Contacting a long-lost ex-girlfriend

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

If/when I do this, it will definitely be in some manner that doesn’t put her on the spot. Probably e-mail or snail-mail. I don’t think we share any mutual friends any longer, but if we do that’s the route I’d like to take. Certainly nothing “live”, like a phone call or a doorway appearance.

And I will definitely make sure that she has an out and that she knows it’s there. I don’t want her to feel pressured or obligated in any way.

As Dangerosa touched on, I don’t want to creep her out.

Yeah, this is something I’ve been struggling with a bit. That’s where the “selfish asshole” comment in my OP came from. I realize that there is some selfishness in doing something like this. That’s probably unavoidable. And I guess I have a little guilt from splitting the way I did. But I’d think it’s safe to say that she probably has questions for me too, and I’d like to give her the chance to get some answers. I’d like her to know that she’s really not to blame for me breaking contact. I think there’s a chance we could be friends again.

22

I recently found an address for a man I dated twelve years ago and always remembered fondly (I broke up with him to get back together with an ex. BIG mistake on my part). I wrote him a short letter stating that I’d often thought of our friendship (we remained friends for a while after we dated), that I wish we’d kept in touch, and that I’d love to hear how he’s doing. It’s been three weeks and I haven’t heard anything, but I’m still glad I did it. It’s not like me to put myself out there like that, so I figure if nothing else it probably built some character or something. Maybe.

23

My first boyfriend tracked me down via Classmates. We haven’t seen each other in almost 30 years. But we will this summer. He’s retired from the Navy, and his wife just retired last month. They’re taking a cross-country trek and they plan to stop visit me and my sweetie. I’m so excited!

24

Several years ago I had a thought about a former girlfriend and wondered what had happened to her. On a total whim I picked up the Chicago white pages and thumbed through to her last name. I had no reason to think she was also in Chicago. It was just a bit of curiosity.

Of course, she was listed. So I called her and a few weeks later we got together for a movie.

Nothing ever came of it except we’ve occasionally kept in touch as friends. She’s an artist, so I’ve seen her now and then at show openings.

I’m glad I did it, if only for the weirdness factor of actually finding her name in the book.

25

Now that I think about it, I know why I looked in the first place. It was because I’ve occasionally encountered several other people from either my college or my hometown (unexpectedly) since I moved here and I guess I just thought I’d play the odds.

26

Oh God, I just googled an Ex-GF, and was directed to several Porn sites. :eek:

27

Do I have to do this? Yes, yes I must…

…CITE??..

28

I had an ex contact me out of the blue a few years ago. I was very glad to be rid of him at the time and was surprised that he looked me up. We we’re having a pleasant conversation, until he started bringing up “old times” and how great they were. :rolleyes:

If/when you do contact her, leave the past in the past. I had grown up quite a bit since the relationship ended and it became very obvious that he hadn’t. I have kept in contact with several ex’s and when you leave the past in the past, you can find a great friend.

29

In the past year and a half I have contacted and got together with one ex and been contacted and got together with another ex. The one I contacted we got together back in the hometown and, I got to listen to 3 hours of how everything that had happened in the past 5 years of her life was my fault. WTF, I haven’t seen you in 5 years.
The next was an Ex contacting me, (please kick me). We had been together for 4 years and apart for 1.5. Out of the blue she started calling me, after much reluctance and an iron clad guarantee that I would get some I drove 6 hours to meet her half way. It took about 20 minutes to remember why I hated her. The best thing was, she paid for most of the weekend. The worst was that she “felt” something, well so did I it was “ewwwww”. Two weeks after that conversation she felt it necessary to call me and tell me how she was dating some rich guy who loved her and was willing to be the father to my upcoming child. :rolleyes: The only thing I knew for sure about this girl was that she was a liar, and thankfully I learned to detect when she was lying, it was whenever she was talking.

As far as advice, contact the Ex.  If it sticks in your head it couldn't have been that bad for either of you, and you might find something good, or the worst that could happen is you will remember why they bothered you, and not care anymore.
30

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I feel better about the idea now.

I think I’m going to see if we do still share any mutual friends. Having a trusted third party involved could be helpful. If that fails, I found an e-mail address that looks promising. I believe I can get a snail-mail address.

I’ll be starting this process soon. I’m in the middle of moving at the moment, so anything I do will probably have to wait at least a week. I’ll bump the thread if anything interesting happens.

And, just on the crazy, one-in-a-million chance that she reads this (hell, stranger things have happened): RMB in CV, CA, this is KJC, formerly of UC, CA. Hi.

31

[Brian (from Spaced)]

I still see my ex girlfriends…

Well watch

[/Brian]

32

I have two stories that are ongoing: one involves a good friendship renewed across an ocean after 22 years of silence, the other involves a woman with whom I was madly in love, and whom I will be seeing again – after a hiatus of more than 16 years – LESS THAN EIGHT HOURS FROM NOW!
First Story: I was very close to a young woman in 1979 (we were both Brits living in France). I was falling in love with her, but she did not want to become too emotionally involved, as she was going to be moving on to further studies in Spain. She moved there as planned, hooked up with a Spaniard, and we grew apart mainly because it was painful for me to stay in touch.

In 2003, I bought a music CD from a small company in Spain. Superb music from the time of the Moors in Al-Andalus (now Andalusia), before the 1492 reconquista. I was reading the liner notes, and saw the name of the Spanish-English translator. Surely, there cannot be two women with the same (English) name currently living in Madrid! I waited until her birthday, and sent an e-mail to “info@[company name].es”, asking them to forward it on to their translator. My e-mail to her said simply (in Spanish) “Happy Birthday, Love, [the pet name that she called me].” She responded “Is that all you have to say after 22 years?” We’ve since e-mailed back and forth a fair amount. She married her Spanish boyfriend, they have two children, and she’s happy. Life in Spain has been good to her. In retrospect, she clearly made the right decision for her own needs, however painful it was for me at the time. I’m happy for her, and looking forward to meeting her and her family at some point when there are not several thousand miles separating us.

Second Story: (If spiralscratch had not written the OP, I was going to start my own MPSIMS thread about this one…) In 1987, I met a young woman while traveling through the Rockies on an Amtrak train. We engaged in a passionate bi-coastal relationship for a few months, then decided to move from our respective cities to San Francisco to start a new life together as of Jan 1, 1988. We made a scouting trip to SF and signed a lease on an apartment on Russian Hill. We then returned to our respective homes to wrap up business and arrange the moves.

I made it to SF; she got to within 50 miles of SF and chickened out. We communicated via phone and letter for a while, but I felt that I was getting only stonewalling and misdirection in response to my questions as to what was happening with us. By the time of the last letter, she was married with one child, and I was engaged. Then silence…

…Until sixteen days ago, when I received an e-mail from out of the blue (Googling on my real name gives a direct link to my e-mail address). We exchanged e-mails (current tally is 52 e-mails back and forth in 17 days!), then a week ago she called up and said that she wanted to see me again SOON!

She’s flying to San Francisco TODAY (sixteen years later than promised!), and will arrive less than 8 hours from now. We’re going to spend the day together, and I’ve booked her a hotel room downtown for tonight.

We are both currently unattached. It’s clear that many hard lessons have been learned by both of us in the interim. The e-mails between us have shown a clear spark of attraction.

On the other hand, my “skeptical antennae” are fully deployed and calibrated. I hope she doesn’t try the old “I was abducted by space aliens so it was my humanoid replicant, not me, who gave you the runaround”.

In any case, it’s going to be a really interesting day. I wish I’d had time to have the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fellows come and give me a makeover. Ah well.

Wish me luck, Fellow Dopers!

33

Yes, I have been, about a month ago, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Frankly, I thought it was creepy in the extreme, and I won’t be answering or even acknowledging the guy’s letter. However, your situation may be different (things ended very badly between us, and I wouldn’t have been interested in renewing contact even if the tone and phrasing of letter hadn’t creeped me out, which they did). For what it’s worth, I’ll tell you exactly what bothered me about the situation:

– I’d moved on and he clearly hadn’t. Reading three pages of emotionally overwrought analysis of a relationship I’d barely even thought about for years was just plain weird, especially since he never so much as acknowledged the possibility that I might NOT have spent the past six years agonizing over the way things ended, or even thinking about him very much.

– He went on and on about walking around the town where we went to college at night, revisiting all the places we’d gone together (some of which, frankly, I didn’t even remember!) He also said he’d Googled my name repeatedly over the last few years to see what I was doing. All borderline stalkerish, I thought.

– He wrote it on Valentine’s Day. 'Nuff said. (Not that I think you’re planning to wait ten and a half months, but if you do this, don’t use a special day such as an anniversary.)

As I said, I’m sure your situation is very different and I don’t mean to discourage you, but please make sure you don’t come across as obsessive or unwilling to respect her privacy, and keep in mind that there’s a good chance she hasn’t been thinking about you as much as you’ve been thinking about her.

34

Receiving end –

So this guy calls me up, name of Mike. I say, wow, you still remember me? I dated you for a month more than a year ago.

He says he was looking through his little black book :rolleyes: and came upon my number. Plus he was recently out of a relationship, could we go out? Tonight?

I was absolutely revolted. Talk about total booty call. I said that my boyfriend, name of Bo, the professional boxer, would not like it. Mike didn’t call back.

I didn’t think it was a very good lie, but I was terribly insulted by Mike’s blunt implied reason for calling. I didn’t like him in the first place, he was a mistake on my part and I got away from him as soon as I could.

If you’re going to call an ex, at least pretend like you want more than their body, okay?

35

I was on the receiving end of this just recently. The first guy I ever had a physical relationship with (ifyougetmydriftandIbetthatyoudo) was a complete asshole to me while we were dating. (Didn’t call for days on end, made plans and then broke them, etc). The last I had talked to him was the second summer after we broke up. I was moving to Mexico with my then-BF and he was dating a good friend of his. We hugged each other goodbye and said, “yeah, have a nice life.”

Fast forward almost 10 years later and I return home from my honeymoon (this past October). In my email is an email from my old co-worker, who said that she received this email for me and it looked personal and did I want it? It was a message from Ben* (*his real name) and basically it was just a hi. So I did email him back–with jeevmon’s knowledge–and filled him in on my life, including that I was married. He emailed me back and said that he had done some thinking and that he wanted to contact all his old friends who, though perhaps he had known only briefly, had made an impact on him and he wanted to tell me what a great person I was, etc. Seemed weird but then he mentioned that he was married with a kid and another on the way so maybe it was legit. I wrote him a response–his birthday was a few days later–and I haven’t heard from him since late October. The funny thing is that his non-responsiveness is what I hated about him in the first place, so it is good to see that not everything changes! But I am glad he is doing well and that he looked me up. I didn’t think it was that creepy–especially since he didn’t actually track me down and it was my co-worker’s foresight to pass the message along.

36

I dated a guy for a long time. We broke up, grew apart, etc.

He got married. Then he got in a horrible accident. He had amnesia (no, I’m not kidding. He had a severe head injury, and they were just waiting it out). He didn’t remember his wife, but he remembered me and wanted to see me. I went. His wife went postal. I left. Never saw him again.

When I saw this thread, I thought about him and Googled him. He’s a felon!

I can’t decide if it’s his life or mine that sounds like a Lifetime movie.

37

Over a year ago I started a thread about looking up an ex-boyfriend. I received a couple nasty replies (especially one person who has since been banned–ha!) and some encouraging replies. Ignoring the nasty replies, I called the ex and we started a friendship. I went out last summer to visit him, and it provided closure for me to see that we have gone down WAY different roads. We are completely different from what we were back when. I had always wondered if we had missed out on something special. Now I know that wasn’t the case and have moved on.

Having experienced this myself, I say go for it. You deserve to see whether or not you two can be friends. At least then you’ll know. :slight_smile:

38

I came across this article on the subject in the local paper a couple days ago. It’s a somewhat light article.

The main thing that bugs me about it is how it, like so many other things, generalizes that men and women are looking for something different in the experience. Also, the psychologist they interview is, IMHO, a bit of an idiot.