I feel like my question is more of a “Post-Love” Letters thing. I’m in my early 50s and have been divorced for 16 years. In my 40s, I dated a woman for five and a half years who I thought was going to be my ride-or-die. When we spoke about our future together, she was very enthusiastic and made it sound as if she wanted the same thing. Then, just before COVID lockdown, she broke up with me via text message (yes…ugh). I was both confused and devastated since it came out of nowhere. It turns out she was cultivating the new guy in the background for two years while we were in a “monogamous relationship” and making plans to live together.

In the past 18 months I’ve done a lot of work on myself, trying to understand what happened, grieve the loss of the relationship, and heal. I’ve learned to minimize contact with her and, recently, I broke all social media ties. Once she realized that, she reached out to me to declare how thankful she was for all I had done for her and that she would like us to be friends. I told her in colorful, sometimes eloquent language just what I thought of her and how she treated me. Just to be sure that I burned that bridge to the ground, I reached out to her new boyfriend and told him what she was doing behind his back. It achieved the desired result. Unfortunately, now I regret what I did and I would like to apologize to her. I don’t want to do it because I want her back in my life. That would be very bad for me. I want to do it because it would give me a sense of peace since I was raised to take responsibility when I did something wrong. The question I have is whether this is a good idea?

– Asking for Trouble?