I Have an Elizabeth Problem

And whether to stay friends with your exes

Photo: Gregory Garretson

This week’s essay is slightly different. I decided to take a break from pontificating about migration and write something more personal, though culture will definitely sneak in. So, let’s talk about my exes, shall we?

There are two unusual patterns involving me and my ex-girlfriends, one of which is fairly well-known and discussed among my friends, and the other of which is almost totally secret. Let’s start with the secret.

I have an Elizabeth problem.

Of all of the women I have been involved with over the course of my forty-year dating career (yes, shocking but true—I wish I could say I started at the age of negative two), fully seven of them have been named Elizabeth, or some version thereof. To convince you, I enumerate them:

• Elizabeth, going by Elizabeth

• Elizabeth, going by Beth

• Elizabeth, going by Liz

• Another Elizabeth going by Liz

• One with the second name Elizabeth¹

• One with the second name Elisabet

• And Liza, who finds all of this funny but also slightly disturbing

In addition to these Elizabeths, I have had some other important ones in my life:

• Someone I went after in college but who rejected me, named Elizabeth but going by Liz

• Someone I was friends with in college and did not go after, named Elizabeth but going by Eli (!)

• A colleague I was good friends with, named Elizabeth

• A tutor I became good friends with, named Elisabet

• The mother of an ex-girlfriend, both of whom I am still close to, named Lisa

Normally, I don’t think about this much. But it has been brought to my attention recently because the first four female Substackers I became friends with are named thusly:

• Liza (the same one as above)

• Lisa

• Eliza

• Elizabeth

And yes, who was the first other person whose Substack I subscribed to? Elizabeth Gilbert. 🙄

What in the world is going on here? I wish I knew. I mean, I’m way ahead of the British monarchy. But why?

I can think of three possible explanations for this pattern:

1. This is all just random variation. Elizabeth is a fairly common name, especially among people roughly my age, and such coincidences are to be expected. It would be more striking if the name were Brunhilda or Angustias.

2. There is something deep within me that seeks Elizabethicity, that craves some thing that only those with all the E’s and L’s and Z’s have. What might that be, though?

3. The universe is trying to tell me something, albeit not very clearly.

Here is another twist: In researching this piece (such as was necessary), I came across the information that the names Elizabeth and Isabel are related—and Isabel is my mother’s middle name! I’m sure some of you are now shouting “Paging Doctor Freud!”, but, you see, I didn’t know this until now.

[Edit: After reading this piece, my mother informed me that her parents had argued bitterly about whether or not to name her Elizabeth! 🤯]

I am honestly unsure how to feel about all this, so I ask for your help. I have not yet done a poll on Substack, so this seems like a fine time to try it. I encourage everyone to vote. (Note that only subscribers can vote in a poll.)

In general, I am in favor of embracing the leitmotifs in our lives, but this one verges on the bizarre. I am thinking about this pattern right now in part because my dear ex Liza keeps amusedly pointing it out to me, and partly because it’s now time to start dating again, and I wonder how I would react if I met someone named Elizabeth, or Elisabete, or Isabella, or Lisbeth (though I guess if she were a Salander, I would know to stay away).

An interlude on names: I have mentioned elsewhere that it is very important to Liza that people pronounce her name correctly: as rhyming with “Pisa” or “pleaser”. What I have not said yet on this Substack is that I, too, care a bit about my name. Just so you know, nobody calls me “Greg”. Everyone, even my mother, calls me Gregory, and so if you ever see or hear anyone call me Greg, you will know that they don’t really know me. (I will leave aside for now the question of whether we can ever really know anyone…)

But now let’s move on to the other strange pattern involving my exes, which is actually much more controversial.

Here it is: I have a tendency to stay on good terms with my exes. Not all of them, by far, and not all equally well. (And no, not only or especially the Elizabeths.) But some of them are among my closest friends today. Others are people who I visit when I can, and still others are people I exchange birthday greetings with or write to when something reminds me of them, as I discussed in my essay “How Not to Lose Your Friends When You Move”.

Why is this controversial? Because I come from a culture in which there is a fairly strong narrative that you should see your ex as your enemy. And if you don’t, then your new partner probably will.

North American culture has, to my way of seeing, some pretty strange ideas about relationships. People tend to go into them as Whitney Houston and come out of them as Bruce Willis. I have been married exactly once, and divorced exactly once (Logical, no? In some ways I don’t buck the system). I remember that when I told my parents I was getting a divorce, my stepfather said, “Better get a good lawyer!”, completely ignoring the fact that my wife (who, by the way, was not an Elizabeth) was the sweetest person you could ever hope to meet, and the fact that the separation was amicable. I once heard another American describe his ex-wife as “a cross between Adolf Hitler and Attila the Hun”. Or take the line from the film Don’t Look Up (which I dare you to go watch again and not think of Elon Musk), in which a TV host, upon learning that a meteor capable of extinguishing life on the planet is headed for Earth, says “I hope it hits my ex-wife’s house.”

I have two questions here, to which I don’t necessarily have the answers. The first question is this: Why all this hostility? I do actually have one hypothesis, which I will share with you to see what you think: In the United States, people seem to have extremely negative feelings about failure (Trump: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay? I hate to tell you.”). If you felt this way, and if you had the perspective that every relationship was supposed to be perfect and last forever, than a breakup, in addition to being a loss, would seem like an intolerable failure and a humiliation. And this can cause people to lash out at others.

The second question is this: Is it like this everywhere? I actually don’t think it always is, or has to be. My personal experience is that the Europeans I know are usually less skeptical of my tendency to stay on good terms with my exes than the Americans I know. (There may be a split between the Protestant north and the Catholic south, but I don’t really have enough data to say.)

Perhaps you would like to share your opinion? Now that we’ve done one poll (that was just a warm-up!), I want to try another one, to see what the general opinion on this is. Please feel free to vote, but do read the choices carefully:

I apologize for the dichotomistic view of the world here, but Substack polls are absurdly limited in options. (Yoo-hoo Substack, please give the polling feature some love! Thank you!)

I have heard some rational arguments for both sides of this issue. Alain de Botton, founder of the School of Life, for whom I generally have tremendous respect, made a really bleak video telling people that it is definitely not a good idea to try to stay friends with their ex. The problem with this video is that it presupposes that all relationships are the same, which I know, just from my own experience, is not the case.

Here is what I think about my own situation (I won’t tell anybody else what they should do): I am no longer in touch with the majority of women I have been involved with, and that makes sense—either the relationship (or the breakup) was not really great, or we have both simply gone off on different trajectories. But there are a few women who I genuinely like as people (which is kind of why I dated them in the first place), and with whom I have a shared history of common interests, shared experiences, running jokes, and mutual friends. If there are no hard feelings between us, then I try to stay on good terms and keep some sort of friendship alive. I see this as us placing a vote of confidence in each other—as a way of saying, “I think you are a good person, and I am happy to have you in my life.”

Does doing this complicate things with whomever I might currently be dating? Yes, it sort of requires that I am with someone without a high level of jealousy. But you know what? I really dislike jealousy anyway, so maybe that’s just as well.

Does it always work? Absolutely not. I am still trying to figure things out with Liza (my best piece is about our breakup), who I think is an incredibly special person, and who will hopefully continue to enrich my life. But relationships—including friendships—are complicated, and they take work, as I have argued elsewhere. Both parties have to have the will to make things work, and up to a point, circumstances have to allow it.

And it can get complicated. I was once in a relationship with a woman who was divorced and had two young children, whom I adored. She was on good terms with her ex, and so I got to know him. We would have holiday dinners together—the five of us—and, from my perspective, it went quite well. The ironic twist is that this woman was actually quite jealous of my friendship with my own ex, and complained bitterly about the situation. The moral of the story, if there is one, seems to be that everybody has to work within their limitations and do what they have the emotional wherewithal to do. I just wish that cultures didn’t encourage people to cultivate negative feelings for those they used to love.

Even if they’re not named Elizabeth.

1. I use the term “second name” advisedly, rather than “middle name”. The concept of the middle name is decidedly Anglophone, and these women weren’t. In most of the places I have lived, you have a series of first names and a series of last names. For example, if you were Portuguese and your name were Cristina Maria Almeida de Sousa Pereira Tavares, that would chunk into two pieces: [Cristina Maria] [Almeida de Sousa Pereira Tavares], the latter consisting of last names from both of your parents. Interestingly, in Portugal the father’s last names come last, while the opposite is true in Spain.