People We "Used" To Know?

So I'm listening to Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know, which I love.  This song just speaks to me.  But there's a reason that it speaks to me, presumably because it's about some unhappy relationship that has ended abruptly.    All of us have had one of those, it's not like I'm special in that regard. 

But then I got to thinking about it, and I'm trying to decide if I consider the two serious boyfriends I've had in my life as merely people I used to know.  As many angry feelings I harbor towards them and myself following our relationships, I do firmly believe I wouldn't be the person I am today without them.  So how can they be reduced to people I just used to know?  But to give them any more significance feels a bit traiterous to my current happy self, who had to endure years and years of mind fucking torture just to come out on the other side half put together and in need of serious therapy.
As I write this, the song is playing in the background.  And perhaps what is truest about the song is that although the words go on and on about the exes basically cutting each other off and not needing each other anymore, the emotions behind the words tell a different story.  There is pain and regret and longing.  And I think those are the truer feelings, masked by apathy and anger. 

I don't think relationships like that can be downplayed as just acquaintenances.  There is too much history and emotion and time put into them.  Entire years of lives go into trying to make them work.  Friendships are lost, professions are put to the side, lifelong dreams are stalled ... all in favor of trying to make some relationship work.  But that person - there was a reason why you let that happen.  There was a reason you allowed yourself to neglect one person over another.  There was a reason you thought it was okay to put more time into another person than yourself.   You loved that person.  If love can be reduced to just something you once had with someone you used to know, we are all just sort of shells aren't we? 

I don't have any particular desire to see either of these two men again, or talk to them, or be friends with them on Facebook.  Neither of them were very nice to me in the end and my pride prohibits me from publicly admitting that even a tiny part of me still has any sort of positive feelings toward either of them.   But that also has a lot to do with the fact that I acknowledge just how important they were to me once.  I could never honestly tell my husband that one of them was just somebody I used to know.    So it isn't that I don't care because they're just random people to me, it's that I don't want to care.  Because what I have going on now is so way better than what I ever had going on with them, that it's not worth it to me to re-open that window. 

So even though I still love the song, I see it as a sort of admission that these sort of people could never be someone you just knew once.  This song is the story of a person, or two people perhaps, who are desperately trying to convince themselves that they can minimize their relationships to the point where they never really mattered in the first place.