Does my ex hate me?

I want to be gentle with this one, because the people who ask it are rarely asking about him. Does my ex hate me is a question that arrives from somebody who has been lying awake with their own conduct, replaying the last month, the thing they said at the door, the message that went too far or the silence that went on too long, and what they want to know is not really whether he hates them. It is whether they are the kind of person who deserves to be hated, and that is a question I can actually do something with.

Nobody can tell you what he feels about you, and I will not pretend a card can, but I can say this much before we start: hate is an expensive feeling to keep, most people put it down long before the person it was aimed at finds out, and what you are calling hate on his side is quite often ordinary guilt on yours, wearing his coat.

What the question does my ex hate me is usually made of

It is made of guilt first, and a specific kind of guilt. Not the general regret of a relationship that ended, but a particular scene you keep returning to in which you were not the person you would like to have been. Almost everyone has one. Almost nobody ended a relationship without at least one hour they would edit if they could, and the hour gets larger in the replaying, the way a small room seems bigger in a photograph.

Then there is the silence, if there has been one, because silence is a blank wall and people paint their worst fears on blank walls. If he has not replied, or has been short, or has been civil in a way that felt colder than anger, the mind fills in the gap with the most frightening reading available, and the most frightening reading is that you are hated. It is not the likeliest. It is simply the loudest.

The honest sentence, said once

I cannot see him, and a card that claims to show you how he feels about you is a card being read badly. What I can tell you about hate in general is that it needs feeding, it takes effort to maintain, and the person it is aimed at is almost never as present in the hater’s day as the guilty party imagines. If he was angry, he was probably angry for a while and then tired, and tired is where most of these go. That is a guess, and I mark it as one, but it is the guess the evidence tends to support.

Sorting what is yours from what is not

This is the useful part and it is worth a pen. Take the scene, or the scenes, and split them honestly into two piles. In the first pile goes what you actually did: the sentence you said to wound, the message sent to hurt, the lie, the time you did not turn up. In the second pile goes everything you have been carrying that was not yours: his moods, the way he told the story to his friends afterward, the things he blamed you for that were the relationship’s fault or his, the fact that it ended at all.

People who type does my ex hate me almost always have the piles mixed. They are carrying the whole ending as though they authored it alone, and a relationship is not a thing one person can end alone, however it looked from the outside. Getting the second pile off your back does not make the first pile smaller, but it makes it liftable, and a liftable thing can be dealt with.

What can be repaired

The first pile, and only the first pile, and only by one instrument, which is a plain apology with no argument attached. Not the long message that explains why you did it, because an explanation is a defense wearing an apology’s clothes and the difference is usually obvious by the end of the first line. One sentence, or two: I am sorry I said that at the door, it was meant to hurt and it was beneath me. And then you stop, with no request for forgiveness, no asking whether he is all right, and no door left ajar.

Whether you send it is yours to decide, and there are honest reasons not to, the main one being that some apologies are really a way of reopening contact, and you will know which kind yours is by how much you are hoping for a reply. If the hoping is the point, write it and keep it. The writing does most of the work anyway. If the sentence is true and you can put it down afterward without checking your phone, send it in the daytime and let it be the last thing.

What is not yours to carry

His version of the story is not yours to carry, for one. He is entitled to tell it the way it happened to him, and you cannot edit it from here, and trying to, by explaining yourself to mutual friends or by sending the corrective message, tends to prove the unflattering version rather than the fair one. Let it be his. You have yours, and you are allowed to keep it.

Whether he forgives you is not yours either. An apology is complete when it is said. What he does with it is his afternoon, and an apology that needs a reply to count was not quite an apology. And the fact of the ending itself, which is the biggest thing people are carrying and the thing least likely to be one person’s doing. Relationships end because two people stopped being able to make it work, and the one who said the words out loud is not the one who ended it, only the one who noticed first.

If the guilt is bigger than the scenes, if it seems to be about something older than him, the shadow work reading is written for exactly that, and it stays on your side of the table where it can be useful.

What to do with tonight

Write the two piles, one line each, without the paragraph of explanation, and fold the paper. Not to be read again tonight, because tonight you will only argue with it. Read it on Sunday, in daylight, and see whether the first line is still as heavy as it felt, and whether the second line ever belonged to you at all. If you want company for the stretch of weeks after an ending, the no contact piece walks through them one at a time, and what tarot cannot do says plainly why no reading will report on his feelings, here or anywhere on this site.

Whatever he feels, and I do not know, the person lying awake with this is somebody who minds about having hurt someone, and that is not what hateful people lie awake with. Come back and tell me which line was heavier on Sunday.

Clara