Ex-partner of the partner
Do I have to be jealous?
© O_Lypa / Shutterstock
Is love the answer to all questions? Not quite. It also provides quite a few. Psychologist and couples therapist Oskar Holzberg answers them all.
Why does his relationship with the ex bother me so much? It has to unsettle us so that we can feel safe …
My first wife, my second husband, my ex-boyfriend, an old love of mine – we almost all have former love partners, and we are former love partners of others. One or one in a series of loved ones. The traces of some previous love affairs are lost in the past. Others stay in our lives and become relatives of choice, people who remain familiar and important to us. Even if we have separated as a couple, a lot of things that continue to connect us, what we appreciate about each other, can remain.
Advantages of the ex-partner
We know that. And that’s exactly why our partner’s exes can unsettle us. Passion, desire, sex and great love were once possible between him and the other. Can we really be sure that all embers have gone out?
To be honest, our own experiences with serial monogamy also limit trust in the very great love. Everyone can make an ideal partner out of their past loved ones. Olav in bed, Peter in conversation, Sebastian on his travels and Tom at the stove: That would be a hit. Which of course means that his ex also has advantages that we lack. And which seem threatening to us especially when our relationship is in crisis.
His ex, with her little-girl charm and her rich family home and the long letters that she always wrote him – unlike us, would certainly never have given him hell because he wasn’t interested in a new one Job cares. We compare ourselves with a picture of her that we tinker with precisely when we fear not reaching out to the loved one. And of course in which it looks great wherever we see ourselves critically.
Understanding of love
Oskar Holzberg, 67, has been advising couples in his Hamburg practice for over 20 years and has been married for over 30 years. His current book is called “Neue Schlüsselsätze der Liebe” (240 pages, 11 euros, DuMont).
© Ilona Habben
But there is a completely different reason why our relationship with our ex bothers us: our understanding of love. Actually, everything speaks in favor of no longer believing in eternal love. The list of our ex-partners alone shows us impressively how short eternity can be. But we would not find a hold in our couple relationships if we had to constantly expect that the happiness of love could come to an end. We wouldn’t dare to build a life together.
We therefore make do with a trick, as the sociologist Eva Illouz says: We retrospectively consider all our previous love relationships as doomed to failure because we were still immature or the partners would not have really suited us. So we can continue to believe that we have finally found true love.
We do this to save the idea of great, everlasting love. But that doesn’t turn out to be particularly sustainable. Because at the latest when our new favorite person starts to get on our nerves, we remember how wonderful it was with the exes. Then the old loved ones will feel timeless and eternal again. Timeless and eternal, as we understand love in itself. For us, the price of romantic, eternal love is the ex-partners who remain forever present.
“Couple adox” is the podcast with Oskar Holzberg and his wife Claudia. You speak openly about topics that keep challenging relationships. Funny, exciting and insightful! I.a. on Audio Now.
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