Thinking About Your Ex

Guten morgen, Herr Doktor Freud,

This morning, flipping through the news on my phone as I drank my morning dose of caffeine, I came across the following article: Why Thinking About Your Ex Can Actually Be Beneficial, According To Research

It was really a fluff piece to allow the insertion of ads, but their bottom line summary was this:

“The bottom line is, if you fondly recall times with your ex, it doesn’t mean you don’t love your current partner. And in fact, it might actually benefit your relationship now. Of course, there’s a line between the occasional nostalgia trip and unhealthy preoccupation with your ex, but rest assured it’s A-OK to reminisce once in a while.”

Yup… you got it, it started me reminiscing about exes. Having one or two, I have described this bevy of beauties (smiley face??) as ghosts haunting my soul. I once read an article that claimed when you canoodle with a person, this person is in your aura for 30 days. Except for the most casual of canoodles, my personal experience has been that they leave a lifetime imprint. I wrote about this a bit in Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #9,183, describing a reoccurring nightmare of mine.   However, there are only around a handful of these women who I consider as true exes.  Sadly four of these women have passed away much too young – after we were an item, but still when I think about their early passing, it creates a wave of sadness within me. However, all that is a different story for a different time.

Clearly my principle ex would be my first wife.  After all, I spent nearly a third of my life with her, nearly half of my adult life. For the first couple years after we separated for the last time, then divorced, I was very heavy-hearted about the situation. I then spent a couple years very angry whenever I would think about my marriage or divorce.  I’m not sure what turned that spigot off, but at some unknown point I simply stopped feeling much emotion about it, one way or the other.

One of my traits, good or bad depending on your point of view, is that I like to tell stories, to relate anecdotes of my life.  Fortunately for me, Señora is forbearing, her eyes only semi-glaze over when I recount the same anecdote for the umpteenth time. It must be those three decades plus that she spent as a special education teacher. I can see the rest of the world’s population looking at their watches, eyeing the door, suddenly staring at their phones, thinking here we go again, another rambling, pointless story from the old curmudgeon.

Obviously if you have spent much time with a single individual, like an ex, any number of things will trigger memories and frequently anecdotes that cause folks to suddenly remember an appointment. As alluded to, on occasion, these tales will involve some event in my past marriage, sometimes good things, sometimes not so good. One recent anecdote was about my ex’s Southern Belle behavior. This memory was prompted as Señora, whose hands were full, stood by the door leading to a wing of the lodge, waiting for me to open it for her.

However, what is very strange to me are my dreams involving women in my life, past and present. Señora is almost never in them, probably because she lying in the bed next to me. I do dream about one girlfriend a few times a year, Joyce.  I am not a believer in the afterlife, reincarnation or even karma, but I do have a feeling occasionally that I have karma or business from a previous life to work out with a person. That is why they have entered my life, when they did, in the manner that they did, to complete this business. That is how I now feel about Joyce. With the way the relationship ended due to a large separation of distance due to the need for employment, it has always felt like to me that we never worked out whatever karma we were involved in. That is my take on why she keeps reoccurring in my dreams, and perhaps also because she died much too young. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I wonder if Joyce and I will be working, once again,  on whatever that karmic chore was.

What is a little disturbing is that in the nearly 30 years since our rupture I have had only a smattering of dreams about my ex that I would describe as pleasant.  Usually my dreams involving her are troublesome in some fashion, frequently waking me, resulting in my staring at the ceiling for a period of time.

However, I have an even more bothersome nighttime caller.  This dream apparition  seems to be a devilish amalgamation of my first wife and Señora, traits from both, but not recognizable as either. Occasionally another past amante will join this duo’s melded personality to haunt the labyrinth of my dreams. It is this muliebrous midnight Minotaur that frequently results in the soaking of my t-shirt.  I do wonder what the writers of that fluff piece would have to say about that. While these dreams involving my ex or this amalgamated being tend to run in clusters, fortunately they are infrequent.

And no, please do not send me your bill for a 50 minute hour.  I will not be paying it.

And so it goes.

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