My Ex Finally Apologized

What happens when you get what you once needed, at a time when you no longer need it?

A couple weeks ago, a friend asked me what I would do if my ex from my most significant relationship asked me to meet him for a coffee so he could apologize for what he’d done.

It’s easy for me to answer that. I don’t need a second to think about it.

No, I would not.

That’s not because I’m still angry at him. It’s not because I want to hurt him. It’s not because I’m vindictive or unforgiving.

The reason is simply that what he’d done was so egregious, I don’t feel that it’s respectful to myself to give him more of my time.

It wasn’t just the fact that after seven years together, he had come home one day to tell me he was in love with someone else. That he was moving out. That he and his new girlfriend had decided that he should have no more contact with me or my family in the future.

It wasn’t just that he tried to leave all our financial obligations in my hands. That he said I deserved to pay all the fines for our broken financial agreements because of my “sexual immorality” (a.k.a. being a woman who likes sex). That during the few months we were unraveling those agreements, he mostly would not take my calls and talked to me as if I was a stalker the few times he did take them.

It wasn’t just that he threw me away like a piece of garbage after I had been a devoted companion to him for seven years.

It was that in all this time, all these years, he never apologized for what he did. My phone number has not changed. My email has not changed. It would have been so easy for him to have come back at any point in the last several years and drop a line saying one simple sentence: “I’m sorry for what I did.”

But he didn’t.

And so, no. Why should I agree to meet with someone who wants to apologize for taking such drastic, cruel, unethical actions during the course of our breakup when it took him so many years to muster up that sentiment? If he was sorry, he would’ve told me a long time ago.

All this time later…I don’t give a damn, anymore.

My life has changed a lot in the past few years. I’ve worked very hard on exploring my sexuality, my sense of self, who I am, who I want to be, what I want to do with my life… I’d already gotten to a point of putting my relationship with Lee behind me — at least, as much as one can do in a situation that was such a central part of my life and that left such a huge scar.

I was committed to forgiving him and moving on.

Last summer, though, I was surprised that I still felt pain and sorrow about losing Lee. It wasn’t that I missed him. It was more like a deep sorrow of the dream I had lost — of the family I thought I would build with him that now I know (being almost 45) I will never have. It was a sorrow for the intensity of pain I had experienced in the first few years after his departure and for having to deal with that largely by myself.

And it was a sadness that I had so deeply misjudged him. I knew there were issues in our relationship and certainly issues he had that concerned me — his political leanings, his religious leanings — but underneath all of that was a young man in whom I had always recognized was a deeply good person trying to do right in this world.

The idea that I had wasted seven years on an illusion was devastating to me, and the grief that came with that followed me for a very long time.

But suddenly, after more inner explorations last summer, after feeling the pain of that loss with one more bracing sting…it finally dissipated. Like a pile of embers that suddenly erupted into sparks and crumbled into nothing but ash, it was over.

I see now that that transition moved me into a new direction. Things in my life have been…happening. I have moved on in a very big way.

In fact, Lee seems like a distant memory these days. Everything is ahead of me. There is possibility everywhere.

In fact, I had a particularly good time last weekend, after visiting with my nieces and nephews and enjoying the other new things that have come into my life. New things that have my eyes firmly set on the future — not the past.

After I arrived home, however, I got some shocking news from my mother. My brother Jack, she told me, had been going through an old email account that he never uses anymore. And suddenly, he discovered an email from Lee (who had been his best friend, as well as my boyfriend).

It was dated two years after Lee ended our relationship and his friendship with Jack. And it was an apology — the apology I’d waited so long to hear.

“I’m sorry for the way things happened during my departure,” it began. “It has been weighing heavily on my heart these past couple of years.”

He went on to say that he missed everyone — he had been very, very close to my parents, both of whom considered him part of the family, as well as being fairly tight with my other siblings and some of my cousins — and that he hoped Jack would consider agreeing to have lunch with him, hang out again, and “put the past behind us.”

As you can imagine, though I was glad he apologized to Jack, there was only one thing I cared about — what had happened between me and Lee. All he had done to my family was simply end his relationship with them. He hadn’t shamed them, gaslit them, lied to them, tried to shirk financial responsibilities to them, as he had with me. So what about that?

The last two lines of his email read:

Tell everyone hi if that’s OK and please let Yael know that I am truly sorry for everything that has happened. I truly am.

I read that over and over again. And then I ugly-cried and could not stop for a full ten minutes.

A million emotions overcame me — and none so overwhelming as the sudden and intense memory of how much I had loved him. That feeling came back to me with such strength, it almost drowned me.

I am still reeling over this turn of events. You see…I waited for Lee to apologize to me for six years. Each day, week, month that went by in his silence made me feel like I had spent seven years with a stranger. How could I have been so wrong about him?

I felt very strongly for a time that because of several events that happened to him around the time that he hooked up with this new woman, it was possible that he just lost himself. Made a horrible series of mistakes that resulted in him doing something out of character — hurtful, cruel, cold.

I banked on that. On the fact that I wasn’t so off, so bad at relationships that I had picked someone so terrible as a partner. I banked on him coming back and apologizing. Not to rekindle the relationship — but just to make things right.

In the years and years of silence that followed, I had no choice but to construct another narrative. That I had been very wrong about him. That my instincts about men could not be trusted. That I had no self-respect to be able to stay with a man like that for seven years.

“I am sure he is that same good young man we knew in those early years,” my mother kept insisting when he came up in conversation.

I was adamant that she was wrong. “If he was good, he would have apologized. He would have recognized that what he had done was despicable and he would’ve at least tried to communicate his regret over that. And he never bothered to do that.”

As it turns out, my mother had been right all along. I had been right all along. Because Lee apologized two years after all this went down.

All this time, the “I’m sorry” I had been waiting for was sitting right there in my brother’s old email account like a letter that had been lost in the mail.

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that that apology would have changed everything for me if I had received it when it was sent.

For one thing, I wouldn’t have felt so badly about myself for making such a poor choice in a boyfriend. I wouldn’t have spent all those years berating myself for being so stupid as to not have noticed his true character. I wouldn’t have tortured myself for “wasting” the last years of my fertility on someone who thought I was more worthless than garbage.

But I also think I might never have gotten over him had I seen that at the time it was written. It might have sparked a flame of hope in me that he still loved me. And though there would’ve been nothing to pursue (he had married the girlfriend by that point), I might have gotten caught up in those hopes and dreams, getting stuck again in the endless cycle I had repeated for so long of wanting him, waiting for him, chasing after him.

Receiving that apology when it was written would have cost me a lot. However, not getting it until years later — when I no longer care whether or not he’s sorry — also cost a lot.

While I’m overwhelmed by this turn of events, I also can’t help but think that his apology was hardly sufficient. He owed me more than a couple of sentences at the end of an apology sent to and crafted for my brother.

He should have written me directly.

“I am truly sorry for everything that happened” just isn’t good enough for me. How about: “I am truly sorry for everything I did to you.” Because none of this just “happened.” He chose all of it. The lies. The betrayal. The refusal to take any emotional or financial responsibility in the closing of our relationship. The choice to treat me like a piece of toilet paper that had stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

He made every one of those choices. And if he was truly sorry, he could’ve been mature enough to send me an email and acknowledge how much he had hurt me and apologize for that. For the seven years we were together, I’m the one who took care of him when he was sick. I’m the one who cooked his dinners and did his laundry. I’m the one who tended to him 24/7 when he broke his ankle. I’m the one he slept beside each night.

He owed me more than that.

And yet…I’m happy that I wasn’t so wrong about him — that I can still trust my instincts.

I had already decided last summer that I was going to see that relationship as a worthy use of my time — not a waste. That the love that I gave to it meant something, even if Lee didn’t want it. That it wasn’t a failure, just a learning experience. That I can focus on the fun and pleasure I experienced in that relationship and not dwell on the heartbreaking way it ended.

And now I can add to that list that I don’t need to use that relationship as evidence of my bad taste in men or of allegedly low self-esteem.

I get to make of that relationship what I want — whether he had apologized for what he did or not.

The only thing left to wonder is: Why now? I stopped caring about or needing Lee’s apology months ago. And as I find myself very recently standing on the precipice of something new and wonderful, ready to jump in, I literally couldn’t care less about what happened in the past and whether or not old wrongs could be made right.

Even after reading the apology, even after feeling all the overwhelming feelings that came up for me afterwards…there is nothing left there for me. It’s all a pile of bones to me now. Interesting to look at, sometimes coming with a painful memory, but mostly just…gone.

But I can’t stop thinking about the timing of this — how my very, very special friend just asked me recently if I would meet up with Lee again to hear him apologize to me. And suddenly, that hypothetical apology appears — and one that was made years and years ago, which somehow changes both everything and nothing.

My brother Jack is considering reaching out, just to have that same chat. The abrupt ending of the friendship hurt him deeply and I think he would like to find a way to heal that, somehow.

But would I?

My answer is still the same as it was before. I’m so glad he is sorry, and glad he was sorry as long as five years ago, when I still thought he didn’t give a damn.

But he wasn’t sorry enough to take full responsibility for what he did. He wasn’t sorry enough to face me, directly. He wasn’t sorry enough to make every effort to make things right.

More importantly, I’m not sorry. I’m okay with the way things turned out. Because my future is looking pretty damn bright.

© Yael Wolfe 2021

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