So Sophie,

An old boyfriend contacted me after six years of having been broken up. (He looked up my e-mail address on the internet.) We broke up as I was planning to move to be with him, because he told me he was dating someone else in his town. Our breakup was extremely hard for me to deal with, and it took me several years to get over it. I've since moved on and have a great job and am with a wonderful man whom I adore. I heard through a friend of mine (whom he also contacted after all of this time) that he's married, has a child with another on the way, wound up dropping out of college and then Art school. I've had no contact with him since we broke up. Why is he trying to reestablish contact after six years? What could he possibly be thinking? What should I do about it?

-Jilted and happy about it

Hey Jilted,

our ex-boyfriend must have the biggest balls in the history of the human race. This man had no business sending you e-mail. None whatsoever. If he wanted to know how you were doing there are other ways of finding out. He could simply have looked you up on the internet, found what information he could and gone on his way. Or he could have inquired about you to your friend. Or he could have realized that he's the one who booted you from his life and that he should just live with his decision. But who cares? We're not addressing alternative options here. You want to know why the sorry bastard cheated on you, broke your heart, left you alone and in the middle of moving plans and then has the unmitigated gall to try to contact you after six years... am I getting this right?

There are a couple of possible reasons why he did this. Pick whichever one makes you feel better about it.

1) He just had his 10-year class reunion. He feels old and like he's never really gone out into the world and done anything good. He started thinking about old times and everyone he used to know back when life was carefree and fun. So he thought of you. He wanted to see how you were doing and what you were up to, just as sort of a matter of idle curiosity. (But you and I both know that men never do this sort of thing purely out of idle curiosity. There's always some sort of ulterior motive, which leads us right into possible reason for contact #2.)

2) He's miserable. His dead-end job is not making him happy and his wife is a bitch. He is regretting the day she ever came into TGI Friday's while he was bartending and started flirting with him. What kind of sorry, desperate woman does that kind of thing anyway? Even more than that, your sorry ex is cursing himself for forgetting to buy condoms while they were in Mexico and for the shotgun wedding that resulted from his carelessness. He wishes he would have finished college and made something of himself instead of throwing away everything he ever wanted for some cheap piece of ass. Now he wants to try to reset his life by going back to the last good thing that he ever had in it, which was you. He thinks that if only the two of you could start something again he could erase the last six years of hell.

Did you pick a reason that you'd like to believe? All right then. What should you do? Again, there are several options, each with their own pros and cons.

1) Do nothing.

Pro: You have no contact with him. He doesn't even know whether you got the e-mail and can call into question the validity of whatever information he got from the internet. He is left hanging in some kind of nebulous void.

Con: You don't get to tell him off and let him know what a colossal ass you think he is. You also don't get to tell him how wonderful your life is now, about all of the wonderful exotic places you've lived and worked and about your wonderful boyfriend. You also don't get to tell him about how his leaving you was the single best thing that ever happened to you.

2) Write back. Tell him off. Tell him about the boundless pile of wonderful that makes up your life now. Tell him that you are extremely glad he left you and how you're happy that he's managed to find his own life. Capitalize on the grapevine information you have from your friend and ask painful questions about that art career of his... did he ever get to art school? Is he still stuck in horrible meaningless jobs?

Pro: You get to make him feel terrible about himself. He will wish he never contacted you.

Con: You actually have to write to him. You also risk the possibility of him writing back.

3) Write back. Tell him no factual information whatsoever. Relate stories of your stint with the separatists in Idaho back in the fall of 1999. Allude to your six-year-old child. Leave doubts about the child's parentage. Fabricate more stories about welfare, the child going to foster care and strings of no-good men in your life and tell him that nothing was ever the same after he left.

Pro: He feels tremendous amounts of guilt. He is left wondering whether he has another child out in the world somewhere whom he will never know. The knowledge that you are miserable makes him feel even worse about everything.

Con: You run the risk of him trying to contact you again to make everything all better.