Does my ex think about me?

I am going to answer the question you typed first, and then the one underneath it, because they are not the same question and the second one is the only one I can do anything with. Does my ex think about me is something nobody can answer, not me, not a card, and not the friend who says of course he does, because the inside of another person’s head is the one place none of us can see into, and I would rather say that in the first sentence than let you read to the end hoping.

What I can tell you is that you are thinking about him, a great deal, in a way that has started to feel less like remembering and more like a job you did not apply for. The thinking on your side is readable in a way his is not, so that is what this is about, and I hope it is more use than a guess with a percentage on it.

What does my ex think about me is actually asking

Underneath the words there are two questions, and neither of them is about his Tuesday. The first is whether you mattered, whether the years or the months were what you thought they were while you were inside them. The second is whether the ending was an ending for both of you, or only for you, because there is a particular loneliness in suspecting that a thing which still takes up most of your evening has already been filed away in somebody else’s.

Those are real questions, and I do not think they are silly. I think they are why the search bar gets this sentence at eleven at night more often than almost any other, and why the answer people are hoping for is not really yes, it is you were not the only one who felt it.

The honest sentence, once

I cannot see him and neither can the cards, and anyone who gives you a number, seventy percent, a strong yes, has invented it and is hoping you will come back for the next one. I say that plainly because the pages that answer does my ex think about me with a percentage are built for the hour you are in, and the hope they start is real even though the number is not.

Three kinds of thinking, and what each one wants

The first is the courtroom, the thinking that goes back over the last month of the relationship looking for the moment: the message that was too much, the weekend that was too little, the thing you said in the car. It presents evidence to nobody at three in the morning, trying to reach a verdict on whose fault it was, and it never adjourns, because the one witness who could settle it is not in the building, and the verdict would not change what happens next even if you got it.

The second is the film, the reunion played in the good light: the message that arrives, the meeting, the version of him who says the thing he did not say. It is the most pleasant of the three and the most expensive, because for the length of it you are back inside something that is not there, and coming out of it afterward is the worst part of the evening. I would not tell you to stop watching it, only to notice how you feel at the end, which is the information the film does not want you to have.

The third is the search, which looks least like thinking because it has your thumb in it: who has viewed what, whether the photo was posted before or after, what a change to a profile means. It feels like finding things out and it is really a way of staying in contact with someone you are not in contact with, at a rate of about one small fact to four hours of analysis.

What the amount of thinking tells you

Less than you fear and something different from what you hope. It does not tell you that he was the one, or that the relationship was right, and it says nothing about what he is doing with his own head. What the volume measures is how recent it still is, how unfinished the ending was, and how much of your ordinary day had his shape in it, and by that measure it is reasonable that a person who was in your kitchen every morning is still there a few weeks after he left.

The volume of thinking is the size of the hole, not the size of the love, and it is certainly not the size of his. A lot of people mistake the sheer amount of thought for a sign, and a hole is not a sign of anything except that something used to be there.

The one thought that is worth having

There is one question I put to nearly everyone who asks me this, and it is the one nobody wants: what would you do tomorrow if you knew for certain that he was not thinking about you at all, and could you do that anyway. It is not a cruel question, it is the only one in the set with an answer, and the answer is almost always small: eat, sleep, reply to the friend you have been ignoring, and stop keeping the same appointment with your phone at the same hour every night.

The other honest thought is its mirror. If he did message tomorrow, what would you actually want, the old arrangement on the old terms or something you have not yet let yourself describe, and a surprising number of people who sit with that on paper find they do not want the thing they have spent a month wishing for. That is not a failure of feeling. It is the first evidence that the thinking has started to belong to you again.

What to do with tonight

I am not going to tell you to stop thinking about him, because nobody can do that on purpose and trying is its own kind of thinking about him. What I would do is count, once, honestly, and then look at the wrong column: every time the question came up today, what were you doing, and I would guess the answers make a short list, in bed, on the bus, standing in the kitchen, the last twenty minutes before sleep. The thoughts are not everywhere. They live in the empty hours, and empty hours can be given something else to hold.

If you would rather have a card than a tally, the reading on the is he thinking about me page draws one card on purpose and stays on your side of the table. I have also written about the hour this question keeps if the silence is the formal kind, and about the mixed signals if he has not been entirely silent.

Come back and tell me what the second column said. I would guess it is shorter than the first, and easier to do something about.

Clara