What Your Ex Is Probably Doing Right Now
By Thoughtis
Your ex is rolling around in a sea of your clothes. They’re clutching your forgotten t-shirts close to their chest and stifling their sobs into an old pair of jeans. This is what you’ve reduced them to. Congratulations, you have the power to make someone go insane with grief once you dump them. Your private parts successfully cast a voodoo spell on your ex and now they haven’t the faintest idea of what to do. Bring your mom, bring your best friends and go over to their house when they’re inconsolable and say, “Look guys, I did this! Isn’t that cool?”
If your ex isn’t rolling around in a sea of your clothes, they are lurking you on Facebook and violently sobbing. Those pictures you just posted of you rock climbing with The New Significant Other were obviously a deliberate move, a way to dig the virtual knife in the heart, and it worked. Now they’re sitting at home at three o’clock in the afternoon crying over a website and a rock climbing photo. At least that’s what you’d like to think. In your mind, your ex is noticing every little thing you’re doing and having an overwhelming emotional reaction to all of it. You’re going to make them cry. You’re going to prove that this all mattered.
When your ex isn’t rolling around in your old clothes or crying at your Facebook pictures, they’re drinking too much and experiencing a downward spiral. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To be the cause of someone’s unraveling? You’re praying for a gossip-y tidbit about your ex, which will reveal that they’re doing terribly. “I’m worried about them,” Your friends will say. “Things haven’t been the same since you two broke up.” YES. I mean, really? Tell me more…
You know what though? Your ex is probably not doing any of these things. We wish they were, we wish they were bedridden and alienating close friends and never getting laid, but life doesn’t usually work that way. In fact the reality of their life post break up might be too mundane for you to bear. Every time you see a picture of your ex smiling with their friends on a night out, you wonder how they could ever smile again. You see them tweet bad jokes and wonder how they could even kid during a time like this. But here’s something that we always forget. Number one: The internet is carefully constructed to make everyone’s lives look better than they actually are. And number two: The sadness of break ups can’t be conveyed in a single photograph or status update. It’s more nuanced than that, more silent but deadly. There’s also the other option that they’re just not hurting as much as you are. That’s usually the case, isn’t it? Your ex gets to move on while you have trouble getting out of bed. But then again, we never actually know what someone is going through. We have no idea how someone is truly reacting to a break up. So we can sit here playing the guessing game and driving ourselves insane with our imagination but it won’t get us anywhere.
Your ex is probably eating a ham sandwich on their lunch break right now and maybe they’re feeling an undercurrent of melancholy sweep through them. Or maybe not. Regardless of what they’re doing or how they’re feeling, you must know that it all mattered, it all counted for something. That’s all you needed to know, right?