A small comic field guide to exes

A warning before we start: none of the exes who appear here is real. Or all of them are, depending on who's reading. If anyone recognises himself, he should know it's pure coincidence, and that it suits him.

I write a lot about exes. It's one of the big themes of PLANETA GAYFOLK, alongside love, pride and self-esteem. And after turning it over so many times, I've ended up doing what naturalists do with beetles: classifying them. Not with scientific rigour, but with the rigour of a long lunch that runs into the evening. Here's my little catalogue, incomplete and biased, like any catalogue worth its salt.

The ones who come back

The first big group is the ones who come back. And within this group there are species.

There's the seasonal ex, who always reappears at the same time of year. December is his natural habitat. The Christmas lights make him nostalgic and he sends you a "how are you doing?" all casual, as if it were nothing. In January he vanishes. You could set your calendar by him.

The oddest thing about the seasonal ex is that he never mentions why he's writing. He doesn't say he's been thinking of you, or that he's feeling nostalgic. He asks how you are as though it were a survey. And you, knowing him, can read between the lines: he's alone, he's had two drinks too many and he reached your name scrolling down his contacts.

There's the small-hours ex, a close relative of the last one, who only exists between two and four in the morning. By day he can't even remember your name. By night he remembers you with frightening precision.

And there's the most sophisticated of all, the ex who doesn't write but watches. He sees all your stories. All of them. The food ones, the ones of your friend's dog, the ones of some random sunset. He never reacts. He just appears on the list, right at the top, like a ghost with a good internet connection. This one fascinates me, because he's found a way of being there without being there, and that's practically an art form.

The ones who explain themselves

The second group is the ones who need to explain themselves. They're dangerous because they talk well.

First there's the ex who wasn't ready. He told you so very maturely, in phrases that seemed lifted from a self-help book. He wasn't ready for a relationship. Three months later you see him with someone else, very ready indeed, at a wedding.

Second, the philosopher ex, who turned the break-up into a seminar. He dumped you, yes, but he left you with such a thorough analysis of your relationship that you almost wanted to ask for the bibliography. You walked out of that conversation with a broken heart and the feeling you'd failed an exam.

And then there's the one who apologises for everything, the hardest version to hate. He said sorry so many times that you ended up comforting him. You came out of the break-up with your self-esteem on the floor and, on top of that, the feeling you'd behaved badly.

The ones who leave things behind

There's a whole group defined by objects. The ex who left a hoodie and never came back for it, and now the hoodie has more presence in your wardrobe than he has in your memory. The ex who took something of yours, a book, a good frying pan, and every time you make a tortilla in the bad one you remember him with a very particular resentment.

Among my songs there's a title many people already know, «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend), and I won't explain it again here because I've done that elsewhere. I'll only say it fits in this group: boyfriends who are, deep down, just another object in the house. Comfortable and silent.

And then there's his first cousin, the furniture ex, who spent years in your home without you ever quite knowing what he thought about anything. When he left, you noticed the gap the way you notice where a sofa used to be: by the mark on the floor.

And now the rare species, the one that turns up least in songs because it's less fun to work with. The ex who was good. Who loved you well, who left well, who now and then messages you on your birthday and wants nothing more. With him no joke is possible, and that annoys me a little as a writer. But it makes me glad as a person.

I've put him last because he's the one I struggle with most. The humour of exes runs on grievance: someone did something wrong and I laugh about it. When nobody did anything wrong, all that's left is a certain sweet sorrow, and sweet sorrow is harder to write than rage. One day I'll manage it. Or I won't, and I'll leave it as proof that not everything fits into a chorus.

What classifying is for

You might wonder what the point of all this is. The same as making lists of anything, I suppose: putting order into something that hurt in a mess. Once you label an ex, he stops being an enormous person who ruined an autumn for you and becomes a specimen of a species. He's smaller. He fits on an index card.

And sharing the field guide with friends is a sort of cheap therapy. One says "mine was a December one" and another replies "mine was a story-watcher", and suddenly the break-up, which seemed unique and tragic, becomes something common, almost a club. You're not alone. There's a whole museum of exes and you've only got a couple of exhibits.

In two years I've released 273 singles and a good number of them are about exes. People sometimes ask if I don't get tired of the subject. The answer is no, because exes never run out. Each one brings a new species. I keep on classifying.

The songs, with their lyrics and music videos, are at mikesaintlouis.com.