Getting over an ex

[Gman]

Ok so I'm feeling pretty down right now and thoughts are just swarming me and I just don't know what to quite do and honestly I just want to vent a bit about what's bugging me.

So It's been over a year since I broke with my ex…… over a year….. I STILL find myself thinking about her, like I am doing right now. While it's not as bad as it used to be, it's still really depresses me whenever it happens. The thing that bothers me the most is that she is the only memory I have of how it feels to be intimate with someone and I am terrified of forgetting how that feels like, so my mind grasps desperately to these thoughts. While I did have 2 dates since the breakup that went well (where I found myself kissing my dates), out of a total of 3, they didn't evolve anywhere further than that and I think that that really brought me down. I am REALLY struggling to keep my head up but I feel pretty shitty about my situation. I also find myself avoiding quite frequently from asking women that I find attractive on dates even when I really want to do so, mostly due to fears that come from "external validation" reasons (things like fearing what others might say about me if I made a move on someone or worse, how my parents will react to it, because they tend to get quite judgmental over people who they don't approve of).

I was hoping maybe others can share their ex stories and how did they get over them (if at all) and if they managed to find someone new, then also share how that came to be. I guess my question is: what do you think was your mindset was before you moved on from your ex and what was your mindset when you found someone new.

[KMR]

I had an ex who took me a particularly long time to truly get over. We dated for about a year and a half, and the breakup was not mutual and unexpected, so it hit me really hard. The first few weeks after the breakup were really rough, then the emotional pain got progressively less intense and also shifted from pure sadness to a bittersweet sort of feeling, where I thought a lot about all the great times we had together and was both happy for the good memories and sad that those things were over.

By a complete stroke of luck, I ended up in another relationship shortly after this one ended. I started using OkCupid again about a month after the breakup, but only because the last time I used OLD it took me a year and a half to have any real success with it, so I figured there was no need to wait to start dating since I wasn't expecting any kind of quick success. But I ended up meeting someone pretty quickly and we dated for six months. It was a nice relationship, but we eventually realized that we weren't as compatible as it seemed on the surface and not quite what each of us was looking for in a partner. Throughout that entire relationship, I often found myself comparing this guy to my ex in a lot of little ways and thinking, "I miss this thing that my ex and I had in common, but that this guy and I don't." I couldn't quite figure out if that was a genuine sign that this new relationship just wasn't quite right for me or if I was just so hung up on my ex that I was comparing my new boyfriend to him unnecessarily. Either way, it probably wasn't a good sign.

So after my new boyfriend and I broke up, I found that most of the feelings of sadness were still being directed back to my previous breakup with my ex, not my most recent relationship. I continued to use OkCupid again, but only had a handful of dates over the next two years, none of which progressed past the first or second date, sometimes because I wasn't interested in the guy and sometimes because the guy wasn't interested in me. This was discouraging too, so the bittersweet feelings toward my ex lingered, often in the form of, "What if I never meet anyone as good as he was?" And it wasn't until I started dating my current boyfriend that those feelings finally faded away.

I hate to imply that it requires a new relationship to get over a previous one, as I don't think that's necessarily the case, but it's a tough thing to deal with the loneliness of losing someone you love combined with the frustration of not having any other romantic success. The problem is that we still associate those romantic feelings and experiences we once had with our exes, and we tend to miss those experiences a lot when we no longer have them, but every time we think about it, it brings up feelings directly related to the ex that we're trying to get over, making it a lot harder to actually get over them. Once we get into a new relationship, those feelings start to become associated with the new partner, so it's not surprising that this helps so much in reducing those feelings of longing for a past partner.

I guess the bottom line of what I'm trying to say is that I think your feelings are perfectly normal and understandable. Don't feel like you should be over your ex because some length of time has passed; emotions don't really work like that and if you try to control them or get upset about feeling a certain way when you believe you shouldn't be, it often just makes things worse. The frustration you feel about not finding someone new is also very understandable and it's not surprising that those frustrations are linked with your feelings about your ex. I wish I had something better to tell you than just "keep it up, someday you'll find someone new," but I really do think you're doing a good job with putting yourself out there and dating, even if isn't getting you the results you want just yet.