I’ve been in this situation before, and I realized that my desire to apologize was pretty much about me, to make myself feel better, to get closure for myself. I didn’t think the other person was going to get anything out of it, as I was fairly sure they had moved on. There was a part of me that hoped for a response, for some kind of connection from the other person, and I realized that wasn’t likely to happen, and it was only going to disappoint me. Because of that, I chose to try to get closure on my own, since I was the only one who needed it.

It wasn’t as bad as your situation. I was immature and looking to someone who had no responsibility for how I was to save me from myself. Mostly I called her way too often and kept telling her how much I loved her, after she’d broken up with me.

Anyway, I’m not looking for absolution or renewed friendship, or even a returned email. I just genuinely want to apologize for who I was and for the stress I put on her life.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s still too weird. Thanks for the thoughts, though.

It would depend on how it was written. Even from the ex I called the cops on, if it said, “I just want to apologize for how badly I treated you, and I hope you are having a good life,” that would be okay. If it expected anything of me, like forgiveness or contact of any sort, or tried to be manipulative in any way, it would freak me out, and my ass would be at the police station with the report number from 13 years ago posthaste.

I used to find the boys’ slavish devotion to high school girlfriends whose relationships weren’t going anywhere to be completely silly until I, at the ripe old age of 25, fell in love with someone and realize, “Ahhh… so *that’s* what that feels like.”

Men and women do want the same thing out of relationships. It’s the power-differential that tends to distort this and the years of hurt upon hurt that everyone builds up from their previous relationships that influences their future ones as well as the perception of their previous ones.

1) Very few of us are, as adults, still in relationships with the people we were in love with as adolescents, and there’s a prevalent idea that a relationship that ends has “failed.” Thus most adolescent relationships fail, which means that in retrospect they can’t have really been love.

2) Early crushes and relationships can be pretty intense, and one way of coping with that is to retcon it, and one of the easy, patriarchy-endorsed ways for guys to retcon relationships is to say they were only in it for the sex, or the social status, or whatever. (I guess very early relationships get retconned as platonic because there was no overt sexual component.)

I suspect that they want to insist that every boy was a dick because they themselves were dicks. It provides a convenient excuse for their dickish behavior.

Only if you assume that boys are magically immune from the messages we all get fed by the larger culture that still feeds us stories about the “strong, silent type” who represses all of his emotions because they make him weak.

The worst part is that there are still a lot of boys who think they must be freaks because they don’t think of girls as sex-dispensing machines like all of their friends, their music, their TV, and their movies tell them they’re supposed to. If you get told enough times that you’re not “supposed” to feel something, you’re going to repress those feelings. Not only that, but you’re going to resent with a burning-hot hatred anyone who brings those repressed and vilified feelings back to the surface, and you’ll do anything to punish the person who does it to you.

IOW, MaryTracy, I think your teenage boyfriend was even more fucked in the head than you even realize.

As a teenager, I lost count of how many times various adults told me I didn’t know what real love was, or couldn’t be feeling it. It must be baffling to them that, sixteen years later, I am still with my high-school girlfriend.

When my second HS girlfriend broke up with me, I was suicidally depressed for about a year and a half. It wasn’t her fault, and I had other problems, but I’m sure I made her life pretty bad. I’ve always felt I owed her an apology. I doubt she ever thinks of me now, but I could probably get in contact with her through a few old friends.

If an old boyfriend/girlfriend wrote to you years later to apologize for their behavior, would that be OK, or would you find it creepy stalking-behavior?