WHY “TRYING AGAIN” WITH YOUR EX DOESN’T WORK
AVOIDING THE INEVITABLE
Several years ago I was contacted by “my first love,” who I’d never really gotten over. He’d run into a family member who gave him my number. Enough years had passed that I believed the pain had subsided. I agreed to meet with him, and found myself falling in love all over again. I noted how much more mature he was. During our previous time together he was an alcoholic. Now he was an AA member, as well as a speaker and sponsor for other newly sober members. The old chemistry was still there. I felt as though he brought out some of the best and oldest parts of me — parts I thought were dead and buried. We laughed together. A lot. We reminisced about old times. We made love. He moved in. It all happened very quickly. And it ended almost as fast.
There’s a good reason why people don’t “try again” with their exes. It doesn’t work! At least not for long. Generally, the same problems that drove you apart still exist, though not readily apparent, at least in the beginning. When couples do reunite, the thinking often goes something like this:
- You remember the best parts of the relationship. And you idealize them.
- You feel that either you or your partner (or both) has “grown” over the months or years so you won’t encounter the same issues as before. You’re both older and wiser now, and if problems arise, you can solve them like adults.
- The initial chemistry that attracted you to one another is still there.
- You share a common history and familiarity, which you wouldn’t have with someone new.
- You can erase the pain of the previous break up.
Of course, you can never erase the pain of a previous break up, and eventually it resurfaces to poison the present. In your attempt not to make the same mistakes, you often over-reach, ignoring or denying the existence of potential problems, causing you to make even more of them, including the old ones. You overlook troubling patterns or personality traits that are still there — and still bother you. You do this because you want things to work. You can’t bear another failure. You try to focus on what’s good. And it seems there’s plenty of that — at first.
Over time, however, the romance wanes. The commonality that initially created closeness between you now feels claustrophobic, as you realize things have indeed changed, but maybe not for the better. You actually aren’t the same person you used to be. You’ve developed new interests and ways of seeing things that your partner doesn’t like. In some ways, he wanted you to stay the same, only better. Ironically, he is not rejecting the old you, but the new you, the one who has “grown.” In fact, you’ve grown apart, not together over time. The new you is no more acceptable than the old you. And slowly, old interactional patterns re-emerge. You not only remember the bad times now, but you’re reliving them, despite your best efforts not to. You feel as though you are caught in a recurring nightmare.
In my life, and in my practice as a marriage and family therapist, I have seen or heard about people who dated early in their lives, met up years later, and married. A friend of mine in college was contacted by the brother of someone she knew in junior high school who always had a crush on her. After she moved away, he swore to someday look her up and marry her. He even bought an engagement ring for the anticipated occasion. When his ship was stationed in the same city where she was living years later, he called her up. It was a vulnerable time in her life, and she did marry him, although they seemed, on the outside, to have nothing in common. They bought a house, had a child and seemed happy the last time I saw them.
A cousin of mine also reunited with a woman he had worked with decades before. He’d been attracted to this woman (and she to him), but they thought it best not to date while they worked together. Later, after two marriages, they met again and married.
These are among the successful ones, but there’s a reason they worked out: Neither of them were carrying forward baggage from the past. They hadn’t been hurt the first time, so it was easier to pick up where they left off. Painful endings can rarely be resolved by new beginnings. The best you can expect is to remember once and for all why that relationship didn’t work out to begin with. And then you can move on.
