I'm a 32-year-old girl who has had a number of long-term and short-but-passionate relationships from high school to now, and I'm in love with all of my exes, simultaneously!
What's worse is that I happen to be in a very happy, healthy, four-year relationship and I'm starting to feel like holding on to these feelings is akin to cheating on him, but I don't know how to let them go. In fact, I don't even know if I'm holding on to them, or if they're holding on to me?
Maybe I'm just meant to love many people in my life. Some of these people were real assholes, though, and still I retain this weird connection mentally with them – daydream about them, pretend my partner is them from time to time (although never in bed), contemplate what life would be like if I was still with them. Surely it's supposed to fade, right? What's keeping it alive? What does it mean for my ability to truly love my partner? Are we doomed?
–Can't Move On
Let me get this straight. You are "in love" with all your exes because, "from time to time," they pop into your subconscious and you start to fantasize about the past, or what your life could have been like with each of them? "Love" is a pretty heavy word to use in this case, but what I do wonder is if you are 100 per cent "in love" with your current boyfriend? Do you love him like you love the fantasy of these ex-boyfriends? I just imagine you sitting at the dinner table, imagining the face of the boyfriend you blew in the Dairy Queen parking lot hovering over your man's like a plastic Halloween mask.
I don't think your problem is that you have these fantasies, but the frequency of them. I wish I could slip inside your brain and gather data on the percentage of times you morph your boyfriend's face into someone else's. Day dreaming about what could have been is normal. We all do it sometimes. You see an old photograph, or you smell that musk you haven't in years and the person attached to these memories just fills your mind like water into a bathtub. But if this is happening once a day, you may need some psychedelic drugs to rip you out of this.
I like that you were sure to point out that you NEVER think about your exes during sex. Come on… you really expect me to believe your fantasy-diseased brain is able to cut out the ex-dicks while the current dick is inside you? You don't have to lie to me. I'm not the morality police. They are on their lunch break getting Starbucks. We’re all alone here.
People think of all kinds of non-sex related stuff during sex. Cat Marnell wrote a piecein her old VICE column about how she would think about her family during sex, if they approved of her bathroom stall debauchery. (It's actually a great piece, read it.) Other people make grocery lists or fantasize about the things they are too chicken shit to actually ask their partner to do. Me, well I have an anxious brain that never stops hustling, so sex is the only time it shuts the fuck up. Sex is my transcendental meditation.
Confucius says: You are fucked. Just kidding, but you have some serious thinking to do about current relationship. That thought process being: Am I really happy with this guy? According to almost every therapist, the repeating of these fantasies is either an indication that A) you are unhappy in your current relationship yet, are afraid to admit it because fantasizing it easier than splitting an apartment's worth of belongings in half or B) you are stressed, over-worked or anxious about your life in general right now, and fantasizing about the past, a time that was not so hard, is a way of coping.
You do not sound satisfied in your current relationship. I never think about cheating on my husband. Every other guy in the world looks like Gilbert Godfrey now. But I'm happily monogamous. Sounds like you, my friend, are not with this guy.
The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. That's when you know you are over someone. You are using the memories of your exes as a way of blanketing something bigger. Get in your car, take a ride to quiet place, and go think about your boyfriend at home. Think about why you keep looking for happiness in every other man but him. It's not fair for you to be putting invisible plastic masks all over his mug every time you close your eyes. Pretty soon that thin, tight string will start to pinch his head and it'll snap off.
Love, Mish
