I’d deluded myself in thinking that keeping ex-partners in my life was the right thing to do. The truth was I just liked the attention
The final straw should have been sooner. In reality, though, what it took to cut off contact with my ex was waking up to screenshots of messages he had sent one of my childhood friends, at two in the morning, asking her: “does size matter?”
This was his calling card, an unprovoked question I can only imagine he has sent – without exaggeration – to hundreds of women. I had received screenshots like this from dozens already, during breakups and after our ultimate split, and had even seen some uploaded publicly to Facebook by women looking to call him out. He had been bad to me during our relationship (cheating serially, hitting me sometimes), was far less attractive than I was, and had a personality people famously disliked. But until that morning, these women had typically been strangers, or people I only knew casually, making it easy to reply with performative disgust before adding them to the growing pile I discarded from my mind. Now, I had thrown someone into his wake. I had never felt more mortified by my association with this person. But what was more humiliating was that, at the time, we were still friends.
Sarah Manavis is the digital culture writer at the New Statesman
