meeting the OX

As in, the Other Ex. Well, not THE Other Ex, who would be the ex of ex's OW, but who is completely irrelevant at this point. Now, this would be the relevant to my life now OX...

I met my boyfriend's ex this weekend. It was pretty much by accident. We zagged when we should have zigged (or vice versa) and ended up running into her when none of us expected to. Have to hand it to her, when she realized the situation she handled it well, and politely. Truth be told she handled it better than I did. I pretty much sat there with no idea of what to say. It had just been too weird to hear her say "oh you must be...(insert real name here) for me to do more than nod yes. And really, what was I supposed to do? Say "it's nice meeting you, too?" That big of a hypocrite I'm not. lol

It wasn't until later on that I got around to thinking about why this seemed so weird to me. Some of it, I think, is simply because up until several years, the idea that I could find myself in a situation like this - meeting a boyfriend's ex-wife - just wasn't on the radar of my life. And truth be told, my boyfriend and I have been doing our best to avoid this particular scenario for the past couple of years. He deserves to keep his life private from his ex, and I haven't been in any big hurry to meet the woman who hurt him so badly.

But a lot of the weirdness is because of how she found out about me, and from knowing that she talked about me with their kids, and from assuming that I'm still a topic of discussion from time to time. Oh, I know it's not really about me. It's about my boyfriend. I just happen to be the person he's in a relationship with, so I become part of these conversations by default. Doesn't make it any less odd to know that people are talking about me.

Ya know though, now that the first meeting has happened, I'm relieved that it has. It was inevitable, and it's better that it happened in some innocuous way rather than at some event in front of their kids.

But it's still weird.