No Strings Behind Us

The tide went out, the noise quietened, and one thought remained, love deserves two people walking forward freely, without dragging yesterday behind them.

After a long day of writing, answering messages and trying, with varying degrees of success, not to overthink everything, I went down to the beach.

The sun was already beginning its descent. The shingle beneath my feet still held some of the day’s warmth, while the tide had withdrawn so far that the sea seemed almost undecided about whether it wished to remain part of the landscape at all. People had wandered far out across the exposed shoreline. A dog crossed the wet sand alone. In the distance, figures moved through the shallows, tiny against that enormous pale horizon. For a few minutes the sky was blue, then pink, then somewhere between the two.

It was exactly the sort of evening on which the world appears remarkably calm while the person walking through it is anything but.

I had written something very personal late the previous night¹. By this afternoon, friends, readers and people I had not expected to hear from had begun sending me their thoughts. Some were short. Others were extraordinarily intimate. A few made me laugh. Several made me uncomfortable, not because they were cruel, but because they recognised things in my words that I had perhaps not entirely admitted to myself while writing them.

So, walking along that enormous stretch of beach tonight, I began reading some of them again.

Where the Tide Left Me

The tide was out, the light was fading, and I had a lot of words from other people and a few of my own to think about.

One friend told me that every word of the letter felt as though it had come from a heart that had burst open. What they saw was somebody asking for clarity about something they perhaps should never have had to ask for in the first place. They also saw, beneath all of it, something I had tried very hard not to disguise: love.

That mattered to me.

Because the piece was never supposed to be an indictment of somebody I care about. It was not written to corner anyone, shame anyone or win an argument. Love is not a courtroom, and I have no interest in turning the person I care about into a defendant.

They have asked for time to think.

They deserve that time.

I respect it.

I am writing this follow-up because something else happened today. The people who read the piece began placing their own lives beside mine, and suddenly what had felt painfully private became part of a much larger conversation about the strange ways we carry our past into the present.

John read something almost philosophical into it. He told me that perhaps the lesson was not to allow old relationships to become the instrument through which we measure new ones. He described life as fluid, almost gaseous, while human beings desperately try to make it solid. His wonderfully eccentric conclusion was that existence is less a straight line and more “a bottomless plate of spaghetti”.

I laughed when I read that.

But there is something in it.

We are forever trying to organise love into neat categories. Former lover. Friend. Partner. Past. Present. Closure. Friendship. Moving on. We imagine that if we change the noun, we have changed the emotional reality.

Sometimes we have.

Sometimes we absolutely have not.

Another friend, Vidol, reduced the whole thing to something far simpler: you cannot change your past, but you should not allow it to interfere with what you have now. If you choose somebody new, you should be fully present with them.

That word, «present» stayed with me as I walked.

Because perhaps presence is what all of this is actually about.

Not prohibition. Not ownership. Not controlling somebody’s friendships. Certainly not demanding that another human being erase the years before they met you.

Presence.

The feeling that when somebody chooses you, they have actually arrived.

Pasha wrote to me about having once been invited by a former partner to meet their ex. Pasha refused, initially almost amused by the suggestion. Only later came the realisation that feelings for that previous relationship were still alive somewhere underneath it all. The message was warm rather than bitter. The conclusion was simply that sometimes a door needs to be closed.

Then came Jerry.

Jerry’s response stopped me.

He told me he had begun reading my piece in the morning and spent the next two hours writing back while crying.

His story was not about failing to find love.

It was about finding something precious and then, without understanding what he was doing, slowly damaging it by refusing to leave an old relationship entirely in the past.

After separating from an ex, Jerry maintained dinners, conversations and regular contact. He convinced himself that this represented maturity. That keeping an ex close demonstrated confidence, emotional intelligence and a wonderfully modern ability to remain friends after love.

Then there was somebody else in his life.

Someone who loved him deeply.

Someone who would eventually become, as Jerry now understands it, the most precious love of his life.

That person did not complain much. They did not want to appear jealous, possessive or controlling. They said things were fine. They behaved as though things were fine.

But Jerry remembers what he called a tiny “glitch” running through the relationship.

Something never quite settled.

The previous relationship had ended, but the previous partner had never entirely left the room.

And so the person who loved Jerry was placed in an impossible position: expected to build a present while somebody from the past remained woven through nearly everyday life.

They endured it for six years.

Then they could endure it no longer.

They left.

And only after losing them did Jerry understand what had happened.

That is what made his message so difficult to read.

He was not mourning an opportunity he had never taken. He was mourning the person he already had. The person who had loved him. The person he now describes as the great loss of his life.

His words towards himself were brutal. I will not repeat all of that brutality because I do not think self-punishment is the useful lesson here.

What moved me was his recognition that silence can sometimes masquerade as acceptance.

Somebody saying “it’s fine” does not always mean it is fine.

Sometimes it means, “I love you enough that I am terrified of appearing controlling.”

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That distinction matters enormously.

Ruslan said something similar in our conversation. The position was firmer than mine: exes belong to the past, and allowing one to remain deeply embedded in a developing relationship can create a boundary that somebody else ends up sacrificing themselves to accommodate.

The argument was simple, people should speak early about what they are not comfortable with, rather than silently accepting something in the name of appearing relaxed, enlightened or modern.

Again, I do not think there is one universal constitution governing former lovers.

There are people who genuinely become friends with an ex. There are relationships where everybody involved feels secure and nothing unresolved remains. Human beings are complicated, and I would distrust anybody claiming to have discovered a law applicable to every heart on Earth.

But I understand something tonight that I perhaps understood less clearly yesterday.

A boundary is not necessarily an act of control.

Sometimes it is simply the truthful description of what you can and cannot live with.

There is a profound difference between saying, “You are forbidden from doing this”, and saying, “I cannot build a relationship under these circumstances.”

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One attempts to control another person.

The other tells the truth about yourself.

And I think that distinction is where I am now.

As I walked, the sun disappeared completely. The enormous exposed beach took on that strange silver-grey colour that comes after sunset. Far away, somebody was still standing in the shallow water. The dog I had noticed earlier kept wandering across the flats as if it had somewhere extremely important to be.

Everybody looked tiny.

There is something useful about being made tiny by a landscape.

It reminds you that even the emotional catastrophe taking place inside your chest is still only one human life trying to understand another.

So I want to say something clearly, especially because the person at the centre of my thoughts may eventually read this.

I am not angry with you.

I am not writing these words to hurry you.

I am not collecting people’s reactions as evidence against you.

You asked for time, and I heard you.

Take it.

What I am doing during that time is also important.

I am listening to myself.

I am understanding why this touched something so deep in me.

I am learning that loving somebody does not require me to abandon my own emotional boundaries simply to prove that my love is generous enough.

Nor does having boundaries make my love smaller.

Perhaps the opposite.

I want a love in which neither person has to pretend.

I do not want somebody beside me saying “I’m fine” while quietly disappearing inside themselves.

And I do not want to become that person either.

I want the sort of relationship in which uncomfortable truths can be spoken before they become resentment. Where somebody can say, “This hurts me”, without immediately being accused of jealousy, insecurity or control.

Most importantly, I want the person I love to choose freely.

Not because I frightened them into choosing. Not because readers agreed with me. Not because friends produced persuasive arguments. Not because I wrote something beautiful enough to win.

Love obtained through pressure would be worth very little to me.

If somebody comes towards me, I want them to come because, after thinking carefully and honestly, they know where they want to be.

And if they need some quiet before knowing that, then quiet is what I must give them.

Tonight the tide was out. Eventually it will return. That is what tides do.

But standing there, I realised that human beings are not tides. We cannot demand their return simply because we are waiting on the shore.

We can only tell them, truthfully, where we stand. And perhaps that is what my letter was. Not an ultimatum. Not a slammed door.

Just a light left on somewhere in the distance, and one honest sentence beneath it:

I love you, but I also need to know that when we walk towards something new, we are actually walking towards it together.

So perhaps that is where I leave this tonight, not with a grand declaration, not with another emotional summit meeting, and certainly not with a committee being formed to investigate the ghosts of relationships past.

Just with something much simpler.

If we are going to walk, I would like us to walk forward together. Both hands free. No invisible strings tied around our wrists, no old doors left half-open behind us, no emotional luggage being dragged along the shingle making that dreadful scraping noise.

The past can stay where it belongs. It has already had its chapters, its dinners, its arguments, its photographs and, frankly, quite enough screen time.

We do not have to hate it. We do not have to erase it. We can even wave politely at it from a safe distance.

But we don’t need to take it with us.

There is a whole bloody beach ahead.

And, sweetheart, if you are walking beside me, I would much rather be looking at where we’re going than constantly turning around to check whether some old ghost is still following us.

So come on.

Forward.

Slowly, gently, stupidly happy if we’re lucky, and preferably without anyone from the past holding the other end of the bloody lead ❤️

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