how to be happy enough on my own so that I could withstand the amount of space and distance Joe seemed to need so he’d love me again. My future seemed full of possibilities then. I felt free (in both an empowering and terrifying way). I’m proud of everything I accomplished since then and all that I carried myself through over the past 13 years. Not only have I been able to hold a full-time job and graduate, I’ve excelled (even if it was in a field that didn’t feel aligned with my values). I’ve travelled a ton. I’ve done things that I was too scared to even dream of when I was with Joe. My anxiety and ADHD and depression were so overwhelming that I didn’t think any of what I have now was possible. I’m so proud of myself for what I’ve been able to do.

Another trigger from the past few months: I saw a picture of Joe’s baby with his partner on Instagram (his partner and I have a few mutual friends and her profile popped up). It was such a gut punch to see his daughter’s face. She looks just like him. For a second, my brain malfunctioned and didn’t understand why/how that wasn’t my baby. He’s also been with his partner for 12 years. It seems like we both met our long-term partners within a year of breaking up. I’ve been crying on and off whenever I think of him for the past five months.

I don’t know if I miss him, if I miss being 21, if I’m inconsolable over not ever being able to go back to the past when my future was so free and possible, or what. Seeing his daughter’s face finally closed a door that I didn’t even know I had left ajar. Somewhere deep inside me, without me ever acknowledging it, a part of me had always thought that we would find our way back to each other, once I’m independent enough, evolved enough, calm enough, chill enough, etc. Now that possibility is gone forever and I realized that I’ve been using our memories and this fantasy as an emotional refuge whenever things got tough. I held so much hope there. It’s like I’ve been living my life as a placeholder for when he finally wakes up and realizes I was the one who got away.

I feel so stupid and delusional when I write this all out and yet I can’t help that I feel this way. The tears are still coming whenever he pops up in my mind or a familiar song from that time comes up.

Am I just going through a midlife crisis and he’s a convenient focal point to project all my lost hopes onto? I feel like such an ungrateful asshole to my loving and kind husband who has been there for me, who has shown up, exactly as he is, fully human and present and willing to be real and vulnerable with me versus Joe, an avoidant guy who by the end didn’t even seem that into me and who’s always made me feel like something was wrong with me for having some basic emotional needs like wanting her partner to text back within a week and to keep plans for Thanksgiving dinner.

Maybe Joe is just a refuge for how dead I’ve been feeling. Our best memories were so heightened, those heady early days when we spent all our time together and things felt so ecstatic and wonderful. How could ordinary life compare to those? I’ve been feeling dead with a meaningless job. My life with my husband and our dog is lovely and calm, to the point where it feels a bit flat. I’m looking at my future and terrified that a baby would just lock in all the monotony that I can’t stand anymore. I want to feel alive. I want to have an unknowable future. I still want serendipity and beauty and wonder and the potential to be surprised and learn many new things.

How do I finally let Joe go? Is any of this even really about Joe? How do I finally face my life as it is now? How do I show up for my husband without killing the messiest and most alive parts of me that are dying to be seen? How do I figure out if I really want a baby or not without tangling Joe into it? I’m so confused and sad and honestly a little hopeless. Please help.

Sincerely,

Longing To Change

Dear LTC,

The problem you have has nothing to do with youth or sex or age or your current life circumstances, even. It’s a problem that’s embedded in your language and in our culture’s language about what it means to feel good, comfortable, settled, and secure. We confuse security with boredom and mistake insecurity, longing, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with romance and adventure.

Our bodies collude in this bewilderment. We feel electric when we’re in a state of wanting more and feel half-asleep or half-there when we’re comfortable. In some ways, we enjoy longing more than being satiated. We crave more desire, and translate total relaxation and lack of drive as a state of decline or death. We fear permanence because it means we’ll be trapped in a flat-lining state forever. We want suspense, even if it means being kept in the dark about what will happen next week or next month or next year.

But instead of taking on the kinds of life choices that build suspense and bring us energy, we use other people as a shortcut to that excitement. We ask other people to deliver to us all of the romance and excitement and desire and adventure that we refuse to slow down and find on our own.

Collectively, we associate uncertainty and anxiety with seduction and romance. We watch stories about people who are running for their lives or destroying their marriages out of boredom or smashing things apart for the sake of justice. We love comedies about sloppy freaks who screw everything up repeatedly. And don’t get me started about true crime fixations!

So we’re fed these sad myths about love: Romance is for the young, for the daring. Sexy times are only sexy when it’s the first or second or fifteenth time and after that it’s like playing the same song over and over again for no good reason. Stable, secure, loving people are boring. What you can’t have is far more attractive than what’s right in front of your face.

You can add the myths about having kids in there, if you want to: Babies ruin your life and your body and your marriage. Kids are a nonstop hassle and people often regret the choice to have them.

I know these are all common beliefs now, but I don’t share them. I don’t personally believe that the ideal way to live is a nonstop sexy adventure. I’ve never managed to go on a short sexy adventure, even, without my thirst for true companionship and security popping up along the way. Having kids was incredibly inconvenient over and over again, but the pure volume of madness and fun and joy that sprang forth from that time in my life was immeasurable. I was much more productive and adventurous, by the way, when I had constant kid-related tasks to complete. I am much more of a slug now that my kids are pretty independent.

My personal belief is that we all need A LOT OF THINGS to be happy. We require a lot of security and a lot of adventure. We demand a lot of stability and satisfaction but we also want intrigue and longing in the mix. We want to be who we were at 21 and 31 and 41 but we also want to feel as settled and established and respected as a 65 year-old.

I wrote a whole book about marriage and the scary and fun things about it. You can buy it and read it if you want to know more. My personal take on husbands is that the very, very good ones — the ones you can rely on, who take on half of the work of running the household, who enjoy following your trains of thought wherever they go (at least some of the time!), who have smart things to say, who keep their jobs (generally) and take their responsibilities seriously — are also sometimes UNNERVINGLY PREDICTABLE in their behavior and speech.

But look, everyone who’s been with anyone more than a few years has a handful of complaints. That is inescapable. I don’t know anyone with a husband who hasn’t complained about their husband in the exact way that you complain about your husband in your letter. I don’t have a single friend who’s been with the same person for two years or more who hasn’t said, “My god, THIS AGAIN,” to me. Joe’s wife does this, too. It’s what married people do, and all it means is that we have been hanging around the same person a long time.

I went through a stage where I was pretty sure that the source of my restlessness was BEING MARRIED. I kept trying to trick myself into believing that I had a bad marriage or that I had picked the wrong person. But that wasn’t possible because it wasn’t true. Even so, I longed to have a disastrous affair with someone I didn’t know at all. I wanted something crazy and romantic and unpredictable to happen for a change.

That would make me feel like I was 21 again, or 28 again, or 32 again. That would make me feel like my life was a big question mark and anything could happen. I wanted to be seen through fresh eyes, and told that I was irresistible. (Ha ha that sounds fantastical to me now, which is a little sad, but IRRESISTIBLE? COME ON, WOMAN.)

Making an either/or equation out of love is pretty stupid in general. You assign the familiar partner a bunch of arbitrary traits (“dull” “repetitive” “doesn’t challenge me enough”) simply because they’re a known quantity. You assign the less familiar or more idealized person (“yum” “what was that?” “what did he even mean?”) magical powers. The magical unavailable figure owns all music, controls all sexual responses, paints gorgeous sunsets across the sky. All weird or daring thoughts belong to this person. All communing is deeper and more poetic. Time spent together is imagined to be weightless, sparkling, sensual, unearthly.

Real humans don’t look that romantic in the long term when you allow yourself to believe the myths that our culture feeds us. One of the most destructive myths of all is that when you’re married to someone who’s great, your whole life is like a happy sweet song by Faith Hill or John Legend. Another destructive myth is that marriage is a big drag and everyone who’s married wishes they could fuck anyone and do anything but they’re trapped. Another shitty myth is that feeling unmoored and afraid like you do when you’re 21 is the absolute peak of human experience, the most romantic and special way to feel. Another bad myth is that as you grow older, you become increasingly boring and rigid and disgusting and unattractive and your life sucks in quiet, terrifying ways that you can’t mention to anyone because you still want them to see you as special and vital.

Our myths make us dissatisfied and evasive. We turn on the people, places, and things we love in favor of the myths we’ve built that echo the shitty myths we were raised on. Our bodies change and shift every single day and we build reductive stories about what it means to feel the sensations we feel. We don’t understand ourselves as complex and ever-shifting organisms. We want to fit ourselves into a Faith Hill lyric instead.

Joe was a symbol of your youth and a symbol of true love that you held very close to your heart. There was never anything wrong with that. You feel pain now because you have to let that myth go. We’re all forced to let go of myths repeatedly in this life. We don’t realize what kinds of fantasies are working on us until we’re forced to live without them.

Fixating on what you can’t have is almost always a way of avoiding the present moment, and avoiding the hard work it takes to face your own path forward in the world. We’re all afraid at some level and we don’t want to compromise for any reason, about anything.

When I had a few crushes in a row, I was afraid of getting old and afraid of death. Once I faced those fears, the crushes faded out of sight. I had to struggle through the darkness of my fears in order to feel the ground under my feet again. I had to let go of my fantasies and delusions about myself, too, in order to reconnect with my real life. It was upsetting and sad and hard, but I came out on the other side with a lot of clarity about what I love and who I love.

If you want to understand this fixation, you really have to look closely at your fears. My guess is that you’re very afraid of the big responsibility of having kids. You’re afraid of doing anything that feels permanent. Maybe you’re commitmentphobic at a deep level that you haven’t faced before. But as long as fear is in control, you’re not going to be able to ground yourself in the life you’ve built or the marriage you’ve built. You need some time to feel your way back to your life. Be patient!

But building a life with one person is always a compromise. You’re choosing one person and not fifty. The idea that Joe would still be challenging you to be better in ways that your husband doesn’t is certainly seductive, but the truth is that you’d be a basket case if you had to stay with Joe for more than a year. He told you in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t give you, specifically you, everything that you needed. You wisely moved on and found someone who could. Most of the people I’ve had crushes on are also people who absolutely could not give me all of the things I require to feel loved and safe. As a child, my parents absolutely could not give me what I needed to feel loved and safe. My husband does this for me. It’s a change and sometimes it feels less romantic than starving out in the cold, wanting more. That’s absolutely natural and common, that desire to suffer for love. But it’s not good for you over the long haul. You have to question it and you have to find other ways to feel more alive.

If what you want is MORE — whether it’s more desire, more longing, more adventure, more change OR more of an ability to accept what you already love and what’s already making you happy — then you have to push yourself. You can’t rely on someone else to make your life more interesting. You have to take responsibility for locating your desires and feeding your spirit and having the adventures that you crave.

If you pretend that these adventures can only unfold in your life if you’re with someone who’s half-there, withholding, or imbued with the magic of your fantasies, then the likelihood is that you’ll end up feeling both dissatisfied / bored AND insecure / unstable. You’ll get sick of a person who can’t give you what you need the same way you’ve gotten sick of someone who can. And if you really want to know how much of what you feel is a fantasy? Stay close friends with someone you once had a crush on, and familiarize yourself with how they talk from day to day. Get to know the mundane side of a person that you tricked yourself into believing was magical.

The ridiculous prank on us all is that no one is magical. That said, we are all magical deep inside, in ways that only WE can access. When you fall madly in love with someone, most of the magic and romance is coming from inside the house. The trick to continuing to grow and wander and feel alive is committing to that magic inside you. You have to keep pushing yourself to do hard things, do new things, do interesting things that kick up more romance inside your bloodstream. You have to put yourself in new environments and endure new people. You have to take on difficult tasks. You have to step outside of your comfort zone and soak in new habitats.

Maybe you’re truly dissatisfied with your life and you want more. Maybe you need to try a new job, a new form of exercise, a new hobby, and make some new friends. Maybe you never wanted kids in the first place. I don’t know everything that’s going on with you. But I would resist doing the easiest, most reductive thing and questioning your relationship simply because you happened to put this one person who never loved you completely on a pedestal. This is a Go Back to Therapy moment, not a Change Your Whole Life Now moment.

No human can serve a platter of fun and excitement and eternal youth to you over the stretch of your entire life. It wouldn’t be sustainable for you to be married to someone who was constantly dissatisfied with or overwhelmed by you. You’d constantly have to work your ass off to be more like him, take on his pursuits and hobbies, work out the way he does, and he’d still be lukewarm about you. That doesn’t mean Joe is extra special. It means he’s not your guy.

The most interesting aspect of this picture is the woman who really, really loves to work hard and try new things. That’s the magic here: You, a person who is hungry for a big challenge, who wants to break past her fears and do more with herself. Let me be clear here: You can do more and also have a baby. You can do more and stay married. You need to understand what kinds of MORE might bring you energy and lust for life over the long haul.

You need to take responsibility for the fact that you’re not giving yourself enough new challenges right now. You need to wake up and see that you want much, much more from your life and it’s up to you alone to give yourself more to do, to place yourself in new environments, to build new skills, to discover new talents and passions. It’s a slow process.

Once I finally saw that it was up to me to make my life romantic, I started living in full color again, this time without relying on fixations or fantasies or escapist urges to give me the energy I wanted. I let go of my imaginary worlds and I started to show up for reality. I began attuning myself to new friendships, new collaborations, new research projects, new ways of writing about life. I made it my goal to allow my interests to guide me forward. I resolved to support my own curiosity as much as possible, even when it led down narrow alleys to dead ends.

That’s an abstract way of saying that I committed to the romance that lives inside me. I committed to respecting that romance more than any of the fairy tales I’d been told since I was a kid. I committed to feeling how much love I have for the people who are in my life right now, and committed to showing up in the present and listening closely to what makes them excited and inspired.

When I had an anguished marriage crisis like yours, I committed to trying to see my husband more clearly by listening closely to him. It was hard, and my heart wasn’t in it at first. But I attuned myself to what was weird and alive and interesting about him. It’s hard to describe that process. It was slow. But it’s added a lot to my life, to slowly become someone who could get curious about another person who I know very well already.

I also got more curious about myself. Now every morning, I try to honor what my heart wants. That’s pretty hard to do in general, but I think it makes the world more colorful and it’s made me more creative and also more connected to other people.

The trick to getting out of the sad and wilty and fantasy-addicted state you’re in right now is redirecting your attention. It’s really that simple. Stop going back to the dopamine of believing these old myths. Kick that habit simply by looking at something else. Imagine a bright and vivid life ahead that has adventures you can’t see clearly from here. Open your heart to experiences and situations and feelings you don’t understand yet. Stop looking backwards and attune your fragile heart to the beauty of uncertainty in this moment.

Honor your pain and sadness, but keep your heart open and stay curious about what this pain is here to teach you.

Safety and security are not inherently dull. Go back to therapy and keep talking about what you want. Figure out what’s inside you. Whether or not you stay with your husband, I think the most important job right now is to figure out how to let the romance and energy and love inside you express itself. You need to honor the poetry that lives under your skin more.

No one is blocking you from being exactly who you want to be. No one is dampening your spirit. You are loved and embraced for who you are. You can grow anything you want from here. You can have all kinds of adventures. The hardest things are also the best things. Do all of the hardest things. Honor your drive to be challenged. Respect your longing to be placed outside of your comfort zone.

I know you feel sad and vulnerable. Take those feelings to your husband and talk about them. Lean into hard things but lean into your fragile heart, too. You can do both. You can do a lot more than you thought, in fact. Dare to honor the vast, expansive, intricate universe inside you.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Let’s talk about crushes and fixations and obsessions in the comments. What are these fantasies here to show us? Personally, I feel like I was never going to learn to be grounded in my real life until I figured out how to let go of some of my oldest (and most perfectionistic) fantasies about myself. That doesn’t sound that fun, being grounded! But it makes life so much richer and more satisfying when you’re not living inside your head all the time. If you read Ask Polly often but don’t pay for it and you can afford a subscription, please consider subscribing!

Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. I appreciate your support!