agonyaunt | Dear Fuck-Up: I can’t stop mentioning my ex

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Dear Fuck-Up: I can’t stop mentioning my ex

Dear Fuck-Up,

I found your recent essay on “How to Poach an Egg and Leave a Marriage” touching and wonderful. I related to it immensely because I'm currently divorcing my husband of six years after staying unhappily in my marriage for far too long.

Here's the issue with my situation: My soon-to-be-ex husband and I grew up as close friends in a very conservative Christian culture, and we got married when I was 19. I asked for a divorce last year, and we have been separated for about eight months.

About three months ago, when I didn't feel ready and didn't expect it, I met someone new who is wonderful and exactly what I want and need at this moment in my life. But I don't exactly fit the description of an average 25-year-old; so much of my childhood and adult life until this time was tied up in religion and the fact that I got married so young. Even though I've left both religion and my marriage, everything about my life until now has had something to do with my ex-husband — even things like childhood vacations.
I'm in therapy, and dealing with all the emotional ups and downs of this new life completely separated from both of those huge things, but on a day-to-day basis the question I get hung up on is how to talk about the “before” with the new guy I'm seeing. It's not how to talk about the fact that I've been married (we've had that discussion already), but more that I find that my marriage leaks into my new relationship more than I would like. I find myself talking about my ex, something we did together, or using “we” instead of “I” when talking about some previous experience I had.

My ex and I are just now starting on paperwork to legally divorce, so it's also a very current thing in my life. It's not that I'm struggling to emotionally move on from my divorce — I don't regret asking for one at all, and don't want to go back to him. I think it's that I've never had an identity in my adult life outside of my ex, so it's not so easy to cut him out of my verbal patterns. While I originally would have expected to process this transition from a “we” to an “I’ privately and on my own time, I now have a new person in my life and I find myself cringing every time I “slip up” and talk about anything related to my ex.

How can I keep my damned mouth closed when the impulse strikes me to say something pertaining to my ex? How can I force that switch from “we” to “I’? Is that even a reasonable expectation to have of myself, or is my identity so entrenched in such a HUGE thing that I can't hope to ever move on from my past from how I talk about it?

Dear “We,”

First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity for shameless self-promotion! What a lovely way to ensure I will answer your query. Please read my recent essay here, and all of my previous columns below.
I think you have two interrelated anxieties here: one a more practical concern about language and the deeper one a question of identity. Let me tackle the former because that’s much easier: I don’t think it’s a problem at all that you are mentioning your ex a lot in this new relationship. In fact, it would be very odd for you not to reference what amounts to your entire past when talking to your new boyfriend.

I think the commonly held assumption that it’s taboo to talk about an ex is ridiculous. A person who never mentions their exes has something to hide. So please stop cringing and just embrace that this is a fact of you — one any new partner should happily abide.

But I suspect the fact of you is what you’re worried about. That your “we”-ness rather than “I”-ness is essentially cringeworthy, and leaves you struggling to catch up with your peers. This is a reasonable way to feel, especially as you navigate your divorce and read essays on the internet about it. So much of what we sell to women under the guise of empowerment hinges on the notion that one should have a discrete and legible self. One that you develop alone, and then care for and have confidence in and esteem.

The older I get the more I reject that notion entirely. Each of us is constantly made and unmade by the people we love and the ones we leave, by the communities we inherit and the ones we build. Your faith and your marriage and your decision to walk away from both are all bound up together with the 25-year-old woman you are now, as they will be in different ways with the 35-year-old woman you become.

You ask about separating your identity from your past as though that’s a thing you should even desire, let alone achieve. Every person walking the earth is, fundamentally, a “we,” and I think it’s a lonely and alienating thing to live in a world that tells us we should always be striving to be an “I.”

Besides, you only have this concern because you did in fact leave your church and your marriage. If your identity was so entangled with these things that you had no real sense of yourself and your desires you wouldn’t be writing me at all. You would still be there. You were brave enough to walk away from a situation that didn’t suit you; the next step is being brave enough to admit that you still carry things from that life.

Love,
A Fuck-Up

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I'm in love with this part:

So much of what we sell to women under the guise of empowerment hinges on the notion that one should have a discrete and legible self. One that you develop alone, and then care for and have confidence in and esteem.

The older I get the more I reject that notion entirely. Each of us is constantly made and unmade by the people we love and the ones we leave, by the communities we inherit and the ones we build.

I was highlighting the same part to copy! It's so... yes.

So I enjoy and embrace a lot of this. We certainly don't develop alone, we are always in relationship, etc. But having been in too-close relationships (if not romantic) before, that we to I think isn't just about being able to tell stories. It's also about stepping out of groupthink, and separating your own opinion from that of the relationship/group of that time. Much like a child forming their own opinion as they grow, separate from their parents. And I thought the LW was talking about that, too.

I agree. The answer neglected that aspect -- neglected the distinction between talking about an ex in general and talking about this ex, whose presence in LW's life was part and parcel of a strict religious community.

I didn't mean to imply that a strict religious community is the only reason this would be relevant -- I hear what you're saying about too-close relationships (romantic or not) and stepping away from groupthink.

Well said. I was just inchoately thinking's this concept and you put it better than I had yet formulated it.

I think the commonly held assumption that it’s taboo to talk about an ex is ridiculous. A person who never mentions their exes has something to hide. So please stop cringing and just embrace that this is a fact of you — one any new partner should happily abide.

Eh. I feel the columnist is rather dismissive of the LW here. The LW didn't say she wants to stop talking about her ex. She said she wants to stop talking about him all the time. Is it normal to sometimes mention an ex who was a big part of your life? Sure. It is normal to bring them up constantly? Maybe, maybe not, but the LW wants to be able to stop doing it to better convey that she is mentally and emotionally moving on. That seems completely reasonable.

If the LW has some close friends or family members she is comfortable recruiting to help, she can ask them to point out (maybe with a gesture) each time she mentions her ex or says "we." It will be annoying at first, but the feedback could help her begin to train herself to develop new speech patterns.

Rereading it, I'm really not impressed with the columnist's response. It's kind of nice philosophically, but it isn't helpful. The LW clearly is asking for help with speech. She only mentions identity to ask whether it's even possible for her to "keep [her] damned mouth closed" on the topic of her ex.

Those are good points. The part that I love will be very helpful to me in my life -- but I'm not the LW and that part doesn't necessarily make the answer useful to them.

Having seen my father use references to his exes as a form of emotional abuse toward later partners, I have very mixed feelings about this. If I were spending time with someone who kept centering things with an ex during interactions with me, I'd probably react badly because my experience with it is having seen my father weaponize it.

I think that the LW's situation is different. I'm not sure that the ex is all of the issue leading to wanting to talk about 'I' instead of 'we' because 'we' doesn't have to be just 'my ex and I.' For the childhood stuff, the ex is there, but a 'we' might well include a much larger group that included parents, siblings, members of the congregation or the church youth group. Those things can be talked about with 'we' without most listeners assuming that the comments are connected to the ex personally.

The LW having parted ways with both spouse and the 'conservative Christian culture' in which they grew up implies a break from a much bigger part of their past than the marriage. I wonder if their parents, siblings, other friends, etc. are still available to the LW. Leaving that sort of community can rupture the majority of a person's relationships, so I'm wondering if the ex is all that the LW is trying to verbally separate from.

It could, though, just be the LW not wanting the new partner to think that the LW would prefer to still be with their ex.

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