Starting New Love While Still Hung Up on an Ex

In the pantheon of modern villains of love, there is one character who stands out as worthy of particular condemnation: the fiend who starts a new relationship while still not fully over their ex. The complaints against this appalling figure are legion: why are they wasting everyone’s time? Why such selfishness and deceit? What amoral and disgusting behaviour to show up at love’s door like this. Why not just wait?

The outrage is easy to sympathise with (especially if we, or someone we care about, has ever been on the receiving end of the damage that can ensue in some of the more extreme cases). The problem is that pure outrage has very little to teach us. We end up abundantly certain about what people should not do, and yet without much clue as to why they sometimes do it anyway.

The reality is that for some of us (who aren’t necessarily outright monsters), there may not always be a choice between getting over a past relationship on the one hand and starting a new relationship on the other. Such is the grief that we’re mired in, such is the hold of sentiment and nostalgia; the only plausible way we can begin to overcome the legacy of an old person may – gingerly and soberly – be to try to connect with a new one. We could otherwise have waited for five or five hundred years in a room on our own without ever making progress; the sole realistic way of staunching our wound is to love again.

This isn’t, of course the neat scenario that moralists like to believe in, but the difficulty with moralism is that it raises the burden of honesty to such a degree that it more or less forces people to end up in deceptions. Why wouldn’t a heartbroken person be tempted to lie about their state when the alternative would be to condemn themselves to a permanently solitary future?

Paradoxically, the more two lovers can bring themselves to share and listen to their complicated realities, the more fidelity stands to increase. Relationships – at their most noble – should be about making room for the less edifying aspects of being human: the bits we wish weren’t there, but are. Lovers become more solid, rather than less so, as they confess without too much fear (and with all the necessary caveats) that they still have confusing feelings for someone else, or indeed that they are sometimes angry or sad or jealous or inadequate. The more we allow someone to be who they are, the more our bond with them deepens. ‘So, tell me more about your ex. It sounds sad, but interesting,’ might be the question that – more than any other – allows someone to love afresh and, ironically, move on decisively from a troublesome ghost.

Good parents are aware of the benefits of allowing tricky truths into the light. They know that if they remain calm when a child says that they sometimes think Mummy is a horrible cow or that they want Daddy dead, this isn’t a prelude to delinquency or mass murder. It’s just a passing articulation of ambivalence which, if it can be accommodated without weakness or fury, will help a small person to feel seen and loved.

Naturally, in a perfect world, no one would ever have any feelings of any kind for an ex – just as no one would ever fancy the waiter, flirt with a stranger or wish for a few moments to abandon the partner they adore.

But in this world, so long as complex feelings are expressed with sanity and respect, it may be highly conducive to love that they should be listened to with imagination. What love properly aims at is a mutual, kindly forgiving acknowledgement of all the stranger aspects that come with being human. The people we properly love are those who allow us to explain who we are without judgement or fury. For them, we’ll reserve our deepest loyalty; for them, we’ll do our utmost to become the pure, uncomplicated people we long to be.