Why I'm Still Getting Mail For My Ex-Boyfriend (Over A Decade After We Broke Up)
It's been years since we broke up, but the mail still keeps coming.
Jonah_M via Canva | Mikhail Dmitriev via Canva | Hispanolistic via Canva Several times a week, I receive mail addressed to my ex-boyfriend.
It isn’t a mistake.
He’s still using my mailing address and home phone number over a decade after we broke up.
He didn’t have a stable living situation while we were dating. His roommates and his landlady often intercepted his mail and didn’t pass it along to him.
After he missed several important letters and notices thanks to his living situation, I offered to let him use my home address as his mailing address.
Then we broke up.
For five years following our breakup, my mother dutifully hand-delivered his mail from our house to his apartment. Five years.
Even after she told him she could no longer deliver his mail, his mail kept on coming.
I bought a Sharpie and painstakingly wrote "Return to Sender: Addressee Does Not Live Here" on every subsequent piece of mail.
It doesn’t matter what it is: sealed envelopes, jury duty notices, postcards, junk mail, and menu flyers. If it has his name on it, I mark it in block letters and pop it back in the mail.
I don’t know his current address, so it’s the best I can do.
Yet the mail keeps coming.
You’d think he would have updated his address by now. It’s been more than a decade since he last set foot in my house.
He’s moved at least four times since we broke up. Surely one of those times he provided his new address to the post office or to whoever sent him mail.
But no.
The mail just keeps coming and it’s driving me crazy.
I checked his Facebook account, and I was stunned to see my mailing address listed on his profile page.
Who puts their mailing address on their Facebook profile, anyway?
And there, beneath my address, he had entered my home phone number. Once again, I have to ask: Who does that?
I sent him a message via Facebook, asking him to please remove my address and phone number from his profile. He didn’t respond.
Maybe he didn’t get the message; maybe he chose to ignore it.
If you’ve ever dealt with an ex who just won’t let go in some way, you know how frustrating it can be.
You try to move on, but they just keep coming back into your daily thoughts, whether or not you want them to.
I don’t know what else to do. The mail just keeps coming.
It’s a reminder of a failed relationship that I’d rather not receive. But short of moving myself, there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I’m tempted to toss his mail in the trash, but I simply can’t bring myself to do it. So I keep using my black Sharpie to write my message and letting the mail carrier take it away.
Tracey Folly is a writer who has been contributing lifestyle and relationship content to the Internet since 2009.