I asked my ex-boyfriends to give me yelp reviews and this is what I learned about myself

“I’m not going to comment on this exercise” -My therapist

According to Jerry Seinfeld and my own personal experience, 95% of the population is absolutely undateable. If you were to scan a crowded subway or your respective line at TSA, you’d find a 1 to 10 ratio AT BEST of people you’d maybe momentarily agree to get a drink with. That’s why when you meet someone whose company you can tolerate and who tolerates you back, it feels like a miracle. 

Given the sheer sparseness of successful romantic interactions, it’s curious that when the connection doesn’t work out, many of us are swift to cut contact. But the pandemic changed that. And it didn’t just cause many of us to reconnect with past lovers on purpose. Just look at Google searches for “why am I dreaming about my ex” spiking by 2,450% in the first month of the pandemic. But what if instead of viewing our exes as people to avoid both in real life and in our dreams, we could see them as valuable sources of knowledge?

When you leave a job you have an exit interview, so why don’t you get one when you leave a relationship? Given that there’s nothing worse than a person who enters a relationship uneducated or overconfident about their own shortcomings, asking your ex for a yelp review may be the best thing you can do for a future partner you haven’t met yet.

I’m not the first person to observe this, organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant says that “when you punish failure, people are quick to deny it” and that it makes people “strive to convince others—and themselves—that they haven't failed.” Inspired by this advice, I decided to lean into failure and look at the relationships that didn’t work out and ask myself and the other participant, “why?” Grant even recommends making a resume of failures, so consider this an attempt at mine. 

My methodology was pretty simple. I got tipsy on Amtrak wine and started drafting a girlfriend 360 performance review and testing the waters with some of my exes. 

Having good ex-lovers is a blessing I don’t take for granted. I sometimes wonder if my toxic trait is that I stay friends with exes. With a few rare exceptions, there’s mutual love and respect. But some of the people I reached out to I hadn’t talked to in years, others it was more like weeks or months because we had maintained a friendship. But everyone I messaged was surprisingly down to do this weird exercise. 

Told you I had great exes.

Before I read my reviews, I wanted to come in fully prepared so I did my research and what I found is that we all  seem to have an ex-bias. Apparently, our past relationships are like baguette bags, we remember them more fondly than they deserve to be. Relationship expert Helen Fisher finds that we have a human tendency to love relationships more when we’re out of them. “After we resolve a romantic relationship,” she says, “we have this remarkable ability to forget the bad parts and focus on the good ones.” So while I was bracing myself for my arch enemy, constructive feedback, I was also ready for my exes to probably remember me as a bit nicer than I probably was.

This is why many of us struggle with thoughts or even impulses to get back together with our exes, sometimes even when we’re in a new relationship. This happens not so much because you don’t love your new partner, but because the human emotion of love creates new neural pathways in the brain. These new pathways remind our brains of the older pathways from past relationships! That’s why a first love will always be special. Even rats (who are not even monogamous!) will seek to be with the first rat they ever were intimate with.

So armed with this knowledge, I dove head first and texted four exes. 

1.Voldermort, my college boyfriend, who I met at the library and dated for about a year and whose number I had to delete from my phone SEVERAL times (I would make my best friend delete the last digit of his phone number and then beg her to put it back when I would eventually crack)

2.SXSW husband, a whip-smart producer I met at the infamous conference who I had a very explosive romance with that fizzled into a deep lasting friendship and collaborative working partnership.

3.La La Land, a gifted composer and comedy writer I dated on and off right around the pandemic who became a close friend. Our first date was an elaborate prank on my mom to convince her that Barack Obama was texting me to run for president.

4.David, my longest-term relationship, hence the absence of a nickname, a dad of two brilliant young girls who designs very fancy sets who I was set up on a blind date by a mutual friend with the day after the 2016 election. 

The most surprising side-effect of this exercise was that it actually made me feel good about myself, not worse. I anticipated that my exes’ cold hard truths would be painful to stomach but hearing how I had positively impacted their lives was meaningful. Breakups, if done correctly aren’t just about breakdowns but also breakthroughs. We become new people because of them, hopefully better versions of ourselves. “My journey towards enlightenment started with our breakup,” David shared. “I learned about all kinds of attachment styles and began reading voraciously about the voice of the inner child.” We dated while I was writing my book and while he offered me unparalleled support during that time, once the book came out the relationship was over. But unbeknownst to me, he read it and would preeminently reshuffle the book to more prime placement in any bookstore he would walk into. How special it is to learn about the support from your ex you didn’t even know you had.

When breakups happen we are uniquely aware of what we did wrong, the mistakes, the shortcomings, but what we did right is a lot less salient. It was a powerful exercise to actually hear about what worked about a relationship that ultimately didn’t. When I asked SXSW about my strengths as a girlfriend he shared something I probably wouldn’t have thought about myself. “Your ability to live inside of complicated conversations and ideas in service of long term growth,” he answered. “Additionally, I would say that you have an acute desire to be aware of your partner’s needs and if you can accommodate them, you do.” Voldermort even gave me an “11/10” rating followed by “would recommend.” I wouldn’t have anticipated them to all keep such fond memories of our time together. When I asked La La Land what I should keep doing he said “going into relationships gun blazing, not afraid to get hurt” I got the same happiness hit from the others. “Your joie de vivre is contagious,” Voldermort shared. “You were extremely fun and outgoing and always a blast to be around (...) You are very expressive in your love and you made me feel secure and supported. There was also always ample french fries and mayo when you were around which was comforting.”

I also didn’t expect the tenderhearted protective older brother vibe from some of my exes who really seemed to want the best for me and were skeptical of other men.  When I asked SXSW “what is one thing I should stop doing?” he answered “thinking you can make a man “drink. (i.e. you can lead him to water, but you can’t make him drink)” Nothing you do will change a man. Better said, stop picking projects. Be with an actualized person.”  I received similar feedback from La La Land. When he was asked what I should start doing he said “following the advice of your own writing” and when I asked him to expand he expressed concern about the fact that I had chosen men who exhibited the very toxic traits I detailed in my book. When I asked David if he would recommend me as a girlfriend to his friends he was perplexed. “I cannot just recommend you to anyone, friend or not,” he wrote. “You are like some extreme delicacy at a Michelin star restaurant that serves strange and exotic things from the furthest reaches of our planet.” 

Nonetheless, it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies—some of the truth-bombs were a gut punch. Voldermort said that my obsessive focus on work made him feel like he was holding me back and that my inclinations towards anxiety or self-harm were challenging to him as my partner.  SXSW advised me to spend less time on my phone which is a gentle way of pointing out how distracted I can be. David pointed out that I could be conflict-avoidant and skittish. “It seemed that when challenged, you would rather run away and hide rather than address issues,” he wrote. It’s a special kind of sting when strangers who’ve never met reach a consensus about your deepest flaws.

Yes that’s a flip phone right between my loved ones.

Afterall, relationships don’t fix our problems, they reveal them. I don’t recommend doing this with every ex (I sure didn’t) but I did find the experience surprisingly restorative. When you’re single, it’s easy to see the past as a string of failures, when any relationship at all should be celebrated as a success, even if it didn’t last forever. Some old relationships can be like chocolate pudding you find in the back of your fridge. Yeah you might have forgotten about it, and yes there’s an expiration date, but on certain nights that pudding sure can look sweet. So why not, in these strange days that we are all going through, give that pudding another look? At the very least, it might clear some shelf space for new love when it comes knocking.