The Great Dopamine Fix: why you can’t get over your stupid ex

Is it undying love? Or just the relief of hoping it isn’t over?

Authors Note: I’m going to use neutral pronouns in this piece before we all end up exhausted by a very long Life of Brian sketch. But obviously, this goes for all genders, all sexualities, and all identities.

He finally texted you back. Are you happy now?

Once upon a time at home, sung Kirsty MacColl many years ago, I sat beside the telephone, waiting for someone to pull me through, when at last it didn’t ring, I knew it wasn’t you. Admittedly you might need to swap the landline for WhatsApp, but many of us are still there today. That suffocating, hollow limbo of wishing that person wanted us as much as they once did. That we are on their minds, desired, hoped for, that this numb ache, this unsatiated hunger, haunts them as much as it does us. Of course, it doesn’t. And hasn’t for a very long time. Perhaps it never did.

This probably isn’t because they hate you. They aren’t desperately avoiding you. On the contrary, they aren’t even really aware of you, now. They just have their own cacophonous mass of arguments with siblings, MOTs to sort, jury duty, work, new crushes, mediation hearings, and whatever other junk flows through our lives and clutters up that space between us and our friends and lovers. You just don’t really feature…