Last night I was in a bad place. Loneliness had settled in like damp, mixed with too much cheap wine and the kind of quiet that makes your own thoughts feel too loud. I decided to call a friend. Simon, it’s been a while. It was for nothing more than a chat. That is all it was, and it was nice. We talked about nothing important at first, the usual rubbish, work, the weather, how everything feels a bit heavier than it should lately. For context I am a liberal. We do things differently. We are all about love, sharing and honesty, or at least that is what we tell ourselves. So I tried to delve into his life a bit. I wanted to know what his days actually look like when the rest of us are not looking.
What I found out was staggering. It was so at odds with every value I claim to hold that it sent actual shivers up my spine. I asked him, casual as anything, if there was a love interest at the moment. He went quiet. The kind of quiet that tells you the answer is not simple. Then he said there is a girl he really likes, but he cannot. I asked why, expecting the usual stories we liberals like to wave away. She is married. She is engaged. She has kids with someone else. The tropes we have spent years saying should not matter if two adults want each other.
It was worse.
It is his ex’s friend.
Why is it always this one? Nearly every message I get it’s this. I’ve explained this to death at this point. But this time, it’s my mate. This is war.
I sat there on the sofa with the wine glass halfway to my mouth and just stared at the wall. Really? You have got to be joking. What is going on with everyone? Why is everyone still so bothered by their exes years after the fact? This particular ex is the worst kind too. She dropped my mate like a stone. One day they were together, the next she had run off with another man and taken the house with her. Everything. The place he had put his money and time into. And he is still worrying about her feelings. That is the part that properly got under my skin.
It gets worse. It is not even him holding back. He would take this girl out tomorrow, no question, the second she said yes. He likes her. She likes him. She has told him it is all she thinks about. The only thing standing in the way is the ex. She will not allow it. She has made it clear to both of them that it is not happening. So now two grown adults who want to see each other are sitting on their hands because one woman who already left, already moved on, already took what she wanted, has decided she still gets a veto.
I do not know this woman. She does not know me. She does not read my Substack. I have never seen a photo of her. I do not even know her name. I already do not like her.
I sat with that feeling for a long time after we hung up. The wine had gone warm. The flat felt smaller. I kept turning it over. We spend so much time talking about freedom, about people being allowed to live their lives, about not letting old relationships dictate new ones. Then you hear a story like this and realise some people treat their ex like a piece of property they still own even after they have thrown it away. She left him. She chose someone else. She took the house. That should have been the end of her say in his life. Instead she has drawn a line around one of her friends and said no one from her old life is allowed to cross it.
That is not protection. That is possession. That is spite wearing a concerned face.
I started thinking about how often this happens to men and how rarely we talk about it without someone immediately jumping in to say he must have done something to deserve it. He did not. She left. She moved on first. Now she is blocking the door behind her so he cannot move on either, at least not with someone she knows. The girl in the middle is her friend. That makes it even colder. She is not just controlling her ex. She is controlling her own mate as well. Two people who have said out loud that they want to try, and she has decided their wanting is less important than her discomfort.
Liberal values are supposed to be about expanding the space people have to be happy, not shrinking it because one person feels a twinge of ownership over a life they already exited. If she had stayed, if she was still with him, that would be different. She is not. She has a new man. She has the house. She has whatever life she built after walking out. Yet she still wants the power to say who he can and cannot speak to. That is not love. That is not friendship. That is leftover control.
I kept coming back to the quiet in his voice when he told me. He was not angry. He was just tired. He has accepted that this is how it works for him now. He likes someone. She likes him. The only obstacle is a woman who already took what she wanted and left. That is when it hit me properly. Being a man in this situation sucks in a very specific way. The rules that get applied to him are not the same ones that got applied to her when she decided to leave. She got to choose. He does not. She got to take. He is expected to stay polite about it. She gets to police the aftermath. He is expected to live with the policing.
I do not think most people sit down and decide to be this way. I think it happens in small increments. A comment here. A look there. A message that says “it would be weird if you two…” until the weirdness becomes law. No one calls it what it is because it is dressed up as loyalty or protecting feelings or not making things awkward. It is none of those things. It is one person using the fact that she used to matter to keep mattering, even after she chose not to.
The girl who wants to go out with him is being asked to choose between her own interest and keeping the peace with a friend who already moved on. That is a shitty position to put someone in. My mate is being asked to keep performing consideration for someone who showed him none when it counted. That is also a shitty position. The only person who benefits is the one who already left.
I have spent years arguing that people should be free to follow what they feel without old contracts hanging over them. I still believe that. I just did not expect to see it illustrated so clearly in a conversation that started as a late-night check-in. Two people who like each other are being told they cannot because it would upset the woman who already replaced one of them. That is not complicated. That is just small.
So this is for her, the woman I have never met.
You do not know me and I do not know you. I have no photo, no name, no history with you except the one my friend told me last night. That is enough. You left him. You ran off with someone else. You took the house. You made your choice in the clearest way possible. That choice came with consequences you seem happy to ignore when they apply to you and very keen to enforce when they apply to him.
You do not get to keep a claim on his future after you discarded his present. You do not get to decide that one of your friends is off-limits because she happens to like the man you already replaced. That is not boundary setting. That is territorial marking on ground you already walked away from. You had your turn. You ended it. The fact that you are now standing in the way of two people who have both said they want to try is not loyalty. It is pettiness with better lighting.
You already got the clean break you wanted. You got the new relationship. You got the house. What you did not get, and what you appear to still want, is the right to control how he feels afterward. That right expired the day you left. Every day you keep using it is a day you are choosing bitterness over the thing you claim to value when it is convenient. You are allowed to feel whatever you feel. You are not allowed to turn those feelings into a rule that two other adults have to live by.
The girl in the middle is your friend. Think about that for a second. You are asking her to suppress something she has admitted she thinks about all the time so that you can feel comfortable with a situation you created by leaving. That is not protecting her. That is making her smaller so you do not have to sit with the fact that the man you walked out on might be happy with someone you know. If the friendship cannot survive her being honest about who she likes, the friendship was already conditional.
My mate would take her out tomorrow. She would say yes. The only reason it has not happened is you. You are the obstacle. You are the one turning a simple possibility into a forbidden one. That is a choice you are making every time you make it clear the answer is no. You can dress it up as not wanting things to be awkward. Awkward for who? You already made it awkward when you left and took the house. The rest of us are just living in the leftover mess you created.
There is a version of this where you hear that two people you used to be connected to have found something they both want and you decide it is none of your business any more. That version requires you to accept that your chapter ended. You have not accepted it. You are still writing footnotes in a book you already closed. That is not strength. That is not self-respect. That is clinging to a power that only exists because the other two people are still trying to be decent about a situation you made indecent. Do you want these two people to hate you, to resent you, do you even care about their feelings, their happiness?
You got to choose the ending. He did not. Now you want to choose what happens after the ending as well. That is the part that is vile. Not the leaving. People leave. Not the new man. People move on. The part that is vile is the refusal to let the people you left behind have the same freedom you took for yourself. You wanted out. You got out. The least you can do now is stay out.
I do not expect you to read this. I do not expect it to change anything. I am writing it because last night I heard a grown man speak quietly about a girl he likes and the reason he cannot ask her out, and the reason was you. A woman who already left, already replaced him, already took the house, still holding the keys to a door she no longer lives behind. That is not how any of this is supposed to work if the words we use about love and honesty and moving on mean anything at all.
Two people want to see what happens if they spend time together. You are the only one saying they cannot. That makes you the problem. Not him. Not her. You. And the fact that you are comfortable being that problem, after everything you already took, is the bit I cannot stop turning over.
Simon deserved better than the way you left. He also deserves better than the way you are still lingering. The girl deserves to like who she likes without it becoming a loyalty test. You had your chance to be in his life. You ended it. The decent thing now is to let the rest of it belong to the people who are actually still in it.
That is all.