A Requiem for Exes

I have been thinking about exes. Not mine, but other people’s.

Specifically, I have been thinking about the exes whom I never got to meet.

In some cases, this was because the person whom I did know had a relationship when they were living somewhere else, and then broke up before I ever got to meet the partner. Sometimes it wasn’t even geographical separation, but never getting to meet the partner for one reason or the other.

In other cases, it was reading somebody’s blog, and over the months or years, seeing the partner once referred to, change from name to allusion, and then vanish altogether. And made all the more poignant because the ex had no online presence, no blue link underlining their name, to give them an identity other than once partner, then ex, now cipher. The same applies to Twitter and Facebook, I suppose.

What happened to all these exes I never knew as persons, but only as partners, I wonder. Did they take the breakup badly? Did they move on? Did they see it as an opportunity to become aggressively single and Lothario their way through life? Go to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzly bears? I shall never know, particularly when the breakup was either messy or embarrassing.

Perhaps they’ve all gone to the same place, and Scott Pilgrim style, formed a League of Evil Exes.

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