“How Can I Stop Thinking of My Ex?”
We work in a similar niche field, we had many other things in common, and the connection grew quickly. I have been out for many years, and at the time we met, I was going through a divorce from my wife and my mother had recently died. She had only been out for a short time and I was her first serious girlfriend although she had briefly dated another woman before me. She lived alone with her cats in a little cottage on her work premises. Her family is all overseas and she had few close friends.
We met up in person a couple times and on the second visit spent nearly three weeks together in her home city over the winter holidays. It was easy, fun, and full of laughter. We are both introverts and have so many similar interests.
The holiday was wonderful, but as soon as I got home in January, I felt her pulling away. I knew she was stressed about changes at work and various other personal things, and I gave her space. At some point, she told me she felt like she was having a midlife crisis. I asked what she needed from me, and she said she didn’t want to be “constantly looking at a screen” (which was obviously the only way we communicated, either by video calls or text), and that my texts and the frequency of our calls were becoming overwhelming. I scaled back.
I have never been overly clingy or demanding, and I always matched her enthusiasm. In fact, from very early on in our total seven-month relationship, she told me she would marry me one day (even though I was going through a divorce and never initiated conversations like this), that I was the love of her life, that no one had ever loved her like I had, etc. After three weeks of this strange behavior and off the back of our canceling a plan to see each other again in person (given the tension between us and the fact that we were due to meet up at my sister’s house overseas), she called me and broke up with me. I was totally blindsided, and apart from one cursory text response the next day, I never heard from her again. She went from professions of adoration and predictions of marriage to stone-cold silence, overnight.
It has now been many months since we broke up, but I cannot seem to move past it. I’m not in love with her, but she is on my mind a lot. I felt (feel?) a lot of anger towards her and a lack of closure. To this day, I do not understand why she started pulling away after months of telling me I was the love of her life, and after such a good holiday together, including a teary airport goodbye. She never explained her behavior or apologized, and she left me reeling. I had a lot of hope for the relationship and even now, eight months after breaking up, I find myself wishing, occasionally, that she would contact me to get back together. I know she won’t.
I don’t want to admit I’m heartbroken because I’m so angry that she was able to cut me out so easily. Part of me thinks she was terrified about being out (if people saw pictures of us together, she’d say I was her sister or friend), or not yet sure of herself. I know it doesn’t really matter.
How do I move past this? How do I forgive her and stop being angry – and also stop holding out hope that one day she’ll give me answers? How do I put her out of my mind for good and stop constantly thinking, “What just happened”? Lastly, it’s a terrible idea to reach out to her, right, given that she’s ignored my emails and messages since our breakup? — WTF
You say you don’t want to admit you’re heartbroken because you’re angry your ex was able to cut you out so easily, and maybe what you don’t realize is that your anger IS your heartbreak. It’s so much easier to express anger, which feels powerful, than it is to express sadness or grief, which feels vulnerable. There’s no way past your sorrow and grief and sadness than through it, and if you don’t let yourself actually really sit in that vulnerable spot with those uncomfortable emotions, you don’t heal and you don’t get past it.
We could theorize why your ex behaved the way she did. Maybe she had unprocessed trauma that was holding her back. Maybe the transition to living openly as a lesbian was proving harder than she could manage. Maybe she, too, had trouble sitting with uncomfortable feelings and so, rather than face them, she ran from them. As you said, it doesn’t really matter what her deal was or is. What matters is the effect she had on you and how you choose to wade through the emotions that her departure from your life – and the dismissive way she departed – has stirred in you.
One way to process your feelings now is to name them. You are heartbroken, you are sad, maybe you’re confused and lonely, and maybe your confidence in your judgment has been affected. What else are you feeling? What other names can you call your emotional state? Naming something, and talking or journaling about it, strips it of some of the power it holds over you.
You asked how you can put your ex out of your mind for good and move on, but I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. Instead, I think a healthier framing is to ask yourself what, if anything, you learned from this relationship, what you would take from it if you could, and what you would leave behind and avoid in a future relationship. Instead of trying to erase the relationship and your ex from your mind, which is impossible anyway, it’s more empowering to gather whatever wisdom you can glean from the experience and use it to find a better match going forward. All experiences – even, and maybe especially, the ones that leave us hurt – offer something useful to us. If we can find and take those useful bits, it can soften some of those feelings that are uncomfortable to sit with. It can give some of the power back to us.
You are hurting, but pain doesn’t define you. And the pain won’t stick around forever. Time is the greatest healer, and as you continue moving through your heartbreak, the harder edges of this stage will soften and you may find yourself feeling less anger and maybe even more compassion for your ex. That compassion and even forgiveness, if you feel ready to give it, won’t affect your ex much because you aren’t going to actually explicitly express it to her (continue resisting the idea of reaching out!). But compassion and forgiveness will affect YOU. It will help transform your grief into something else – something that is easier and lighter to hold.
You don’t need to rush the experience of processing your anger and grief into forgiveness and compassion, but neither should you stand in the way of this transformation. You have to move through the feelings and know that on the other side is the freedom – the freedom from hurt and anger – that you crave.
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If you have a relationship/dating question I can help answer, you can send me your letters at wendy(AT)dearwendy.com.
Beautiful advice. An additional thought that, once I realized it many years ago, was a gift to me when working my way through pain: no matter what the person who hurt me had to say, no matter their excuse for their behavior, I wouldn’t have been content with their reasoning. I wouldn’t have understood it because I wouldn’t have treated another person that way. Closer doesn’t come from their excuses. It comes from within.
One thing to take away from all of this is to NOT fall (or maybe even get involved with) someone who isn’t at least semi local (1 to 2 hours away). You absolutely can not get to know someone who isn’t around. It is WAY WAY too easy to hide who you are (intentionally or unintentionally) when your interactions are all online, scheduled or VERY short in person. It is easy to be the charming, funny, good listener, shares all your interests person when you only have to be “on” for short stints via video call, phone call, or email.
Also because of this curated persona opportunity, a six month (an example timeline) “relationship” with someone who isn’t local is way way closer to a 1 month in person relationship.
The reality probably is that your girlfriend was just a flake. If you two had been interacting in person for 6 months you probably would have determined that easily and it might have been YOU who broke it off.