I’m in one of those weird transition periods where apparently every bad feeling I’ve ever had has decided to crawl out of storage at the same time.

I left a job that spent months grinding me into dust. I started a new one. I’m trying to remember what it feels like to exist without my nervous system running exclusively on spite, cortisol, and the knowledge that somebody somewhere is about to send me a Slack message that could have been prevented by reading literally anything.

We’re also creeping up on a year since my mom died, and for whatever reason, it is hitting me harder now than I expected.

So naturally, I hate everyone.

Including myself.

And because my brain is a tremendous asshole, instead of using this period of transition to reflect on personal growth or gratitude or whatever emotionally healthy people do, I have been revisiting every period of my life where I felt stupid, ugly, unwanted, humiliated, or otherwise like absolute garbage.

Which is how I ended up thinking about a man I haven’t spoken to in years.

Again.

This is not a story about wanting an ex back.

It’s a story about what happens when someone spends years repeatedly entering and exiting your life while changing the explanation every time, until eventually you have no idea what the relationship was, what was real, or why you’re still pissed off about it nearly a decade later.

We met through work.

For months, he traveled to the US every two weeks and stayed for two weeks at a time. We worked in the same office. We talked constantly. We got along in a way that apparently surprised people who knew him because, as one person later put it, he was basically just a bloke who liked typical bloke-ish things.

I am decidedly not a bloke who likes typical bloke-ish things.

But somehow it worked.

Eventually we hooked up at a conference in Vegas, which was probably where we should have left it.

He would later tell me exactly that.

The problem was that neither of us ever actually left anything anywhere.

After Vegas, we talked almost every day for six months. Then he came back to the US and we spent more time together. Then there were more gaps. More trips. More conversations. More sex. More arguments. More breakups.

And then more returns.

There would be a period of silence and somebody would crack.

Sometimes me.

Sometimes him.

There would be regret. Missing each other. Gifts. Jealousy. Future talk. Sex. Emotional intimacy. Ridiculous arguments. Long conversations. Boring conversations. Conversations where I wanted to throw my phone into the ocean.

Then another autopsy.

Maybe we should never have started.

Maybe there wasn’t enough physical attraction.

Maybe we were better off as friends.

Maybe we couldn’t be friends.

Maybe we should try again.

Maybe this time would be different.

It almost never was.

The problem with relationships like this is that eventually you stop knowing which version of history you’re supposed to believe.

Was I wanted?

Clearly.

Except when I wasn’t.

Was there attraction?

There was apparently enough that the guys he worked with used to talk about how fit I was and make fun of him for liking me.

Except later there apparently wasn’t enough.

Did I matter?

Enough to miss me.

Enough to come back.

Enough to regret breaking up.

Enough to send gifts.

Enough to get jealous.

Enough to worry about losing me.

But apparently not enough to just choose.

That one took me an embarrassingly long time to understand.

If you don’t want to lose something, eventually you have to choose it.

You don’t get to stand in the doorway indefinitely saying you’re not sure you want to come inside while getting upset every time somebody tries to close the door.

Well.

You can.

People do it all the time.

It just really fucks up whoever lives in the house.

For a long time, I thought there was some objective truth about me that I couldn’t see.

My face was too round.

I had gained weight.

I ate too much.

I didn’t make my bed.

I was messy.

I didn’t know how to take care of myself properly.

There were enough critiques that eventually I stopped hearing them as individual preferences and started hearing them as a diagnosis.

This smart, competent, successful man had examined me thoroughly and concluded that I was fundamentally lacking.

The especially fun part was that he apparently knew he was mean to me.

Other people called it out.

He admitted it.

He even told me he wasn’t like that with other women.

Which, if you already have abandonment issues and hate the way you look, is a spectacular thing to hear.

It doesn’t make you think, Wow, this man should really work on himself.

It makes you think, What is so uniquely wrong with me that I make this person cruel?

Very healthy. Five stars. Would recommend.

And because he was the person I wanted, it didn’t particularly matter that other men thought I was attractive.

I didn’t need a focus group.

I wanted him.

That is the particularly cruel thing about insecurity: compliments from a hundred people can bounce right off while one criticism from the correct person burrows into your ribcage and lives there rent-free for a decade.

And he was the correct person.

It has taken me years to understand that someone can be intelligent and still be profoundly stupid about himself.

Someone can be excellent at his job and incapable of handling an emotionally uncomfortable conversation.

Someone can be socially skilled and emotionally illiterate.

Someone can have a reputation for being “no bullshit” while producing an absolutely breathtaking amount of bullshit whenever asked to explain his own feelings.

At some point, I started wondering whether the problem wasn’t actually my face.

Maybe something felt wrong to him and he needed a reason.

Maybe uncertainty was uncomfortable.

Maybe “I don’t know why I keep wanting this woman and then doubting the relationship” was too messy.

But “she gained weight” was concrete.

“She doesn’t make the bed” was concrete.

“Her face gets round” was concrete.

And if something had to be wrong, there I was.

A perfectly available list of imperfections.

The annoying thing is that there was also a tremendous amount that was good.

I would honestly prefer if he had been universally awful. That would be considerably more convenient.

Instead, there were trips I still remember fondly.

There were stupid jokes nobody else would understand.

There were gifts and movies and shared rituals and conversations that lasted for hours.

There was a period where talking to him was the best part of my day.

There were moments where I genuinely thought, Oh. This is what it feels like when somebody really understands me.

And then there were later moments where I thought, Jesus Christ, I am so fucking tired of talking to this man.

Both are true.

That’s another thing nobody tells you about moving on.

Sometimes you are already over somebody before you are actually over them.

You forget to call.

You get bored.

You start thinking about someone else.

You date other people.

You go days or weeks without speaking and eventually stop being surprised by it.

You book a trip because you already paid for it and figure, fuck it, at least you’ll get to see England before the whole thing finally detonates.

And then, naturally, the trip goes well.

Because of course it does.

Nothing in this relationship was ever allowed to provide a useful conclusion.

I went to England with basically no expectations.

We had been fighting. We had been going stretches without talking. I had started complaining to friends that our conversations were boring. I had literally forgotten to call him at one point.

I assumed the trip would either get canceled or end in some massive fight that would finally kill the thing.

Instead, it was good.

Which was devastating in a completely different way.

Because apparently even the final experiment was going to refuse to produce usable data.

Years later, after enough breakups and reunions and silence and bullshit to qualify us for our own limited series, he came back with one final proposition.

Why couldn’t we just talk?

We had history.

Good history, apparently.

He liked talking to me.

We could be friends.

I told him I wasn’t his emotional support American.

I also reminded him, as I had approximately six thousand times before, that I had enough friends.

This annoyed him so consistently over the years that it became a running joke between us.

I remember those last conversations being strange.

By then, I had moved in with someone else.

I talked about him.

I talked about his family.

I had an entire life that did not involve waiting around for a British man to decide what category I belonged in.

And even then, the old dynamic was still there.

I’d ask some completely normal question like what he had been doing and get one of his evasive answers that somehow managed to convey information while also revealing absolutely nothing.

And I remember thinking:

Oh my God. I hate this.

We couldn’t even be friends without me wanting to shake him.

And then, after insisting that friendship was this perfectly reasonable thing we should obviously be able to maintain, he disappeared.

We never actually became friends.

We barely spoke again.

Which, in retrospect, is almost too perfect.

For years, he couldn’t decide whether I was a girlfriend, a mistake, someone he missed, someone he wasn’t attracted to, someone he wanted back, someone he should never have gotten involved with, or someone he could apparently still call years later because we had such a lovely history.

Then he finally settled on friend.

And he couldn’t even follow through with that.

I suppose after years of me insisting that I already had enough friends, he finally decided to believe me.

Maybe that’s the ending.

Not some dramatic reckoning.

Not an apology.

Not one final conversation where two grown adults sit down and say, Okay. What the fuck was all of that?

Just silence.

Which is annoying because silence doesn’t answer anything.

It doesn’t tell me whether he ever realized how contradictory he was.

It doesn’t tell me whether he ever looked back and realized that my face, my weight, my eating habits, my unmade bed, and every other item on the Jennifer Performance Improvement Plan probably weren’t capable of explaining why he kept coming back.

It doesn’t tell me whether he ever understood that if you repeatedly return to something you claim you don’t want, eventually the problem might not be the thing.

Maybe it’s you.

I don’t want him back.

I don’t even know what I’d do if he showed up again.

Probably panic, analyze it to death, and then remember within 48 hours why talking to him made me insane.

But some small, petty, still-wounded part of me would like to know that age eventually gave him enough perspective to recognize one thing:

A woman can be imperfect without being the explanation for every uncomfortable feeling you have about her.

Sometimes your girlfriend gains weight.

Sometimes she doesn’t make the bed.

Sometimes her face looks round.

Sometimes she asks annoying questions because your behavior is fucking confusing.

Sometimes she fails spectacularly at walking away because every time she finally starts doing it, you show back up.

And sometimes none of those things are the reason you can’t decide what you want.

Sometimes you are simply a man who cannot decide what he wants.

And perhaps the stupidest thing you can do in that situation is keep returning to the same woman and asking her to pay for your uncertainty.

I don’t know whether he thinks about any of this anymore.

Maybe he doesn’t.

Maybe I am nothing more than some bizarre American chapter from a life that continued perfectly well without me.

That possibility used to devastate me.

Now it mostly pisses me off.

Because whether he remembers it properly or not, I do.

It happened.

It mattered.

There were good parts.

There were terrible parts.

And for several years, two adults repeatedly chose to revive something they also kept insisting should be dead.

I am perfectly willing to own my half of that.

I just hope that every once in a while, somewhere very inconvenient – in traffic, in the shower, halfway through a perfectly pleasant afternoon – the other half crosses his mind too.

And he thinks:

Well.

I really fucked that up.