Is it ok to date when you still love your ex?
She texted him back even though she knew better. Her grandmother was dying and he was the closest thing to comfort she could reach. That night he held her while she cried. A week later he was calling someone else gorgeous online.
She asked if they were together. He said he wasn’t with anyone. She knew what that meant. She also knew she would take it anyway.
We tell ourselves we are choosing this. We call it being realistic, being cool, being low-maintenance. Stay light, stay easy, maybe he will pick us when he is ready. But somewhere under the reasoning we can feel it—the hunger that makes crumbs look like a meal.
She kept seeing him. When her grandmother died, he was the first person she called. He asked her to bring back fudge from the coast. He called her every day she was gone. When she got home, he went to Vegas with his ex and came back and told her about it like honesty was the same thing as respect.
She reminded herself they were casual. She reminded herself she could not be angry about rules she had agreed to. What she did not remind herself was that she had never actually agreed. She had just stopped asking for more after he met her questions with silence.
His ex moved in. He said they were not together. She believed him because not believing him meant walking away, and walking away meant being alone with everything she had been using him to avoid feeling.
The night her grandmother was dying, she was not searching for him. She was searching for a place to put the grief. He was just there. And once he was there, leaving became the harder thing.
We can date someone while still loving an ex. We can also date someone while still running from ourselves. The second one is the one that makes us stay in situations we would tell anyone else to leave.
She stayed for four years. Not because he was worth it. Because she had not yet learned that being alone is not the same thing as being empty.
She finally left. Not because she stopped wanting him, but because she got tired of eating crumbs and calling it dinner. The hunger did not go away when she walked out. It just stopped pretending to be about him.
We stay too long because leaving means sitting with what we were using the situation to avoid. Grief. Loneliness. The gap between who we want to be and who we are when no one is watching. We cannot date our way out of still loving someone else. The moving on comes later. First comes the part where we stop pretending.
Where are we calling it casual when it is costing everything?
What are we eating that is not feeding us?
What would it mean to stop asking someone else to fill the gap?