A few days of radio silence between us was broken when he eventually messaged me to say he was sorry. I replied in a flurry of messages about how confused I was, how all the plans we had for our future shouldn’t be thrown away over something as silly as him worrying about balancing our relationship with his responsibility to his family, and how we were ruining something that had potential to be incredible. He disagreed.

A fresh bout of radio silence resumed, only to be interrupted every few weeks by one of us sharing a link to a song we used to listen to in the car or to the Instagram photos shared by someone we used to hang out with at uni. It makes me cringe to recall this period because, knowing what I know now, we were breadcrumbing each other. And that’s not fun or healthy for anyone. It’s no wonder that years – yes, years – of these sporadic interactions eventually turned into phone calls where we’d dance around each other’s relationship status and talk for hours about nothing of any real consequence, simply content to be back in each other’s orbits and feeling close to the person we had shared something special with.

Needless to say, it’s caused a few issues in the serious relationships I’ve entered since then. Whenever the conversation about ex-partners has come up, I’ve maintained that I’m distant friends with this particular ex but we’re not close. Non-committal and fairly palatable. But a few years before T and I got engaged, we broke up after an argument that was prompted by T overhearing a conversation I was having with my ex. T said he’d not heard me belly laugh like that in ages and asked who I was talking to. I told him and he was crushed. At the time, I couldn’t understand why T would be so upset by me laughing with an old friend, but I can now see that my display of comfort, familiarity and intimacy with someone I was once romantically involved in would rub him up the wrong way.

“I’m engaged but still in love with someone who dumped me 10 years ago”