Emily Watkins is a professional Millennial (read: precariously employed twenty-something). Each week, she will answer a generation-specific query from the depths of her on-brand existential crisis. Our Aunt returns once again to aid an imperilled someone in their Hinge endeavours.
Please send any quandaries, issues, troubles or thoughts to aunt@whynow.co.uk for a good dose of aunt-ing.
I was messaging this girl on Hinge and it was going really well — until I mentioned my nightmarish ex and she went totally cold. When I realised I couldn’t pull things back from the brink, I asked what had gone wrong and she said that ‘the all my exes are crazy line’ is a pet peeve of hers. But I can’t help it if my exes really are crazy, can I?!
What do you think?
Yeah, sorry — I’d tap out too. This is because ‘the all my exes are crazy line’ is never true.
Even if it were, wouldn’t it beg the question why do you have such dreadful taste in people? Like, is it more likely for someone to have had the straightforward misfortune of encountering Completely Unreasonable Partner after Completely Unreasonable Partner – or is it more likely that you yourself, as the common denominator, are the Completely Unreasonable Partner?
To answer your question, of course you can’t help it if all your exes are crazy. But that doesn’t matter, because I just don’t believe that they are.
The real question is, are you brave enough to look yourself in the face? Can you replace that defensive knee jerk reaction with a fleshed out account of an intimacy between two fully fledged human beings and how that closeness came to its end?
It’s easy to dismiss criticisms if you frame them as having come from nutty cartoon characters (“I don’t have commitment issues, you crazy harpy!”), but you’ll be doing yourself a favour if you let yourself grow from past relationship mistakes rather than ignoring them.
Put your grown up pants on, have a proper think about each romance — who said what, who ignored whose calls, who bitched to whose friends — and get back to me. Till then, no more dating apps for you, ok? Ok.
