My first ex-boyfriend

I have this (occasionally) re-occurring dream about my first boyfriend. In it, I go to visit him for some reason (he lives in the Netherlands) and we're really friendly and get along great... as if we'd remained friends over the last twenty years instead of breaking up and never speaking again (which is what actually happened). Sometimes I may even end up getting flirty in this dream and express an interest in getting back together... though around this point a part of my subconscious usually seems to raise the alarm that something isn't quite right with this scenario and throws some kind of curveball into the mix - in the case of last night's dream, this meant me finding out that he's actually married and has a six-month-old baby. The latter was funny to me upon waking up in so far as I could tell exactly what piece of real life news my brain had pulled inspiration from for that one.

As far as I can tell from my ex's public Facebook profile, he's not actually married - though I don't really know, as we literally haven't talked in twenty years. I find it curious that my brain keeps coming back to this relationship in that way. I guess your first real love does have a special place in your heart no matter what happens, but of all the breakups I've had, this is also the one I have the fewest regrets about. When we got together, I was very shy and self-conscious and he did a lot to build up my confidence... but as I became more confident in my own identity, I also realised that we really weren't a good match and that I had to move on.

I have to admit there is a part of me that definitely wishes I could have a chat with him again some day though, largely because I feel I have better words now to articulate why things couldn't have worked out between us than I did back then, when I think it all just kind of came out of the blue for him and he never really got a good explanation for what was happening.

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