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Most people would rather not talk to many of their exes—especially when things ended badly. While this helps to protect you from future hurt and enables you to move on to a hopefully happier future, it can also deny you some important understanding that could change your beliefs and behaviors about being in a relationship.
In the spirit of investigating what happens when college sweethearts meet up to do a relationship postmortem two years after a breakup, Glamour magazine filmed this intense and thought-provoking video. You’ll see Ali and Andrew (who were together for seven years) have a brutally honest conversation about why things just didn’t work, and how things could have been different.
Their reflectiveness and thoughtfulness in engaging with these tough questions might give you pause for thought when it comes to your own exes—what went wrong, and what can you learn from it?
One of the key messages you can take from the video is that all relationships (happy and unhappy) provide opportunities for incredibly rich learning about yourself and what you want from a partner. So, while it’s not healthy to dwell on a former partner for years on end, it’s well worth taking some time to try and see the dynamic from a more objective perspective.
What attracted you to each other, and why wasn’t that enough to sustain the bond in the end?
Are you usually attracted to the same type of person? What vital needs weren’t met? As Ali and Andrew show, having a better grasp of the answers to these questions can offer a valuable sense of closure—or at least the beginning of closure.
