Shawn Bower grew up in a family where estrangement from siblings was passed down from generation to generation. His father had twelve brothers and sisters. Growing up, Shawn watched him cut off ten of his siblings, one at a time, for either rumored offenses or no reason at all.
Shawn's father never checked out the truth of the rumors he had heard or let his siblings know that they had been cast out of his life. The offending siblings simply ceased to exist.
Shawn was horrified by his father's actions, but he grew up and became estranged from his ex girlfriend, Sandra, for no apparent reason. "I don't know how to explain it, but Sandra just stopped speaking to me. We'd be at my parents for Thanksgiving, and she wouldn't speak to me. Mostly, she grunted. When I asked her about it, she'd turn her back on me. I couldn't get any more out of her than that. Eventually I stopped trying."
Initially, Shawn was hurt by Sandra's rejection, but he soon stopped caring. "To tell you the truth, it didn't seem all that weird. Coming from such a cut-off family, it felt normal to me."
Yes, I Think It's Time
Years passed, and the couple rarely thought of each other. On opposite sides of the country, they developed separate careers. Then two years ago, when Shawn was fifty, he decided to contact Sandra. His children from a previous marriage were growing up, they had never known Sandra, and he didn't want them to repeat the family pattern of his own sibling estrangement. So he got Sandra's e-mail address and wrote her a note: "Do you think it's time we talked?"
She e-mailed back the same day: "Yes, I think it's time."
Like many people, Shawn and his ex girlfriend found the Internet a safe place to begin reconciliation. With e-mail, they did not have to see each other, hear each other's voices, respond to emotions, or answer spontaneous questions. E-mail didn't require any real commitment; they could each sit safely in their own world, fingers on the keyboard, and not risk much at all.
Eventually, Shawn and Sandra expanded their contact to phone calls. Later, Shawn had an opportunity to travel to Pittsburgh for business. He called Sandra, and she agreed to meet him for breakfast. "Seeing my ex girlfriend after two years wasn't as dramatic as you might imagine," he later told me. "The weird thing was that I absolutely did not recognize her. I spent a lot of the time just staring at her trying to connect this person I was speaking with to the ex girlfriend I knew. I kept looking for some connection. She seemed to know she was my ex.
Go here for more insightful information Getting back with ex girlfriend
Read More From Cezare Elmi
|
