The most productive, and in my view the best, way to make an ex jealous

I have never had a relationship end well. There has always been some kind of drama. There are people out there who, upon ending a relationship say “Oh, it wasn’t working out so we decided to go our separate ways” and when I hear that it doesn’t seem to make sense to me. I suppose if they could let go of a relationship that easily then it probably wasn’t worth them being in it in the first place. In the aftermath of a bad break up, there is, at least in my experience, a desire by one or both of the partners to make the other one jealous. I would say that this is a completely normal reaction. The reason I say it is normal is because it is something that I have constantly found.

A long time ago now, maybe seven or eight years ago, I found the perfect way to make an ex-partner jealous.

Background

A couple of nights ago I went to the usual pub quiz with the boys. The night had ended but I still had a hankering for a pint. Plymouth being the way it is, I was still able to get a pint midweek at a bar. Allow me to explain. Plymouth has been a 24 hour city for a long time. If you want a pint at any time, night or day, there are always about four or five places open, any day of the week. I digress. I got chatting to a delightful young lady, and she, along with a couple of friends/colleagues of hers was discussing a choice of dress.

She asked me for my opinion of it. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what her frame looks like. I try not to visualise those things when speaking to a young lady. The dress was very revealing and highly sexualised. Anyone who knows me, knows that that sort of thing isn’t really my cup of tea. I passed thirty this year, I’m a Catholic, in some aspects I’m a feminist and while I have a specific opinion of what I would and wouldn’t find attractive on a woman, I wouldn’t dream of sharing that opinion. When a man makes any comment about what a woman is wearing, he really is playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the cylinder. My mum always said “never make fun of a woman’s hair, clothes or menstrual cycle” and I would said that that is good advice but I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never been stupid enough to make fun of a woman’s hair, clothes or menstrual cycle.

When the girl in question showed me the dress. It looked hot. I could tell that someone like her, wearing a dress like that would draw the eye of all the men in the room. That goes without saying. I saw the photo’s of her wearing it and she did indeed look stunning.

Back to the point. She asked me a question, very frankly. She said “Do you think it will be enough to make my ex-boyfriend jealous?” I have to confess, I was a little shocked. My experience of this young lady was limited, granted, but I thought that her charm, demeanour and looks would be enough on their own to make any former partner of hers keenly aware of their loss. I resolved, but not before the day she wore it, to tell her how I always go about making my exes jealous without the need for such a dress.

Jealousy

Jealousy often drives us to do things that we regret, or moreover things that we will come to regret once the haze of jealousy and anger has subsided. I could indeed share many stories of ex-girlfriends whose actions, driven by jealousy, has caused the break-up of a relationship. Likewise one might think, “I will make my ex-jealous by kissing/flirting with/sleeping with this person.” This is a bad reason to make an emotional connection with someone as it is borne of hatred and not love. Because things done to instigate jealous feelings are usually exacerbated anger, they are almost universally negative. When an ex-partner has been violent with me because of their jealousy, when they have checked my phone or invaded my privacy or my past, I have always pitied them more than anything.

The reason why I haven’t judged them though is that I too have been guilty of those same offences. It’s not for me or anyone else for that matter to judge those who feel jealous. It happens. Don’t get me wrong, I have never raised my hand to a woman in anger, nor would I ever invade a partner’s privacy, but I have been jealous in the past and it has led my mind down those dark path’s but I wouldn’t begrudge another for feeling like that and acting accordingly.

I needed to find a way to channel that though, to focus on it, and soon I found a positive way to make an ex-girlfriend jealous.

The productive way to make an ex-girlfriend jealous

This came about around a decade ago. I was in a relationship with a young lady. By all accounts she was a nice girl but she certainly wasn’t the one for me. We were together for five years. We had a semi-detached three bedroom house in suburban Nottingham, all mod cons, she was a hairdresser, I was a local government administrator, life was good, or if not good, certainly not unpleasant. We even had a couple of cats. I did, however, grow frustrated. Frustrated with how things were. Frustrated and depressed. I constantly felt like I was playing a part in someone else’s life. The relationship, as one might expect, broke down. I’m not in the habit of berating people online, not least because the lawyer in me says they don’t have the opportunity to defend themselves, so let’s focus on where I was at the end of the relationship.

After a while in a relationship, things can get a little stale. I don’t use that as justification for my apathy, but it is difficult to inject passion and excitement into your life if you don’t get that from your relationship. I would idly spend my weekends on the sofa playing PlayStation games, occasionally switching it off for Simpsons or to go to the pub. The week had become a Monday to Friday nine to five affair that offered me no excitement. I had lost all the things I once desired in life. I no longer had any clue as to what I wanted. I’d built my entire life around my girlfriend to the point where I didn’t have any friends, at least not in Nottingham, no interests of my own, no life of my own and my life with my girlfriend has just become a painful laborious slog that I used to fill the time in between trips to Plymouth and an endless plethora of staycations that I used to glean a lot from but that a girl in her early twenties would have found mind numbing and boring to say the least. We were horribly mismatched and by the time I finished with her, I have to admit, I wasn’t much of a catch.

I tried the usual ways to make her jealous afterwards. The destructive ways. Going about with other ladies. Partying. Then about four months after the relationship finished I realised how I was going to handle things. It was a breakthrough, at least for me.

You see, she’d fallen in love with a unique, driven individual who enjoyed a modicum of success. Why not take that to a whole other level while at the same time living out my life as I want to? I knew the information would eventually filter back to her, as these things do.

Part one was to get myself a new job. I had been thinking about this for some time and I needed something that would challenge me and make me successful. Surely if my ex-girlfriend heard that I was doing an important new job, she’d be really jealous and I’d be happy. That’s precisely what I did. I got a job at a business data agency. I got my drive back. Soon the money was rolling in and I was off.

This was me in 2008, a few months after the break up, in my new job. I’d just been given a bottle of moderately priced, non-domestic champagne as a thank you for some recent work I’d done.

Of course that is only one part of it. The other is that when a relationship breaks up, the inevitable factionalisation happens. I have noticed this wherever I have been. When someone is in a couple, they both begin to isolate themselves from people they were great friends with when they were single. In addition when have couples friends. Friends that are also in a couple to do couples things with. My only friends independent from my girlfriend at the time were couples friends and without them, I had very little going on. So, I started to massively socialise. A far cry from the no hopers and hairdressers (my ex-girlfriend was a (very good) hairdresser, I grew to loathe them and to this day I will only get my hair cut in a men only barbers) that my ex-girlfriend used to knock about with. I used to do Capoeira, and constantly socialise with old friends of mine that I hadn’t spoken to for years. I consistently found myself in completely different surroundings with completely different people. My new partner lived in Bethnal Green and opened up my eyes to new worlds, new ideas, upcycling me from the rut I had once fallen into.

The constant travelling. The constant moving from place to place. My own home fell into a state of disrepair and I had to move on from that. I ended up in a posh flat. Soon it was Athens, Brussels, Luxemburg, the Runton’s, here there and every.

By the end of all of this, I wondered what the application of my jealousy and revenge was. I’d become a new person, a different person, with a hugely better life and one day, not long after, I was pondering about what her life must be like and how things must be now. I then realised that part way along my journey I had lost the desire to attempt to make her jealous. The changes that I’d made and the life that I’d led since those days in 2008 where I was was stagnant and complacent, those are things that I should’ve done. I shouldn’t have done them with a view to making her jealous, I should’ve done them for me.

This, therefore, is my advice: when you are thinking of making an ex-partner jealous, one way to do that is to give yourself away, show how sexually desirable you are, spread gossip about them and rumours about yourself, but all of that is completely unnecessary and usually negative. The best way to make an ex-partner jealous is to go out there and succeed in the world. Get the good job. Get the travelling under your belt. Meet the right people. To play the short game of jealousy boiling it down to attraction is one thing. To play the long game, to fully realise your potential and live your life the way that you want to live it is a a complete other. To have your ex-partners looking at you six months later or six years later and think “I backed the wrong horse” is not only a better feeling but a lot more productive, not least because you have the fruits of your labours to show for it.

I have a slight confession to make. While I broke off all contact with my ex-girlfriend shortly after the end of the relationship, I can’t really see her being jealous. The reason for this is that she had, at least in her view, moved on to better things, or so I am led to believe. It’s not a life I would have chosen, the settled down, married and kids one, at least not at my age, but she chose that and I believe, if I know her as well as I think I do was that that was what she wanted in her early twenties. Not my thing, but yeah. This is the piece of advice I will leave you on. That is the best way to make your ex-partner jealous. Even when I realised that I needn’t do these things for her, I saw that I needed every bit of self improvement, every bit of personal development, every minor victory and major accomplishment, not to make her jealous but for myself.

Yes, Facebook does ruin relationships, but not in the way you might think, and I’d say the same of What’s App too.

I have an ex-girlfriend. I love her very deeply. She loves me very deeply. She has been my ex-girlfriend for almost nine months now. Following some misplaced values and poor communication around Christmas, we got into a cycle of breaking up and getting back together, which has led to some horrible game playing which has quite frankly, soured things. Both of our families and friends are exasperated by all of it. Now, if I’m meeting someone new I describe her as my ex-but-when-is-an-ex-really-an-ex-girlfriend and people tend to understand that reference.

Recently I fell on some hard times where I had no money and no roof over my head. Life is full of these stumbling blocks and thankfully I had friends that were able to help out, and they did, in some pretty huge ways. Although, and it begrudged me to contact her (the time that I contacted her before that was to tell her that if she didn’t stop, I’d get a restraining order, due to her behaviour on Facebook) I remembered that while my friends would bend over backwards to help me, they weren’t well resourced. She on the other hand had money and lived in a big(ish) house.

Such is the animosity between her parents and I that they would rather have seen me homeless, hungry and destitute on the streets no doubt savouring the moment and popping along with a digital camera to capture it for future enjoyment at a later date. It also took her a leap of faith to help me, which she did.

The breakdown of the relationship was spectacular. It started in the most intense and interpersonal of ways, and ended with slagging each other off on social media and to each other’s friends. It wasn’t just one break up, it was several.  Bear in mind that had the situation been the other way around, I would’ve helped her no questions asked, again, despite the ferocious nature of the break up. Of course, as a very social couple, the break up too was very social. One friend, upon hearing about this said that he thought that it was sad that a social circle descends into civil war and factionalism when a break up occurs.

When my ex-girlfriend heard about what was happening, she immediately offered to take me out for a vegan dinner, which I went along with. She wasn’t working very far from my friends so she came to pick me up. My friend, who, while he had witnessed the breakup, had never actually met the girl in question. He said how he had never seen a couple as much in love as we were. I saw her a couple of days afterwards and it was as if no time had passed at all. I was, and still am, completely in love with her. I then went to stay with another friend in the small South Devon town of Ivybridge.

I asked my ex-girlfriend if she wanted to come out and visit. She obliged. We spent the first half hour kissing and cuddling. Overcome with a sense of guilt, I suggested we go for a walk by the River Erme to some secluded beauty spots. No prizes for guessing what that entailed, twice.
The day was magical. Fresh air, the September sun shining walking along with the woman I love. Occasionally stopping to take it all in. I couldn’t possibly ask for more.

Cows blocking the path to the river. Meant we were all alone, just us.

A notable point is that my other friend, who has never met the first friend, said also that he had never seen a couple so much in love. He had briefly met my girlfriend, and we all went to school together but I wouldn’t say they knew each other well enough to say “Hi” in the street. I felt it odd that they made the same point. That very evening when me and my ex-girlfriend returned to his, peculiarly he went out, affording us some time alone which was put to good use cuddling in front of the television with some chip shop food.

I trust I’ve set the seen. A young couple, in love, basking with the sort of radiance that makes everyone else want to tear their hair out. So, what went wrong?

Things happened on both sides. I won’t be so harsh as to divulge hers, after all, she isn’t able to defend herself. On my part I went to another country with a female friend for a week and stayed with her family there. It seems obvious that I shouldn’t have done it now but miscommunication at the time and the fact that we were still intimate in the six months that followed led me to believe it was all ok. I’ll never understand how her family came to detest me so strongly, that is just there way I suppose. I can’t expect everyone to love me, but their hatred and derision of our love also led to some unsavoury behaviour on my part.

I do, however, think there was one more key thing that drove the relationship of these two people, that even apparent strangers could see how much they loved each other, to the point where it became painful and unworkable. To explain this I will need to go back some years.

Dating in the pre-Facebook era

Aah, the first one. Everyone remembers the first. The Eagle pub, Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, 1999. The day of the Carnival. Number three, Skateboarding at the civic centre. Number Four, in a nightclub, Five through nine, at college. I could go on. I used to meet girls in normal places, we would exchange numbers. We would arrange to meet up. Phone calls were still (kind of) a luxury, and generally the whole house would share one telephone, and mobiles were still exhaustively expensive, though everyone had one. The only way to communicate effectively and at length with someone was in person. Face to face.

Fast forward to New Year’s Eve/Day 2003/4. Number 24. A childhood friend and friend of the family. We’d been partying all night. We were taken with everything and stuff, just, y’know, happened. We were together for four and a half years. In that four and a half years (where I wasn’t on the pull) Facebook came out.

When the relationship came to an end, suddenly I was back on the dating scene and nobody met in the same ways anymore. I was flabbergasted. There were a few places where it was actually easier to pick up women. The newly established smoking areas in pubs (God bless the Public Health Act 2007) became a veritable gold mine of women. Generally though, nobody seemed to be meeting in person.

For me the chosen method of meeting a girl seemed to be meeting up and being together, in person. Everyone else was meeting on Plenty of Fish, chatting on Facebook or what’s app and I couldn’t get to grips with it. Fast forward to number 31. This is where I first noticed things beginning to change.

I met her on a dating website. She wasn’t beautiful. In fact she was… well… though I’m not naming names or showing photographs there is still no need to be unkind. We tried to meet up regularly. I had a dodgy feeling about the whole relationship though. There was evidently something going on that she wasn’t telling me about. I’d just had a newly acquired smartphone. On this smartphone, I’d installed what’s app. Suddenly, we’d spend every evening talking on what’s app and spent no time at all seeing each other. She would message me incessantly, yet she would never want to meet up. I couldn’t for the life of me understand it. Needless to say we didn’t end up seeing each other for very long.

Skip to number 33 who, ironically, I met in a smoking area. Facebook was how we first began to communicate. Then what’s app. We got together but we lived, I’m going to say 120 miles away. She lived in, I’m going to go with, Gloucester. Yeah, Gloucester, let’s go with that. We saw each other once every fortnight or so. In the in between periods we contacted each other unremittingly on Facebook and What’s app. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was being ground down and gradually exhausted by the relationship and I think us not seeing each other played a large part in that.

I think the internet loses a lot in terms of tone and context. It’s difficult to put across those things to just characters on a screen. Undoubtedly the person reading that will attribute context and tone to it, whether it is there or not.

My situation

Facebook is normally the cause of break ups because one partner uses it to cheat or another believes that their partner is cheating using Facebook. Her words were “Cyberstalking you is my way of letting you know I care.” Both these things happened, well, sort of. However, quite early on, we descended into a situation where we would use Facebook to chat. When we worked together and saw each other every day, it was fine. When we didn’t was when the trouble used to creep in, and this, in my opinion is how Facebook played its part.

I’m quite puzzled that there has been a change in divorce law in the UK. A person could give one of several reasons for divorce and now it is reduced, in simplicity, to just five. Consistently, year after year, the top cause cited in nine out of ten divorce cases was “breakdown of communication”.

With us, because we were communicating predominantly on Facebook and what’s app, we never spoke in person. When a problem occurred, we’d discuss it on what’s app and Facebook, never talking about it in person. The problem was therefore never resolved. It just lay under the surface. We’d have a growing animosity towards each other that didn’t exist when we were in each other’s presence, and probably still wouldn’t.

What happened was that we had substituted speaking in Facebook and what’s app for regular communication and as a result, a chasm grew.

Then came another event. She decided to open Pandora’s box. She used Facebook to contact several of my exes. Something that was never going to end well for either of us. She did this alongside messaging several of my friends that she had never or barely met.

When I was younger, one of my Catholic mentors was talking to me about money. He said “Money is like a gun. A gun is a tremendously useful tool. Money is a tremendously useful tool. Unfortunately, people use these tools for evil, as is their nature.” I think social networking tools are the same.

Social networking is a useful tool, but when it’s misused or substituted for normal conversation, it can be misused and used for evil, which has the propensity to reduce a relationship between two people who, when they are together are the most in love couple people have ever seen, to a smouldering wreck of a relationship with little or nothing to salvage from it.

Lesson

I suppose the main lesson I will take from this is that number 35 will not be on my Facebook, nor will I talk to her in any other format than in person, especially for those super serious conversations.

The past can hurt. You can either run from it or learn from it. I prefer to do the latter.