While having our usual Sunday evening post-mortem at the weekend, my friend and I started analysing the whole concept of the re-match - that furtive plunge back into familiar waters best known as sex with your ex. It's an interesting one as most people I know have a firm opinion on whether or not it's really a good idea, but at the same time most people I know have still done it regardless of whether it's a good idea or not. The scenario must be familiar to everyone: you go out with somebody for three months or three years or what feels like three centuries; you split up; you both smoke a lot of fags and bore your friends; you stay split up; you move on. But sooner or later, you bump into them at a party or in the pub or, in one friend's case at the dog track, which just goes to show something although I'm not quite sure what.
The acrimony has all but disappeared and to be honest, any bad feelings that are still there add a certain edge to proceedings. You start to talk and for the first half hour or so, you're both very busy patting yourselves on the back about how terribly mature and 1990s you're being about the whole business. Then comes the bit when you're both having a whale of a time and finding everything the other says very hilarious and fascinating. All of a sudden you've forgotten the fact that he used to make fun of your mother's flat feet or that you hated the way she said vehicle. Suddenly it seems like a terribly good idea to get your drearily beloved back into the bed which not so long ago you were trying terribly hard to get them out of.
Before you know it, it's morning and you're under that Star Trek duvet you never thought you'd see again, wondering what on earth you've done. Of course it's not usually as mindless and simple as this - there are a million and one reasons why you end up back in the arms of your ex. Admittedly about 999,000 of them come under the heading of too much alcohol, but there are plenty of others too, most of them understandable, if not all of them excusable.
There's nostalgia, curiosity, revenge, habit, lust, a lack of new targets, a point to be made or, most commonly of all, it can just happen. However, the most obvious motivation for re-igniting an old flame is because one or both of you wants to get the fire going again, or indeed wishes that the fire had never gone out in the first place. And hell, I feel like taking a tired metaphor way beyond its natural life-span by pointing out that the end-result of raking old embers can be nothing more than burnt fingers.
Certainly this is the classic view of revisiting the scene of the crime - no good can come of it and somebody will end up hurt. To this end there is usually lots of chat about whether this is a good idea or not, when both of you know that it is definitely not a good idea but that you're both going to do it anyway.
When I had a last fandango with one ex-boyfriend I practically made him sign a contract in triplicate to the effect that what we were about to do would not change anything between us. While this was of course a big dirty lie, it made us both feel very responsible about our irresponsibility.
And of course it often is a very bad idea, in the long-term at least. One friend who did not have much choice in whether she split up with the love of her life, used to get back with him at regular intervals i.e. whenever she saw him. While this was terribly good news at the time as it gave her temporary relief from the feeling of being repeatedly hit on the head with a big bag of misery, it meant that she didn't get over him for a long time. Although she did manage to perfect her rendition of the Blondie classic, You Keep Me Hanging On for karaoke purposes.
The other reason it is not a very clever idea is that you may have put a great deal of work into getting to the point where you don't think your ex is Satan's little helper - which is why you are able to talk to each other without the impediment of gritted teeth in the first place.
Sadly the re-match is not usually the cement that maintains this precarious state, much as you like to think so in your inebriated and lusty state: "Itsh so marbellous that we can be shuch good friendz, ishn't it?" No, the re-match is all too often the Semtex that explodes the whole myth that you are ever going to be good friends at all.
Another friend had spent years re-building a friendship with a man who was terribly upset when they split up, only to blow it one night at a party. The words "old wounds" and "re-open" sprang to mind with astonishing rapidity.
All of these case histories were gone through by my friend and I last Sunday night; a re-hash occasioned by her own foray into the indeterminate world of the re-match that weekend. After a few months of a rather unsatisfactory relationship with a man she liked rather a lot, she had thrown in the towel some weeks previously and retired a bit bruised and bored by the whole affair.
In theory it was probably a very bad idea to get together with him last weekend - she might have been hurt, he might have just used her, she might have not bothered to get her legs waxed - any number of disastrous scenarios could have been the end result. Instead she was glowing and found the whole thing hilariously funny. More to the point she realised that while he was a perfectly nice man he probably didn't have the third secret of Fatima and the answer to world peace secreted somewhere about his person as she had always suspected. Closure is a word that has been given a terribly bad press by the American therapy generation, but as a concept, it can't be beaten.
Which is why, on balance we came down in favour of the occasional re-match. After all, despite the point-scoring involved in the game of love, the re-match is sometimes the only way to end a tournament - well you didn't think you'd get away without one sporting metaphor, now did you?