There you are, happy with your life, dating a lot, feeling thin, and then word comes down the grapevine: Your ex is getting married. How do you feel?
It depends. If you’re still attached to him, it can be a pretty devastating little piece of news. “I found out through friends that he had gotten married to a woman he’d been dating for about six months,” says Tori, a thirty-two-year-old magazine editor. “It hurt—bad. The reason we had broken up was because he didn‘t want to commit, and now there he was getting married. I felt like my brain was howling. I couldn‘t work, I couldn‘t think. I was furious—how could he do this? At the same time, I kept thinking, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why didn‘t he want to marry me? Why am I such a loser?’ I got paranoid and hungry for commitment. I chased away guy after guy because I kept badgering them to commit to me. I was obsessed with proving to myself that someone would want me, but I kept coming up empty.”
For women who had achieved a little more distance, the news about upcoming nuptials still rankled. “I saw the announcement in the paper,” says Mia, a twenty-six-year-old art student. “I had no feelings for him; I was living with someone else at the time. Even so, when I saw the blurb in the paper, my stomach turned. It wasn’t that I wanted to marry him, or even that I wanted to be married at all. It was more that I wished that he shouldn’t have one minute of happiness in his life. You see, we’d had a really hostile breakup. I guess I was pissed that anything good should ever happen to him.”
For others, ill will was more focused on the object of the ex‘s desires than on the ex himself. “When I heard that Tom was getting married, my first order of business was to find out everything I could about his fiancee,” says Maria, thirty-one, a museum curator. “By asking friends and by seeing her picture in the paper, I learned that she was gorgeous and rich and, apparently, well educated. She was the kind of person whose name is mentioned in bold type in the society pages. I am not. I mean, I’m cute and upper-middle class, but everything I am or own, I’ve had to work for. Historically, Tom had always gone for glam girls; we’d always joked that I was his one and only ‘normal’ girlfriend. Funny, ha ha. For about a day, I was okay with it. Then the jealousy started. Was I not good enough because I didn‘t have what she had? Was I not good enough, period? That’s when the anger started in. I scanned the society columns for her name, hoping that she had committed some inkworthy faux pas, hoping she‘d gotten into a limo wreck, I don’t know. Meanwhile, I was in a happy relationship, living with someone, mind you. But something about her getting him filled me with hostility and rage. I needed to hate someone—and I guess it was easier to hate some beautiful girl I didn‘t know than a guy I had once loved—albeit a guy with lousy taste in women.”
This much anger seems excessive to us. And then there’s Maude. A twenty-seven-year-old commercial banker, Maude found out that her ex was getting married and, on a whim, went to Bloomingdale’s to check out their bridal registry. Once she had the list, she walked through the store to survey the expensive crystal and china selections. “And then something inside me snapped,” she says. “Claiming to be the bride- to-be — we actually looked alike, which helped—I got a fresh listing sheet from the registry department and proceeded to change all of the items. I went real tacky—and it felt good. For once I acted on my anger, and to tell you the truth, I’m glad I did. He had been telling people how elegant and well- bred she was, how different she was from me. I thought, ‘Let’s see how composed and dignified she is when this shit starts showing up.’ I just wish I could have been there to see her face when she opened the clown-faced alarm clocks and dog-head bubble-gum dispensers.”
And then there’s the First-Runner-Up complex. Basically, this is when you perennially find yourself the last girlfriend that a guy has before he meets the girl he marries. Teresa, a thirty-three-year-old magazine research chief, tells of how she was “passed over not once, not twice, but three times. The first time was annoying; the second time was sort of comic. But the third time it happened, I fell into a deep depression. My friends, in an effort to cheer me up, suggested I charge men to date me so that I could whip them into marriage material for the next girl. I laughed and seriously wondered if there was any money in it. And then I cracked. I couldn‘t accept that it was just coincidence. There had to be something unmarriable about me. What was it about me that sent men scurrying off to spend the rest of their lives with someone else? And we’re not talking long recoveries here; they got engaged mere months after our respective breakups.
“I spent hours every day trying to figure out what the problem was. What a waste of time—all I ever came up with was that I was too motherly. Another thing I couldn‘t let go of was that all of these breakups were amicable. In each one, we had mutually agreed that we were in a rut and that it was time to move on. So I’d move on to the next guy (and we’d eventually split for the same reason), while the last guy would go and get married a few months later. The whole cycle was too depressing—I never imagined that I would end up being the eternal last girlfriend.”
No one does. And ultimately, no one is. It might be hard, but you’ve got to figure that this is just a streak of weird, bad luck. Besides which, if he doesn’t want to marry you, you don’t want him anyway. In any case, whether you’re feeling devastated or just plain annoyed, feel free to indulge fully in your emotions—but for a limited time only. Two weeks should be long enough to bitch, to moan, “Why her, why not me?”, and to make your friends tell you that it won’t last. Any longer, and you’ll start to look pathetic. So pull yourself together and, difficult as it may be, locate a little perspective. Realize that what he does no longer matters to you. That his happiness doesn’t detract from yours. And that his marriage has no bearing on your life. Then take a deep breath and ask yourself: Would I trade places with his bride-to-be? Answer yourself (honestly): Not in a million years.
