That's if my love missives are even considered to merit storage!
My most ill-conceived affairs thankfully took place before the advent of the internet and so my foolishness and dysfunctionality are more easily forgotten, at worst surviving as love letters tucked in a box in someone's attic or in text form on old, discarded mobile phones. A favoured song, most enjoyed tipple, holiday snaps, or old discarded T-shirt all offer instant recall and exacerbate the agony of loss. Killswitch, an app that erases all online evidence that the relationship ever took place, seems a rather blunt approach but I can see its appeal at the end of a love affair. "Dump" is ugly, "ditch" equally unwelcome, "break-up" sounds painful, and none summons up the multifaceted nature of love's ebb and flow. It would probably help if we reinvented the terminology. Alternatively they dump us, which creates sensations of abandonment and despair. Placing "amicable" and "separation" together creates an oxymoron – we don't usually decide to end a partnership until the very sight of our soon-to-be ex fills us with disgust, misery, agony or a combination of all three. As the Abba song goes "breaking up is never easy" and they were the gurus of my teenage years on divorce and separation! There's no such thing as a painless separation or indeed an "amicable" one. Your nights may be spent tossing and turning mourning her loss but I'll bet she's similarly tortured, in her case by guilt. I'm not surprised your ex is offering friendship.
Time is often the only balm for raw emotional wounds and a six-month separation, including two months of radio silence, certainly doesn't qualify as a satisfactory period for recuperation.
Mariella replies Just now I think you're right. I don't know what to do. Despite the horror of the break-up, I can't imagine a life without this person who I loved so much in it, yet I fear that seeing her, and trying to establish a "friendship", would open all the wounds again. The dilemma My wife left me just over six months ago. For many reasons – not least the fact she left me for someone else – the split was messy and hard and nasty. After several unpleasant encounters and back-and-forths, we stopped all contact a couple of months back. Last week, however, I got an email from her somewhat ambiguously asking if we could stay friends (the message was oddly worded, and really seemed to be her offering me a chance to be her friend, rather than her saying she wanted my friendship).