Don’t text your ex: why self-isolation isn't the time to try to get your past love back

It’s the middle of a pandemic and you’ve been sitting at home for a while. The subway is a no-go, so you’re working from home. Your usual social events are either cancelled, or they should be.

What better to do than watch a rom-com and … maybe text your ex? This much at least seems clear from the number of Instagram message screenshots, Tinder pickup lines and memes circulating since the global lockdown begun: a lot of us are trying to, erm, reconnect. Recipients are live-tweeting the texts from their exes, and a quick scroll through Tinder throws up countless “quarantine and chill” jokes.

Sadly, it seems that even in the midst of a global pandemic, jerks, softbois and every other worst version of your ex still exists.

Truth be told, that convenient text from your ex is probably less related to how they just “saw this and thought of u” and more to do with how bored they are. He or she is the equivalent of the person at the party who has a partner but still wants to flirt just to see if they have still got it.

While it’s easy to become sentimental in the middle of a crisis, this is neither the time nor the place. People aren’t allowed to touch their own faces at the moment, so snogging is certainly inadvisable. (Or did you think your ex was just planning on doing a Bernie Sanders-Joe Biden elbow bump?)

While any person who views a pandemic as a get-out-of-jail-free card is not to be trusted, this is a particularly bad kind of person. It’s like the deadbeat equivalent of stockpiling, only instead of toilet paper, your ex is hoarding external validation. That is probably the 15th version of the same “let’s self-isolate together” text they sent out this weekend. Think booty call, but make it quarantine.

If your ex only wants to get in touch when they think it’s the end of the world, it probably wasn’t meant to be. So when they next text, just send them this article and say: “Saw this and thought of u :).”