Why I write love letters to my exes – and you should too

We all know how things are supposed to play out post-breakup.

It’s been immortalised in film and TV a thousand times or more, the clichés repeated ad nauseum until they’re etched into our collective psyche. We’re supposed to drink too much, eat comically large buckets of ice cream and sit around in our pants with the curtains closed. We’re supposed to stop showering, weep and wail along to Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” and shout obscenities at romcoms. But, above all, we’re supposed to declare our feckless former paramour a “bitch/bastard/loser” (delete as appropriate) and forensically go over every one of their shortcomings – a predator picking the carcass clean in the postmortem of this latest failed relationship. We are, in short, supposed to hate their guts.

That’s the deal: in the black-and-white world of heartbreak, committing the heinous crime of hurting someone automatically transforms the other party into an irredeemably bad person. Because, as it turns out, hating someone is a whole lot less painful than the alternative.

It takes real strength of will to wrench free of this well-thumbed playbook; real strength of will to refrain from forever consigning an ex to the scrapheap of romantic deadbeats. Much easier to flatten someone into a caricature of all their worst qualities than recognise the messy truth: that we loved them; that maybe we still love them and always will, just a little; that they’re flawed but not a monster; that amid the gloom of the end of things, there are memories of such shining, technicolour happiness that they’re simply too bright to take out and look at in the dark.

Holding all these truths in tension isn’t easy. But it is, I believe, the key to truly moving forward.

It’s why, rather than finding tenuous comparisons between my exes’ behaviour and that of a Middle Eastern dictator, I decided to start doing as close to the opposite as possible: write them love letters. Well, not always letters, per se – emails, Facebook messages or Whatsapps are all perfectly admissible digital alternatives. The sentiment remains the same regardless of medium: to try to express just what that person and our relationship meant to me in all their fractured, kaleidoscopic brilliance.

I’ll admit that “letters” aren’t written in the first flush of grief, when emotions are still too tender to examine, let alone distil into words. But give it a few months – when the rawness has healed into scar tissue, that initially, acute pain subsided into something altogether duller and more manageable – and I sit down, reflect, and pour my tired, beaten-up heart out.

Seeing as how it’s nearly Christmas, please indulge me in a moment of toe-curling sincerity: however things shook down in the end, we’ve nearly always gained something from the people we chose to entrust with our softest and most precious parts. Maybe we finally learnt to ask for what we needed. Maybe we finally saw that the bits of ourselves we’d deemed unlovable could be accepted by another. Maybe we finally allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, even if only for the briefest of moments. Whatever it is, there’s always something.

Honouring someone and the threads of life that you knitted together among the angst – and, as implausible as it can feel at first, actually thanking them for that shared experience – is one of the purest forms of closure I’ve ever experienced. There’s a release in acknowledging how important a person was to you, a freedom in putting honesty ahead of pride, an elation in choosing to focus on past joys instead of past pains.

It’s rare that relationships don’t work out because we’ve actually been duped into giving our heart to a walking manifestation of pure evil (or even just a common-or-garden a***hole). Most people aren’t actively trying to hurt each other and, more often than not, break-ups happen for a knotty web of reasons so complex and nuanced it’s almost impossible to pinpoint where things started to unravel. And despite the paint-by-numbers victim/villain narrative so frequently pedalled by Hollywood, the reality is far blurrier.

People are, for the most part, simply trying their best to be happy, and making all manner of mistakes on the never-ending journey to get to that fabled promised land. Accepting this fact and refusing to categorically vilify an ex doesn’t make you weak. It can be the very thing that gives you the strength to let go.

There are a few caveats, of course. When someone’s actions have been manifestly harmful – if they’ve abused you or serially cheated or turned out to be a compulsive liar, complete with a double life and second family – it goes without saying that you can lay off the “thank yous”. It’s also worth gently probing your own motives to ensure there’s nothing ulterior lurking beneath: the idea of sending a letter is to mark the end of a chapter, not to rake at old wounds in the vague hopes of rekindling a burned-out romance. It’s supposed to be a full stop, not an ellipsis.

But if you can hand-on-heart land in a place of forgiveness, able to appreciate all that you had with another human, wish them well and, crucially, mean it, that might just be the best Christmas present you can ever give yourself.

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