I met and talked with the fantasy ex.

I met his ex last night at the grocery store. The fantasy ex. I was kinda unsure of whether I should say anything or if it would cross her boundaries, but I'm a pretty impulsive, unabashedly open person, so I figured I should test the waters and trust that if she felt awkward or violated, she would tell me. Besides, how many times do you get to humanize and finally talk to the person whose presence seemed to dominate so much of your relationship? I was so, so curious. 

To my surprise, she was completely receptive. Really emotionally accepting. She was def the more avoidant of them, hence her position as fantasy ex/the one who got away! When she ended their relationship, it was a complete surprise to him. She told him she hadn't been attracted to him for the last 6 mos and had feared that she had only really been with him because she was depressed. She didn't say this in a nasty way, but in such a matter-of-fact/detached way that it left him reeling. He was convinced there was more going on there, and that she was lying to herself. Basically. It was always such a weird, jarring experience for me to listen to him talk about their relationship. They never fought. They spent time with each of their families. They lived together for a year of their year and a half relationship. He always felt she was right for him. He never questioned his attraction to her or their relationship. As you can probably guess, these were all problems in our relationship. We never lived together, he never felt i was right for him, compared me in his mind to her, he never shared his vulnerabilities or insecurities or past with me, and told me, right to my face, that he didn't know if he would be attracted to me in the future because I wasn't his ideal: skinny. He never apologized, constantly told me he felt bad about us, never talked about how he contributed to our conflict (which was always centered on me feeling like he was questioning and doubting our relationship and that i was ultimately just a placeholder for him), and didn't empathize. Looking back on it, he also never really asked me questions about myself. Sometimes, this would bother me, but I usually wrote it off as a consequence of our insecure/conflictual relationship. And I wrote it off as him just fearing intimacy and struggling with engulfment because we were so aligned and were just SO CLOSE to real intimacy. Surely our problems were just a consequence of our potential for closeness...

So here I was with the fantasy, the one who seemed to have everything I didn't. I'll admit that I'm usually fascinated with my partner's exes. I feel pretty strongly about woman-woman hatred, and I've never been the type to pick apart an ex just to feel better about myself, but i also recognize that i kinda build them up to be just as much of a fantasy. I'm just so damn curious about knowing them on a deeper level! Some of my neuroses, I guess. Right away, she was really warm and welcoming. Right away, she said that she had been terrible to him, and felt guilty about that. Then she said, very plainly: "I just didn't feel the same way about him, you know?" I didn't get the impression she was cold-hearted, more genuinely remorseful for having hurt someone. She said that she had just been thinking about him the other day and couldn't help but think that he was the only good person she had dated. She said the rest were assholes. She said she missed my ex, but she missed his friendship. She didn't say this, but my ex had been pretty hurt by her firmly shutting down their romantic connection. They had tried to be friends a few times, but she was clear, each time, that she didn't want more, and he didn't take that well, so they parted ways for good some time before we met. Then she asked me how long we dated, and said something again about him being a good person, and of course, I noticeably flinched. She noticed. I told her, briefly, about the attraction comments he made at the beginning. Because really, I kept that to myself, for the most part, and it felt good just to get that out there. I wasn't really thinking, oh right, this is my ex's ex, maybe I shouldn't say anything. She was pretty shocked, but also expressed a lot of empathy towards me. She was like, I hear you, you were accommodating, probably over-empathized, and rationalized it. She said she had been there and was trying to learn how to undo those lessons now. I didn't say anything else about him, and affirmed that I didn't think his comments made him a bad person, just really confused, and it set the tone of our connection. 

The surprising thing to me was how emotionally open she was. She offered to meet me for tea in the future, and said that I should think about it for the night, do what feels best for me, and if I changed my mind about meeting, she would have no hard feelings. She reminded me to not feel obligated. Later on, we messaged on fb, and she said she had felt a warm, peaceful feeling around me, and was happy I had reached out. I don't know why I was so taken aback by all of this. I'm not sure why it would be surprising to know she seemed kind, empathetic, etc. I know that I don't know her, and I'm not saying she's an amazing person. I'm not sure. I'm neutral. But after all this time, I wasn't expecting her to be as emotionally present as she was. It was weird to connect with her over the same thing. Granted, she called the people she was interested in "assholes," and I wouldn't call my ex an asshole even though he really does fit the bill.

What I got from all of this was this, and I thought it might be helpful to share: when she said she just wasn't as interested as he was, it really hit me. For me, at least, I struggled with accepting the signs. Immediately after leaving her, I felt this wave of knowing wash over me. It only lasted a few hours, but parts of it have lingered. This whole time I've been with him, I felt like I had been trying to fix us, pouring all this energy into us, changing myself, all while ignoring and excusing him never reading the books or doing self-reflection or talking about how he contributed to our problems or him not taking responsibility/apologizing. I overlooked all the double standards he set: I was supposed to be vulnerable and open and make everything about me, not him, but he didn't reciprocate. So i went straight into denial. I made up this story about him being tortured and pained and not realizing that he wasn't as interested in me just because he was scared. But hearing her, in that moment, talk about how she felt about him, I was just like, oh my gosh. She just wasn't interested enough. He just wasn't interested enough. If he had felt attracted to me, he would have tried. We could have been closer. Maybe. I know there's still avoidant stuff there, but does it really matter if in the end, they just think they weren't interested enough? My ex used to tell me that, that he didn't feel as strongly about me, but that that didn't mean he didn't want to be with me. Now i just feel like I was a placeholder. He admitted to me once that he feared he would leave me if he connected with other people. I also knew that he felt traumatized about the idea of opening up to me and sharing. He felt like I was keeping him from being him whenever I reacted to him telling me he felt bad or that he wasn't certain about him. Now I'm wondering if our whole relationship was just one big lack of interest on his part. He ended up blaming me for a lot of stuff and getting really angry and never empathizing with me, and I can't help but think that maybe he blamed me for so much stuff just because he felt guilty about using me. I don't think he consciously used me, but I think he did underneath it all. He rationalized staying with me even though he always questioned his attraction to me and never felt like i was right. I'm actually kinda angry about it, to be honest. I feel dumb for having tied so much of my self-worth into our relationship, which is my responsibility, that I deluded myself and tried to "empathize with him" by assuming he was just a confused fearful-avoidant. Now I'm not too sure. I've felt really messed up by this relationship. I'm a highly sensitive person, so I'm already prone to crying a lot (not just when I'm sad), but I've cried so much and in such a painful way for the last year and a half over good memories and wondering why I wasn't good or deserving enough that I'm exhausted by myself. Intellectually, I get it, but emotionally, I'm still playing through the same stuff. Most of me wants to believe that he really loved me and wanted to be with me, but is that just a story we tell ourselves? When she said how she felt, I thought about how traumatized my ex said he was after their relationship, how he still carries that pain almost 4 years later, and I knew, I knew I didn't want to be that over something as simple as someone just not being interested. If someone tells you they aren't interested, even if it's not explicit, you have to trust them, right? I felt like her telling me that about him was really him telling that to me-that might sound weird, but it felt like that. I hope to get to a place in my life where I'm not taking someone's lack of interest in me as a personal rejection or reflection of my worth. 

I know this was really, really long. Thanks for reading. I really needed to share this. I don't know if i have a question so much as a curiosity if someone else has met one of their ex's fantasy ex, or what. It was such a surreal experience for me and the things I thought afterwards just blew me away.