The final straw should have been sooner. In reality, though, what it took to cut off contact with my ex was waking up to screenshots of messages he had sent one of my childhood friends, at two in the morning, asking her: “does size matter?”
This was his calling card, an unprovoked question I can only imagine he has sent – without exaggeration – to hundreds of women. I had received screenshots like this from dozens already, during breakups and after our ultimate split, and had even seen some uploaded publicly to Facebook by women looking to call him out. He had been bad to me during our relationship (cheating serially, hitting me sometimes), was far less attractive than I was, and had a personality people famously disliked. But until that morning, these women had typically been strangers, or people I only knew casually, making it easy to reply with performative disgust before adding them to the growing pile I discarded from my mind. Now, I had thrown someone into his wake. I had never felt more mortified by my association with this person. But what was more humiliating was that, at the time, we were still friends.
From the moment I began having boyfriends, aged 12, I developed a habit I became known for: staying close friends with my exes. No matter the circumstances, no matter who dumped who, I made an effort to maintain these relationships, believing that there must have been a friendship that drew us together in the first place. As a teenager, I received rapturous praise from my family and friends for the maturity this demonstrated. Over time, I grew to see this trait as a virtue – I was doing something others didn’t have the strength of character to manage. I slowly deluded myself into believing that even if it was difficult, maintaining a friendship with an ex was, fundamentally, the right thing to do. I told myself and other people that these relationships added enormous value to my life.
This principle was, of course, nonsensical. But what made it even more deranged was how embarrassing most of my exes turned out to be. Once, I hosted my first real boyfriend for a long weekend just days after finishing university (he had dumped me six years earlier, for another girl called Sarah). I thought we had developed a meaningful friendship since then, occasionally seeing each other for dinner when I was back home in the US. Most of the weekend was spent listening to him sermonise on how I wasn’t doing enough to serve the greater good (he was a professional cellist then and works as a conductor now), and how he struggled to maintain interest in the attractive women he fell in love with.
Only a few months before, I had spent several weeks speaking with another ex who sent me long, laboured emails about how freeing it was to go into the woods and live without technology. When I offered updates on my own life, he replied curtly, acknowledging none of it and attaching a picture of himself out to lunch with his new girlfriend.
The people around me wondered, often out loud, why I kept doing this. One of them was my current boyfriend, who did so most notably after I forced us to get a drink with my girth-obsessed ex. I pretended this encounter was funny, that he and I were in on some joke, but I knew what I was doing was strange and unpleasant. I couldn’t have told you what I thought either of us were supposed to be getting out of it.
Personal embarrassment in front of a beloved friend is what drove me to quit, after shamefully ignoring previous opportunities and the pleading from my friends. But this wasn’t a break from my principle, merely a break from this particular ex. Only with space did I realise why I was persevering with these pernicious relationships; why I needed to give them up for good.
There are undoubtedly patriarchal mechanisms that encourage women in particular to make excuses for the men who treat them poorly, and to minimise the bad things that happen to them. My ex had been abusive, though this word’s overuse has watered down its meaning, and I hated him for what he had done to me. Pretending he hadn’t done anything at all – or that what he had done hadn’t affected me – was one way I reduced the impact of what was happening.
But this also obscures the agency I had, for years, to behave differently. I knew what my ex was doing. I even believed him to be a bad person, and had any of my friends been in a similar position I would have told them that maintaining a friendship with him was insane. But the truth was I liked the attention – I liked the emotional payoff that came from the physical juxtaposition of spending time with the men I’d moved on from – knowing where I was now was better, imagining they might spend this time regretting how they treated me. My new life without them was validated by their audience.
I’ve been with my partner for more than six years and he is mercifully unlike anyone I’ve ever dated. Even if we split (in an ideal world I’d die before that ever happened) I’d be proud to have been with him. But I’d also know that the chances we could be friends are exceedingly slim. I have learned the difference between real value and what is merely masochism masquerading as power, or even altruism. I don’t know which our friendship would be. I can only hope I would have the strength to admit it.
Sarah Manavis is the digital culture writer at the New Statesman
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