Ex Marks The Spot

There's nothing like an email exchange with your ex-wife (or ex-husband) to add a little sparkle to your week, especially when you haven't had any contact for  25 years or so.

This actually happened a year or two ago, but I was reminded of it yesterday in a client meeting, for some strange reason.

My first marriage was relatively brief — less than two years — and we parted on neither good nor bad terms, in my opinion. We weren't compatible, probably shouldn't have gotten married in the first place, recognized it and separated. No children, few possessions, a painful parting but relatively quick healing. (At least for me.)

So a couple of years ago, out of nowhere, I got an email from a woman with the same name as my ex-wife, saying she had googled and found a few folks with my name (it's not common; there are probably only a handful of folks with my name in the country). She asked if I was her ex-husband, and apologized for bothering me if I wasn't.

I wrote back, telling her that yes, she'd found me, and she almost immediately sent back a long email telling me all about her life, where she was (Silicon Valley), and what she was doing. I responded with an email listing my situation.

She then sent anther email with photos of her family. In that email, she went out of her way to mention that her second husband was quite tall. I'm 5' 6", and hadn't realized that height was in an issue in our relationship, but apparently it was.

Since I didn't really care about her life — or, for that matter, the height of her second husband — I thought I might as well get something out of the email exchanges. So I emailed her back, asking what she thought of our marriage and what she'd learned, now that she'd had the benefit of 25+ years of hindsight and reflection.

I never heard from her again. Apparently, she'd communicated everything she wanted to communicate, and she was done.