I can’t get over my ex from long ago. Even though I have a happy life and a good marriage, someone I was with 25 years ago still haunts me.

I have been keeping this pent up for so long and I have to say something to someone.

Twenty-five years ago I fell in love with a great guy. We clicked instantly. Nothing in my life to that point had ever felt so right and the feeling was mutual. However, too many obstacles were thrown in our way. He moved to another state and came back, which was one of our biggest obstacles. But also we were both immature. I had issues with trust. He had issues with more adult commitments.

We were on an off for three years. Six months after the last time we saw each other, he was engaged to someone else. I met someone else as well and we have been happily married for over a decade. Ex and I remained casual friends over the years, mostly on social media. Although I would always have feelings for him and regrets about our relationship, I kept them in a little “box” in my mind that I could keep out of the way and not let it interfere with my life. I tried not to open the box too much, but I always knew it was there. I got on with my life and was happy without him. As I saw our lives go in very different directions over the years, I was mostly at peace with how things turned out.

After his divorce about five years ago, he called me up one day and told me how much he regretted letting me go. He said he only did it because he had never been with someone like me before and it intimidated him. He said the only reason he got engaged to his ex-wife so quickly was because he was so disgusted with himself for not making things work with me and he was determined to just settle down with someone. He had a terrible marriage. I deserved to know that our breakup was not my fault and that he always had feelings for me.

We began chatting regularly. We became much better friends and had regular talks off of social media. We confided in each other and kept each other informed and updated about what was going on in our lives. We even met for lunch once. There was nothing inappropriate or illicit. I believed at the time Ex and I had entered a new era of friendship. I imagined us hanging out more. I wanted him to meet my husband (they have a lot in common and I think they would get along well) and become a bigger part of my social life. I encouraged him to meet other women and even tried to think of friends I could set him up with. He would say he wanted his next partner to be the “2.0” version of me. I admit it sometimes made me a bit uncomfortable that he might be too hung up on me and was hanging on to me too much. I didn’t want him thinking he had a chance with me in any way.

One day he stopped communicating with me outside of social media. Our friendship just ended abruptly. He stopped telling me things. I was really hurt. If he said something to me about why he wasn’t talking to me anymore, I might have understood, but he said nothing. He just stopped talking to me regularly outside of social media comments. Several months after our last offline communication he finally messaged me to say he had met someone. He didn’t want to tell me much else, but I pressed him. He told me how they met and how long they had been dating and that he felt ready for a real relationship for the first time in his life. In the two years since I had that communication with him, they got engaged (or I think they got engaged – he won’t announce it publicly and never told me personally, but I got enough hints on social media), bought a house, and got a dog. They are living a perfect Brady Bunch life with their respective kids and are quite obviously deeply in love with each other. In every photo they post of each other online, they just glow with happiness.

He remains distant from me. He doesn’t want to communicate with me. It has opened up all kinds of old wounds. When I realized he was not ever going to talk to me again, I just sort of snapped. I feel like his rejection of our friendship is just another one of his many rejections of me. I feel discarded. I feel like I was nothing more than a placeholder to him. When I see how deeply in love he and his new wife are, I admit I feel jealousy. I know I shouldn’t. I love my husband and value my marriage, but I have this incredibly selfish and irrational feeling of being “replaced”. After Ex kept telling me about all his regrets and how I was the best girlfriend he ever had, I can’t stand to be knocked off the pedestal. Now I sometimes resent his new wife for having the life with him I never got to have.

I feel so conflicted because I want him to be happy. If he were still pining for me and full of regret, I would be seriously uncomfortable. I had no desire for anything beyond friendship with Ex. I truly believe if he had stayed in touch and treated me like a real friend, I would be less jealous of his new wife. It’s the fact that he is keeping me on the margins of his life and not giving me a chance to share his joy (and maybe even make friends with him wife) and cheer him on that’s giving me the real heartache.

I guess the really awful part, the secondary source of my jealousy, is that even though I don’t want to be with Ex now, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to be with him if the opportunity arose. I love my husband, but he is 11 years older than I am. I want to spend the rest of my life with him, but I probably won’t. I will spend the rest of his life with him, but I will likely to grow old alone. There is part of me that liked the idea of having “backup”. I wanted to put Ex on a shelf behind a wall of glass I could break in case of emergencies. I had this horribly irrational belief he was supposed to wait for me to be available. In some ways, I used him to alleviate my fear of being alone in the future.

I think about him more than I should. I am constantly analyzing why he doesn’t want me in his life anymore. I do my best to accept that he simply doesn’t want to be friends with me because he has no need for me. He relieved his guilty conscience about how he handled our relationship when we were dating, and confessed all his mistakes to me. He did what he needed to do for himself and moved on. He is not responsible for my feelings. If I thought we were meant to be friends forever, then that’s all on me. He is not obligated to give me any more of his time and attention when he has a home, kids, a wife, a dog, and a social life of his own. Logically I know all of this, but I have a hard time accepting it in my heart.

The pandemic has made all of this worse. They say the way to stop thinking about an ex is to get on with your life, have fun, and pursue hobbies. In the past two years my ability to live my once-busy life has been curtailed by lockdowns. I haven’t had many outlets to forget the Ex. I’m an extrovert who always had a busy social life with lots of activity outside the house. He began dating his new wife right before the pandemic started, so I have had two years to ruminate.

Thanks for letting me get it off my chest.