Name: A Sure Way to Get Over Your Ex (Imagine You Could Have Them Back)
Uploaded: 2026-01-28T17:21:58.000Z
Duration: 4 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There can be few pastimes more compelling than to ruminate on an ex.

How extraordinary they were, what beauty they had, what happiness it would bring to have them back.

Thoughts of them can intrude on new relationships.

They cause us to cry at certain moments in films they come between us and the beautiful places we've travelled hours to see.

There might be one rather counterintuitive way of dealing with the trouble of exes.

To take very seriously the one thought that we have, until now probably been resisting.

This is likely to sound, at first blush, entirely implausible.

We had a rather cold meeting back last year.

They might be with someone else for all we know.

But let's look at things squarely very often, in many cases far more than we assume that there could be a path back.

We could show up at the door and do this properly, lay out the case, make a giant play for them, and

And even if we can't directly assume this, let's at least allow ourselves a thought experiment.

The key move is to push our ideas to the next stage.

Not being able to have someone back prevents us from ever exploring a truly salient issue.

It prevents us from analyzing with sufficient energy and realism whether a return is truly a good idea.

So long as we think a return impossible, it's safe enough for us to say affirm.

There is no cost to our pained but addictive imaginings.

We can pick out the very best bits of the movie, which almost always lie near the start of the relationship.

That trip to Athens, the cosy nights in Marrakech, the amazing three weeks on the coast in Wales and.

But we must direct our syrup soaked minds elsewhere, to the cold light of dawn.

The person who's grown to mythic proportions in our mind has returned.

Like we've been picturing them as heavy, hazily beatific.

But think of those cheeks, those eyes, those hips.

Think then of their character, those habits, those ways of complaining, those enthusiasms, those compulsions.

If they were here, we'd hate them so much for what they'd done, the time they'd wasted the humiliations they'd meted out, their clumsiness and shiftiness.

We'd want to shout at them more or less all the time.

They would be, if we look at the matter, frankly, radioactive.

It's one of these moments when the mind shows its limitations as a reasoning machine.

We see that it's prone to hold two entirely contradictory truths without ever bothering to collide them.

One part of the mind knows full well that they are putrid.

We need to make some introductions to our varied parts.

We need to show the impossibility of the tormenting dream by making it live.

And as a possibility in our minds, we stand to come face to face with a sobering truth.

When they were kind, when their complexities and disappointments hadn't come into view, when we didn't know them too fully.

But the person now, the person after the awful silences and those messages and the news of the betrayal and that chilly farewell.

Within minutes we're crying at the pain of missing someone that we would immediately ask to leave us alone if they showed up.

The best way to get our exes out of our minds is to think in pedantic and clear eyed detail about what it would be like actually to have them back in our lives.