What struck me in his retelling was how ordinary it all sounded. In fact, I’d been here before, looking over from the other side. I winced as I recalled a memory from last January, when a New Year’s kiss turned into a weeklong fling before I caught my breath and decided I was out. What had I done with this realization? I took the guy to an off-Broadway show! I kept the train moving instead of having a hard conversation—one I eventually relegated to text, after I’d safely left town. The hive would have words for me, and I couldn’t argue with them. I’d been careless, too frightened by the unreliability of my own emotions to admit when they’d turned, and too desperate to be liked to be honest. Had I vilified in my alleged love-bombing, future-faking, trauma-dumping narcissist the very things I was ashamed of in myself?

There are the exes who have committed truly evil acts, and then there are the exes who have just broken up with us. Thankfully, most of us only have to deal with the latter, where more mundane evils—selfishness, avoidance, poor communication—result not from any innate wickedness, but from two fallible beings trying to form a connection. If we’re lucky enough to fall into this category, the vilification of the ex can be used as a temporary salve to get one through the darkest days, but it’s probably best not to linger there for long. To make an ex evil incarnate risks becoming its own form of narcissism, with its grandiosity and lack of empathy, that masks the harder truth: We all have the capacity to hurt. As long as we’re busy narcissist-hunting, we miss an opportunity to look inward, and to grow.

Sitting there in the afternoon light, with the forgiving distance of a whole year between us, I didn’t see any evil within this man who had broken my heart. I just saw a person doing the best he could, with the information he had, and the circumstances he was in. And who was I to blame him for that?