How does one avoid coming off as obsessed with someone who was a big part of their life?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was with my ex for 2 and a half years. Certainly not FOREVER, but most of my college life. Further, I spent almost 100% of my free time during that period with her.

Naturally, this means that the vast, vast majority of any interesting story I have to tell from about mid 2010 to the end of 2012 somehow involves her. If I was older, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem, but I was relatively boring in high school, and wasn’t in college too long before I met her – so most of my interesting stories, life experiences, and so on involve her, and only her (or her and one of our families).

So far, I’ve managed to kind of talk around it – not deliberately avoiding it, but just generally talking about interesting things and not bringing my own life outside of school/work into it. But as I get closer friends, this becomes less and less possible, at some point talking about things I do or like is going to entail talking about it a bunch.

It’s just, I want to talk about things I’ve done, but when pretty much every story I want to tell involves “me and my ex”, I can’t help but feel I’d come off as a tad obsessed with her and/or my “lost life” with her. And it’s even in the answers to a lot of questions about me. Why haven’t I done <thing I’ve always wanted to do>? Probably because my ex didn’t want to (this is the answer to more questions than I’d like it to be). Even most of my stories about people saying or doing weird, obnoxious, or offensive things involve her mom, dad, stepmom, etc (mostly her dad). And so on, mostly because I wasn’t able to make any friends when I was with her because all my time was spent with her.

Look, I don’t want to demonize my ex and pretend I was never with her. I’d love to say she was a great person and we were just too different, but after a ton of thinking I can’t say that fairly. She was manipulative, slightly abusive, and somewhat self centered. And when it comes down to it, we also didn’t really have enough in common. But at the same time there are definitely a lot of things I enjoyed doing with her, I did love her at one point, and she’s not HilterStalin or anything. She has the potential to be a good person, and I certainly wasn’t perfect either. She’s neither devil nor saint, and there was plenty of good and bad, even if I feel ultimately the bad outweighed the good by a decent margin.

My point is, I think I have a relatively healthy view of my overall relationship with her (even if I still have some lingering scars for possibly understandable reasons), but the fact that the vast majority of my adult life – the part of my life where I actually had a chance to do things and be interesting was something that happened with her, and I feel it’s difficult to talk about my life without either painting myself as some loser who yearns to get back with my ex (seriously, no), trapped in my lost past, or else “that guy” who cries at every opportunity “let me tell you about why my ex is a terrible person.” I don’t wish to be either of those things, but I’m not really sure how to strike a healthy balance of “being able to discuss my life and tell personal anecdotes when it’s relevant” and “sounding like an obnoxious ex-obsesser”.

2

I think you’re overthinking it. It’s perfectly acceptably to casually refer to doing something ‘with my ex’. With time, you’re going to have more and more things to talk about that don’t involve your ex, so it will become a non-issue.

3

You’re overthinking things.

You are only going to come across as obsessed if you keep referring specifically to your ex in a pointed way. When you are telling stories just mention the other players offhandedly if at all. If you are talking about something you did, don’t mention you did it with someone. If your story necessitates mentioning you had company, just refer to them as a friend, or someone you knew. If you have to be more specific, just refer to “your girlfriend at the time”. And if someone asks more about the person you were with, tell them: but if that happens you are not going to come across as obsessed given that you are being specifically asked rather than deliberately over-sharing. If you have an anecdote about your girlfriend, or some relation of hers, just tell the anecdote about “someone you used to know/hang out with/etc.”

I had one long relationship during college. I never had any difficulty with being unable to tell stories about that time without seeming obsessed. Just concentrate on the nub of the story not the identities and you aren’t going to seem obsessed.

4

I disagree. I was with the same gf from my mid-20s to my mid-30s, and she was my first gf after I moved to Chicago - so same deal as the OP: for years after, pretty much every story I could tell involved her and more than one casual acquaintance felt I came off as still stuck on her. It was frustrating, and I pretty much had to gloss over the period for a few years until there were some new experiences to talk about. It didn’t help that it also took years before people stopped asking the two of us where the other was - it was a factor in her moving out of state.

5

Just tell the anecdote without mentioning the ex, unless the ex has a huge part to play in the story. My girlfriend (understandably) doesn’t want to hear about my ex, but every now and then when we’re with other people, I’m reminded of an anecdote. I don’t want to erase 5 years of my life and like you, much of the interesting stuff I’ve done was in those 5 years. So now I just say “When I went to Costa Rica” instead of when “When WE went to Costa Rica.” Of course the GF knows who I went to Costa Rica with, but I guess this way she isn’t forcibly reminded of it. (I also try to mention these things very rarely.). Should work for you too, although the situation is a bit different.

6

Um, I mean…pretty much what Princhester said.

7

Probably the best way to not come off being obsessed with an ex it to stop being obsessed with an ex. Looks to me that you are still obsessed with the ex. Maybe some counseling would help.

8

Yeah, nobody wants to hear every detail of your life, even concerning your ex. They want to talk more than listen. ASAP, get the convo off of her, and onto them. They will think that you are a brilliant conversationalist, rather than some obsessive creep.

9

Or a new ex.

10

I was with my ex for 11 years and we have a kid together. On top of that, I really never dated anyone before that. But as time passes you’ll have new experiences (family, other dates etc) without her.
Something else I learned was to just leave her out of stories. If someone asks you a question about your house, instead of saying “Oh, back when we bought our house” just say “Back when I bought my house”. Don’t say “Oh, this one time when my girlfriend* and I went to Disney World”, say “This one time when I was at Disney World…” hopefully the new person you’re with will be secure enough not to say “Oh and who were you there with, your old girlfriend?”

It takes time, you’ll get there.
*Try to make sure you say “Ex-Girlfriend” not Girlfriend, that takes time too, and you’ll slip a few times.

11

Agree with those who suggest simply not mentioning your ex during the story.

This past weekend I relayed a story about visiting Cooperstown. I went with a few friends, but it wasn’t actually important to mention who they were, so I didn’t.

BTW, nobody gives a crap about your ex, they don’t care if she was there with you. If the story is about how your ex did this or that, may as well not share it in the first place, unless it’s REALLY interesting or hilarious.

12

Where you used to say “my girlfriend,” then “my ex-girlfriend,” simply say, “My friend.”

“When my friend and I went to Costa Rica…”

The best way to get over any loss, IMO, is to stay busy. And get a lot of cardio in so that you can sleep better.

13

Around the third story, aknowledge that you mention her a lot, say “I’m not obsessed or anything, I’ve just spent most of my adult life with her, I really have moved on” (but try to find a less protesting-too-much way of phrasing that). Do you have any anecdotes you can sort of tell around her, where you can omit her participation, like destineal and a couple of other people suggested?

Or you can say “my girlfriend at the time” or “the girl I was seeing” and sort of gloss over the fact that it was all the same girl.

14

It’s not exactly a recent loss, it happened last November. The only reason I really think about her anymore (except for when I was talking with my friend and realized this problem) is that she finds a new way to contact me every month (like clockwork) to tell me about how she loves me and misses me and needs me.

I have been busy, I’ve been spending 12-15 hours a day programming and contributing to open source projects. I haven’t made any friends since then until… last Sunday because I’ve been out of school and I’ve never had many friends even when I was in school. I made literally four friends in college, and the other three moved far away even before my breakup, so I haven’t had much to do. Social anxiety doesn’t help my making friends, so much as drafting an email to someone when I don’t have an excuse causes several-day-long panic attacks. Hell, the only reason I worked up the courage to make this friend was because it was that or curling up and crying because I haven’t had any non-textual social interaction beyond cashiers in a month and a half.

My point is, the only reason I’m talking about this now and didn’t get over it earlier is that I haven’t had any non-business-related conversations until last weekend and it wasn’t until then that I realized how many anecdotes involve her in some way. I do have other anecdotes that are more recent, but they all involve setting up programming dev environments, issues with Windows environment variables, and cross-language dependency problems. I can talk about them with a great righteous fury, and I probably have hundreds of them, but there’s only so many programming stories you can tell before people start falling asleep.

And yes, I have had therapists, but they mostly just tell me “you seem to have a reasonable view of your anxiety and know all the techniques to deal with it, there’s not much I can do for you anymore. It’s up to you to go out and actually overcome your fears on your own at this point.”

They usually involve an interaction between us, which is the problem. And I don’t like just saying “friend” because it feels like lying. My current friend already knows that I’ve only ever dated one person, so not mentioning it’s the same person doesn’t really work.

15

If you were in college in 2010 to 2012, you’re now in your early to mid-20’s, I assume. You have a lot of life ahead of you. You’ll have a lot of experiences in the future. Go out of your way to meet new people and engage in new activities. This isn’t so much to meet a new girlfriend as to be in situations as different as possible from your recent past.

16

I think with stories it will work itself out, as you get more life experience you’ll have more anecdotes that don’t include her. But this is the worrying thing to me, about her regularly contacting you. For your own mental health, you need to find ways of blocking her more effectively. It might be a hassle changing your phone number, email address, Facebook account, and other things that she might use to contact you, but it might be better for you in the long run. Not that you necessarily need to immediately do all that stuff, I don’t know how she’s been contacting you, but it’s something to consider.

That sucks that you are going through this, I hope you get it all worked out.

17

It’s not lying to omit a detail that isn’t important to the story. If you have a humorous anecdote about something weird an old guy said, no one else really cares whether this guy was your friend’s dad, your girlfriend’s dad, your parents’ neighbor, etc. I have a tendency to include unnecessary detail in anecdotes (I think of it as How I Met Your Mother syndrome, although it doesn’t actually take me the better part of a decade to get to the point :wink: ), but I try to control myself to avoid boring others.

I lived overseas for a while, and after coming back I found that I was saying “in Japan…” an awful lot. So I made some conscious effort to restrain myself. Not every amusing anecdote needs to be shared at all, and while a lot of anecdotes I did want to share wouldn’t make sense unless I specified that they happened in another country, if it was about something funny my other American coworker said he could just be “this guy I used to work with” and not “this guy I used to work with IN JAPAN”. After about a year back in the US I had plenty of other things to talk about and didn’t find myself struggling to think of something to say that didn’t contain the phrase “in Japan”.

Beyond that, I agree with Sam Lowry that your ex is behaving inappropriately by contacting you every month and that for your own good you should probably think about finding better ways to block her.