I Just Want to Know…
Is closure a thing and do we really need it?
I hear people all the time talking about closure. How they want it; how they need it; how they never got it. And for a long time I believed that closure wasn’t real. I’ve always been of the school of thought that all we really want are answers, and even then, with all the information, sometimes we just can’t accept the truth, or the version of that truth we’ve received. A lot of people want closure because they want contact with their ex. They want to talk to them, be close to them again, and ultimately mill through the details for a potentially different outcome. I believe that 96% of people who say they want closure want the exact opposite: they want to reopen the wound completely.
I’ve never been a seeker of closure. The best form of closure I’ve ever received came just by happenstance. I had a “boyfriend” for a long time. In short, he was a piece of shit. Eventually I got tired of the circus and left the monkey to play with his friends. Years later, our friend circles touched in the shallowest of ways, and I got to see him again from a totally objective point of view. So much time had passed that I harbored no feelings either way: no desire to have him again nor any malice for the things he’d put me through. I had the opportunity to see him for who and what he really was, which was a complete and utter piece of shit. And the only feeling it did illicit was a sliver of sadness, because he was a failure wasting his life away, 30 Coors Light cans at a time. It made me sad the way you see the homeless living under the highway bridge and it makes you think Gosh, that’s sad, but you just keep driving. You don’t intercede; you don’t try to help; you just keep driving.
96% of people who say they want closure want the exact opposite: they want to reopen the wound completely.
When a heartbreak is fresh, you yearn for moments. The you’re gonna miss me moment. The you’re going to regret this moment. The you’ll be crawling back one day moment. And you wish them nothing but the worst. You hope they fuck some random at a party with the condoms they’ve been keeping in the glovebox for two years. You hope they get her pregnant and have to take care of her other kids til their dad gets out of jail. You hope they have to move the whole family back to their mom’s house because they can’t hold down a decent job for more than 90 days. Someone remarked to me that it must have made me feel good to see him like that, but it really didn’t. All the elation that I thought I’d one day experience from his failure did not, in fact, bring me any feeling at all. I just didn’t give a fuck. Because I’d wholly and fully moved on from those moments. I’d focused on bettering myself and my life, and one day I just never thought about him again. And I feel like the only thing that can bring about that kind of closure is time.
But what if we stopped calling our search for answers closure? What if we rebranded closure and made it something else? What if we decided to seek out legitimate answers from people we’d been involved with in an honest and healthy way to better ourselves?
I have a wild idea and I’m interested in what you guys think.
After having taken a whole year to work on myself and my mental health, I thought I’d worked through all my shit and was ready to move on. Until the other morning I found myself sobbing uncontrollably out of nowhere, with absolutely no catalyst for my outburst save my entrance back into the dating pool. It occurred to me then that I still had some work to do on myself, and I wondered if some insight from the other side might not be such a bad idea. So I created an exit survey, and I’d like to send it to my most recent relevant relationships in an effort to analyze my own behaviors. And I’d love to hear what you guys think about this. I’ve included a rough draft of the questionnaire here. Give it a look and tell me what you think.
What are your thoughts on closure?
Would you want to know what your exes think about you?
Would you participate if an ex sent you one?
What questions would you ask?
What questions would you leave out?
Feel free to leave a comment below or email me directly at hbic@thebitterbitchsguide.com. All correspondence sent to my email will remain private.