men always come back

they just do :/

Men always come back. Last week, I was reminded of this when I received a Facebook message from a guy who I met last summer in France.

“Hi Brianne. Haven’t forgotten about you and was always wondering how you are. Anyway, I would like to come and fix your furniture for you.”

We’d shared a casual romantic dalliance that somehow managed to cross an ocean for about a month, with us exchanging daily text messages and “good mornings,” until his girlfriend revealed herself to me and I promptly shut down any further contact. Now, a year later, after I forgot he existed, he wanted to come to Canada to fix my furniture for me. My handyman-in-shining-coveralls, apparently.

Typical, I thought.

A few years ago, I received a similar message from an ex-boyfriend.

“Hello. You’ve popped up in my thoughts recently. How’ve you been?”

I hadn’t heard from him in almost a decade, not since I’d deleted him from my social media and erased his phone number. From time to time he crossed my mind — usually when I visited New York on vacation, the city where we met and fell in love — with a mostly positive feeling attached to a slight ache; the type of warm nostalgia you both appreciate and feel a little sad about, like childhood Christmases or a dead family pet.

It wasn’t the first time I heard from him since our breakup. Every now and then he’d call me or send me an AIM message, whispering sweet nothings, all the while dating other women, and sometimes sleeping with me. Our previous longest lapse in contact occurred two years after our breakup, around 2009, when he moved from New York to Seattle with a woman who just happened to bear a strong resemblance to yours truly. I didn’t hear from him for an entire year at that point until he sent me another Facebook message, complimenting my new hair style, the telltale sign that she was gone. Another (drunken) phone call from him on his birthday followed, before another conversation – which would be our last – occurred the following spring.

At the time it was my decision to get off the heartbreak hamster wheel. My ex was still very charming but he was also still very slippery. Heavy on the flirtation, light on the intention. I remember at the time thinking, “Nothing’s changed.” I knew that if I didn’t cut him off, I would never get over him. 

Ready or not…that guy is going to come back! Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Eight years later, and that’s exactly what my friends and my therapist were worried about when I told them he popped up again. Most of them were surprised; some weren’t. All wanted to know whether I would respond to him or not. “What’s changed?” They wanted to know. “What’s different?”

I understood their concern. Because they knew men like him always come back.

At some point or another. Maybe next week, maybe next year, maybe even next decade. They come back.

And when they do, it’s up to us to decide how we want to handle it.

Back to my ex.

Ours was a bad breakup for two reasons, and not because it happened on Presidents Day, the most boring federal holiday of all federal holidays. And not because he thought that The Way We Were had “the perfect ending.” And not because he said to me, “Sometimes love isn’t enough,” after watching The Way We Were, which just happened to be on Valentine’s Day, which just happened to be the week before the Presidents Day on which we broke up.

It was a bad breakup because I still loved him.

“Hi,” I texted back. “I’m really good! How are you?”