Should You Get Back Together With Your Ex?

My breakup with Confident Guy, my first love, was your typical first love breakup. First loves tend to feel like your only love. Like your last. I had said those three sacred words to other men before but needed to say them to him to understand what they really meant. The breakup made its home in my chest, not like a metaphor, but like a heart condition I thought I was developing at twenty-one. The look on my mother’s face when I alerted her to my apparent illness was more amusement than concern. I hadn’t known you could feel that kind of pain.

Our reasons for parting were solid. Not-so-confident Guy couldn’t handle me looking at another man, no matter how platonic it was, and had issues with how much leg I chose to show on any given day. The first month post breakup, I forced myself to go out, meet people, be flirted at. It was still cheating to flirt. He had asked me to tell him when I kissed someone else for the first time. It felt like I should, like I owed him that though I didn’t understand why he’d want to know. Now I wonder if it was the permission he needed to move on, but as I opened my Facebook a full month after the breakup, I had a long message from him detailing how much he’d missed me. I called him without hesitation.

Recently, I was at a Shabbat dinner where the conversation circled Palestinians, Israelis, and the controversy of a two-state outcome, the kind of dinner talk I gravitate toward at a time when reconciliation and collaboration seem far away no matter what issue is on the table. As the honored guest spoke about what gives her hope for the future, I periodically glanced at my phone, still half-hoping my ex— New Guy— missed me enough to say hello. Per my request, we technically weren’t speaking. I was in the process of convincing myself there were plenty of him in the sea, a task I’m still working on. It’s not that I was pining, it’s that it’s hard to think of the future and believe whatever issue the relationship had should be tackled alone. Aren’t most issues best solved as a team? Isn’t it important to know that, no matter what issues you rather face alone, there’s someone in your corner, cheering you on?

I never had those thoughts with Confident Guy. Strategies to talk to through his jealousy had been exhausted, but we missed the past. We both missed people we thought we were, people who could only live on if we pretended our issues didn’t exist. Sometimes, getting back together works out. The only real rules about relationships, both romantic and geopolitical, are that all parties must agree to a framework. The difference between romance and geopolitics is that in geopolitics, we don’t have much of a choice. Not revisiting that kind of relationship could lead to increased tariffs at best, and war at worst.

I think that’s why so many still believe a two-state outcome is the only viable path to stability in the region. There is no one else to negotiate with, no one else to sit in the mess and build a future with. It’s not just that building toward that out-come feels like the only option, it’s that the prospect of a peaceful future for all peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea feels too good to pass up.

Getting back together shouldn’t be about missing the past. I guess ultimately it should be about being with someone who makes the future too good to pass up. As I opened my computer to edit this piece, my eyes shot up, pointing out something obvious that my brain hadn’t registered. I had just sat down with a coffee my nervous system didn’t need, and as I adjusted back to reality, my gaze fixed on my ex.

On the drive home up Mulholland Drive, I would wonder how he reconciled the contradiction. I would wonder how he could pass it up like seconds of an under-seasoned meal.

Revisiting a relationship is more vulnerable, more high stakes than a first date. Trying again is harder than just trying. New Guy was sitting right in my line of vision. I got up with the realization that this would be the first time in the same room without kissing each other. I cut the interaction short, unable to deal with whatever the new dynamic might turn into. There was still too much intimacy between us. Too much good that felt like it was being passed up. I couldn’t bear to let casualness belittle that.