Despite feeling somewhat daunted by having to follow behind Bubba’s brief, direct, and fairly blase post, I’ll contribute to the OP with my experience:
I haven’t yet gotten back together with my ex, but I certainly think about it. We were married for about 12 years and share children and have been divorced for a year, apart for two years. However, we get along very amiably and do things together–along with the kids–quite often.
I have dated several women since our divorce, but I still would be interested in exploring the possibility of getting back together with her because we have kids together and I still care about her and enjoy being with her and am attracted to her.
But she doesn’t seem interested in being in a romantic relationship with anyone right now, or maybe ever. When we split up, she told me that she was ‘never going to be in another relationship and was going to focus her life on the kids’.
She divorced me, so I think she was more deliberate in emotionally closing the door on our relationship, and she’s more the kind of person who avoids looking back or second-guessing herself. I’m more the kind of person who remains open to possibility and revision and overlooks problems.
Despite these differences, I do think there has been a ‘warming trend’ between us recently, and I’d guess there’s a reasonable chance that we might get back together in another year or so. But I’m not sitting around holding my breath or tying my hopes and aspirations to this possibility: there’s probably a better chance that I’ll end up with someone else who comes along.
This is an interesting question to me, however, because I do wonder exactly what draws people together and, conversely, what pulls them apart. Sometimes it seems that external circumstances are key factors in a relationship happening or not: right time of life, location, job status, familial crises in a state of remission, etc. But some relationships seem to develop regardless of what’s going on around the couple, dependent only on the chemical or magnetic attraction between them.
If you split up because of specific transgressions of one partner, then maybe the split was essential to enable proper healing and forgiveness and the time apart might lay the way for the couple to resume their relationship.
If the split was because of character issues or patterns of behavior, then it’s harder to see that getting back together would make sense because those are so hard to change and the partner would also be resistant to recognizing that the person has in fact changed.
I guess a key thing I would look for is whether both persons have, in the time apart, experienced any real growth as individuals and whether they’re likely to continue growing and avoid stagnation once they are a couple.
Lastly, I would think that it’s almost always a mistake to think in terms of ‘going back to how things were’ because that path just naturally leads to the same relationship with the same problems that drove you apart. Rather, I’d focus on beginning a new relationship, even if it happens to be with the ex.
Not sure whether these random thoughts are helpful to you or what you had in mind, but here they here.
