63 Things I’ve Learned Since My Husband Fucked My Girlfriend, Blamed It on Me, Convinced Me to Take Him Back, Then Dumped Me (In No Particular Order)

Installment 5

After ending a serious relationship, there’s always a “We … I mean, I” adjustment period. You know, you say to people: We … I mean, I drove cross-country after college and camped at the Grand Canyon. We … I mean, I traveled to London and almost got arrested while making a rubbing of Milton’s gravestone. Right. Henceforth, it shall be: I laid a bamboo floor in the shit-hole house that I bought and loved irrationally. Et cetera.

Initially, the shift is maybe a way to avoid thinking about the ex … a nifty device to deny him or her the honor of being included in your publicly available past. With time, it becomes more and more an acknowledgment of what is—a way of letting others know you have moved on (or, at the very least, are pretending you’ve moved on).

At first, it feels a little contrived or even disingenuous to tell your we stories as I stories … as if you’re hiding something germane. Eventually, though, you shed the notion of yourself and the other person as a unit, and what was once so deliberate becomes second nature.

I hadn’t given any of this much thought in a long time. It’s all kind of mundane in that way that things are when they only strike you as extraordinary the first time you experience them. I was just talking about it the other day with a friend, though, and something he said reminded me of a quote I had read a few days earlier:

“… narrative is sanity.”

Now, I’d like to think that I’m a testament to the fact that even the most sordid and humiliating of break-ups doesn’t endanger one’s grip on reality (much), so bringing sanity into the discussion may be a tad melodramatic. However, the we–I thing does seem linked to the fact that in some weird way you are your stories … the ones you tell others as well as the ones you tell yourself.

So, without that narrative thread do the different periods of life come apart? Blur together? Seem never to have happened? Beats the hell out of me, to be honest. But maybe the way things become (and remain) real to us is by telling them. I think that’s what the person who said narrative is sanity was getting at, anyway. If so, then going from “we” to “I” is literally a way of letting go of a person without losing our stories … those seemingly innocuous things that tie everything together and help us make sense of the world.