That day, I had just boarded a bus running from Montréal to Laval. I had left the Sauvé metro stop and the bus was to drop me off further along in Laval. Shortly after I got on, a young man came aboard and placed a call on his smartphone. Rather than report their conversation word for word, I will sum it up by saying that the call was meant for his partner. He was asking her to hurry to the bus stop, because the bus would be there in seventeen (17) minutes. The young woman seemed thrown off and apparently answered that there was no way she could make it there in time. The guy then told her to figure something out and show up at the stop, because he would not put up with any delay, and he cut the call off in complete agitation. Seventeen minutes later, the bus reached that very stop, and in came the young woman. She seemed neither out of breath nor tired. She took the seat beside the young man, who asked her how she had managed to get there so fast. She confided that she had had no choice but to ask a favour of her ex, who works not far from there and who was willing to help her out. I will spare you the ruckus that followed and the turn that this couple’s outing took.
This whole episode left me puzzled and set me thinking. Not only did I wonder whether every truth is worth telling, but I also reflected on a conclusion I drew from their altercation: the young man seemed to know the young woman’s past life very well and held this ex in particular, and surely many of her other past involvements, in horror. I asked myself the question of whether there is any use in talking about your past with your current partner.
Along our way we meet people who carry heavy pasts and who may have kept dubious company at some point in their journey. Some partners, out of love, out of self-interest or out of a lack of self-assurance, take it upon themselves to go digging very far back into their partner’s past. And this happens more often with men. Women, by nature, commit to a relationship out of love, so they have little interest in going to find out who their partner has been with. For some men, digging into that past turns into an obsession. And so they will go and ask about the number of partners you have had, the age at which you had your first sexual encounter, the number of exes you are still in contact with, how often the two of you write to each other, and so on. That is the very Cartesian side of men.
Women, for their part, have their gaze turned more towards the future. When a woman takes an interest in a man’s past, it will be mainly to find out why this or that did not work, what drove you away from a particular ex, what the other person could have done to keep you, and so on. Women are in the realm of quality, of the “how...?”; men are in the realm of quantity, of the “how many...?”.
The trap many women fall into is thinking that a man asks these questions the way they do, with a view to the future. In fact, men generally ask these questions in order to build up a portrait of the woman they are going to be seeing. Not realizing this, women will tell everything, down to the smallest details, while overlooking some very specific points and, in doing so, jeopardizing or ruining what their relationship might have become.
Those details are:
- The age of the couple: for a couple that has only just come together, it is better to avoid these conversations about the past and to concentrate your energy on what brings you closer rather than on a past that would drive you apart. And even for a long-established couple, one must not lose sight of the fact that recounting past adventures is akin to confessing earlier infidelities. Consequently, it is also a subject to be approached with delicacy.
- Your partner’s temperament: men generally have a hotter temperament than women. And when it comes to an intensely jealous man, the subject of past relationships has to be handled with tact. In short, if your partner is jealous, thin-skinned or not very understanding, it would be better to leave the exes where they are.
That said, it is important for everyone entering a relationship to understand that every individual has a past, and that is not what makes them a bad person in the present. Our past story makes us who we are today, but it does not determine who we will be tomorrow. Each of us owes it to the other to respect their past, to accept it, because it is what makes the other person who he or she is today. The task, then, would be to bring our energies together to build something lasting for the future. In other words: your past is your past; my past is my past; but the future, that is our future.
M. Z.
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