I decided to totally forgive my ex girlfriend who destroyed my life when she monkey-branched away from me. It might not make any sense, but hear me out. We were insanely in love and planned to stay together, but she met someone and cheated and then ran off with him. This totally destroyed me and I spent years trying to recover, never really fully getting there. Finally, in therapy, I decided to forgive her totally. I had long thought that to be impossible, but I realized it was possible when I figured out that it was possible to forgive someone – in other words quit begrudging them – without condoning their behavior.

For years I had desired some kind of closure, which I had imagined would come in the form of witnessing her get her just deserts. After she cheated on me, some other dude would cheat on her or treat her like shit and then she would regret the way she treated me. Or maybe they would be walking along together and she would have to witness his getting his head blown off in a robbery or something. I wasn't sure. All I knew is it felt like some kind of payback had to happen to her to restore order. That may sound dumb, but when you're hurt, your mind doesn't work in rational ways. I had lost contact with her. At one point I did research to find out if she was still even alive. I was able to verify that she was alive and well and living in a city where I would never have expected her to move. What I felt then was disappointment. I was disappointed that she wasn't dead.

I brought this all up in therapy. The main reason I chose to forgive her was I was just sick and tired of hating her. Hating her wasn't doing me any good. It was just holding me back. It was fucking up my peace of mind. When you carry around such intense anger for years, it fucks you up inside. I had to do a ton of work to even make forgiveness possible. It all involved figuring out the other person's humanity. I studied the writings of a man who had chosen to forgive the drunken driver who had killed his wife and kids by driving drunk. He had done so by realizing that the drunken driver was a very sick man who had never planned to hurt people like that.

So anyway, I wrote my ex a letter forgiving her. The original plan was to write it and never send it. I wrote it for my benefit, so I could finally let go the pain I had experienced for years. It was the pain that had driven me to drink too much and had held me back and had essentially ruled my life. And it helped a lot. It was like this huge anvil I had been carrying on my shoulders was lifted off and I was free. It took several days of sobbing through the night to even be able to write the letter, but I did it. And I finally felt better. I could finally truly move on with my life.

Then I decided to actually send the letter. I had found her email address online, though I wasn't certain if it was a working address. I debated with myself for about a week as to whether I should send it. The point of forgiving her was to help ME. It was to unburden me from the pain I felt. I wasn't sure whether she would misinterpret the letter and we would end up just fighting again, but I suspected she might be glad to hear from me. So I took a chance and emailed it to her.

She wrote me back grateful to have heard from me. She said my kind words had made her cry. It turned out that she actually did regret leaving me for that other guy. He had been a violent dude who screamed at her all the time and beat her up. She had had to sneak away from him during the night. She said she still had nightmares about him. What had happened was the revenge that I had wanted of her marriage turning to shit and her being miserable and regretting her actions. Ironically, now after I had forgiven her, it wasn't what I wanted anymore. Instead of the reaction of, “Ha ha, gotcha, serves you right,” I felt compassion for her that she had gone through some very awful years with him. And she felt compassion for me for the years of pain and alcohol abuse I had gone through. I had always imagined her laughing at me and calling me a loser for the problems I went through, but it wasn't like that at all. We had a meeting of the minds and understood each other again.

It's certainly understandable to have angry feelings toward an ex, especially one who has committed the offense of betrayal. However, MGTOW is about freedom, and if you're carrying around a shit ton of pain from a relationship that went south, you're not free. To forgive her, I never did have to condone what she did. She definitely made some very bad choices, but the forgiveness was never about saying she was right or smart to do that. It was about just letting her be human so that I would let all that go and not have it bother me anymore. When I did, a strange thing happened. I was able to forgive myself. I hadn't even realized that I had been hating myself over this, but when I dug deep down, I realized I had been regarding myself as a dumb-ass for letting this happen to me and as a loser for never having replaced her.

What I learned was that I could let painful shit go and then choose to value others as human beings. Then I could value myself and get rid of expectations of myself. I could respect myself as a human being regardless of whether I'm having sex with a hot model. I found out that my life has unconditional value and that I'll never put myself down again.

The wasteland of destruction that our breakup had made had had other negative side effects. I had ended up working in jobs I hated, jobs that only intensified my anger at life. Today I work in a job I actually enjoy and that pays pretty well. It's all interconnected. When you jettison your emotional pain, you're more relaxed and can do better in your careers.

I realize much of this may sound counter-intuitive. When you're wronged, it's natural to feel a lot of anger, and you may even hate a person. And let me make clear: You have every right to be angry if someone betrays you. I'm not saying that anyone is ever under any obligation to forgive someone else. What I am saying is that once you've gone through something painful, you may find a point where your anger no longer serves you and it may be in your best interests to let it go.

I have no idea whether this will make sense to other men or if it will sound like the ravings of a lunatic, but I've tried to put it out there as it really happened. I'm doing better because I decided to let something go. Maybe this makes sense to someone out there.