It’s been three months and I can’t get over my ex
Dear SJ
I was dating my now ex for just over a year. Things were going really well for the first 5 months, he met my parents and my friends and they all really liked him. He was always calling and texting me. We saw each three times a week, had really fun dates.
Then about six months in, I noticed he had started drinking quite a lot and picking drunken fights me with. In the middle of one fight, he aggressively pushed me away when I tried to defuse it by hugging him. I told him I was falling in love with him, he didn’t say anything, but our fight ended. Then he started taking longer to reply to my texts, at one point it took him 12 hours to reply! Then a month later, he randomly broke up with me. He said he didn’t want to move in with me, but I never even suggested it. He was so amazing in the beginning, and his change in behaviour was really weird.
Anyway, it’s been three months, I’ve been no contact, but I’m really struggling to get over him. He hasn’t blocked me and I keep checking to see if he’s online. I secretly wish we could get back together. I feel so miserable without him and I don’t know how I’ll ever meet anyone like him again. How do I get over him? Please help me move on.
B
Dear B,
Firstly I’m sorry you’re struggling so much with this break up, they aren’t easy Secondly I wonder if you’re being a bit hard on yourself. You said you were falling in love him, and so you must have deeply cared for him and yet it’s only been three months. It’s normal to still be in a painful phase of grief.
Grieving a break up is incredibly hard, no wonder you are feeling desperate to move on. But as much as we’d all like to, you cannot skip your grief. The pain you’re feeling is the mind’s way of healing the heart. It’s same as breaking a leg, it takes a while to fully recover. You can’t will yourself into healing because you’re fed up of being in pain. With the body we recognise it, with the heart, we are more inpatient.
It’s important to remember healing isn’t linear, you will have ups and downs, you may even go through all the stages of grief in an hour and recycle back again. You may feel fine one minute and then be struck with a wave of intolerable grief the next. This is normal, what you’re feeling is normal and you are right to feel as you do.
You asked for my help moving on, but in order to do so, I think you need to explore why you stayed with a man who was picking fights with you and ignoring you for long periods of time. I also query whether you said you were falling for him, just to get to the fight to stop, especially if you’d been physically pushed away. You didn’t seem particularly upset he didn’t say it back.
It sounds as though you are mourning the man you met at the beginning. You said his behaviour changed around the 6 month mark. This is usually when people start to consider how serious they actually are about someone. The fact he brought up not moving in together when you hadn’t spoken about it is telling. As well as his attempts to create distance, physically and emotionally by not even discussing your declaration of love. It’s all very telling of someone who has a fear of intimacy and rejection, therefore they self sabotage in an effort to protect themselves from future harm. The longer you were together, the more overwhelmed he felt, which may explain the drinking. Regardless he sounds deeply troubled.
From the sounds of things, your ex is not an emotionally available man. If you did get back together this situation would only repeat once the threat of intimacy became too great. This is why, when you’re ready you should block him on WhatsApp. Maintaining a connection to him by staring at him through a phone screen is going to prolong things. Although it may not feel like it right now, he has done the kindest thing he can for you and set you free.
Break ups are a good time to glow up, to turn inward and make some emotional space for yourself. You need to examine why you want to be with a man who isn’t emotionally available or seemingly even very nice to you. If you have the resources, a trained therapist can help you work through some of these issues. I know I greatly benefited from therapy following a similarly painful break up.
The truth is, no you won’t meet anyone like him because everyone is unique. But you will meet someone different and if you’ve done the work, different will be better. I also wonder whether you think he’s somehow irreplaceable, which is pouring lighter fluid on the grief flame. If so, you should know that it’s not true. If you allow yourself time to process your grief, you will eventually be open to others, who will also become irreplaceable in your eyes.
In the meantime, you need to stop internally beating yourself up for continuing to feel pain at your loss. You need to be kinder to yourself, it’s harder to heal if you’re constantly ripping out your emotional stitches because you’re annoyed you’re not healing fast enough.
There are no short cuts to moving on, or no healthy ones that will last longer than a few weeks anyway.’ It’s frustrating I know, but eventually you’ll find slowly, you think about him less and less, till one day, you forget to think about him at all. Until you get to that point, indulge yourself in self care, do what you need to do to feel better, you deserve it.
SJ