Why We Miss Our Exes, Even When We Know We Shouldn’t Get Back Together
There’s a particularly annoying moment after a breakup when your head has already worked everything out, you’ve explained it all to your friends, you’ve handed yourself a fully reasoned verdict complete with supporting arguments, and you’ve even managed to live convincingly for a while, and then one evening you hear a familiar song, find an old photo, or see his name on your phone, and suddenly you realise you miss him. What’s especially maddening is that you remember perfectly well why it ended, you know every argument against getting back together, and you could practically run yourself through a two-hour consultation on the subject, but your feelings, as usual, don’t show up to the hearing and don’t file any objections in writing.
We usually just say, “I miss him,” though sometimes it’s a bit more complicated than that, and this may be part of why we miss our exes even when we know getting back together would be a mistake.
Not the woman who got anxious, tried to sort things out, and called a friend at midnight to say he’d clearly lost his mind. That version of you is not exactly the one you’re desperate to bring back. What you miss is the other one: the woman who laughed more easily, got ready for a date with real pleasure, felt beautiful, could decide on a whim to go out for dinner at ten at night, and didn’t spend the next morning conducting an internal inquiry into her own lack of seriousness. It is remarkably easy to file that woman under his name by mistake.
We Become Different Versions of Ourselves Around Different People
There’s nothing mystical about this. In relationships, we’re constantly reacting to each other, which is why you can become anxious and controlling around one person and then, around someone else, relax so completely that you barely recognise yourself.
Sometimes a woman spends years running the equivalent of a small but wildly chaotic company, handling paperwork, bills, holidays, children, dogs, doctors, groceries and the mysterious disappearance of his socks, and then genuinely wonders why, by evening, all she wants is silence rather than lace lingerie and romance. It is difficult to be a lover and a full-time logistics department at the same time.
Then someone else comes along, someone with whom you don’t have to make every single decision yourself, and it turns out that underneath all that competence there is still someone who knows how to flirt, laugh too loudly, say yes to spontaneous plans and have absolutely no idea where the car is parked because, for once, that is not her problem. That feeling can be almost like a drug, especially after years of having to be sensible, strong and responsible, which is exactly why, after a breakup, we can end up missing not just the man but that particular lightness we felt around him.
Memory Makes Relationships Look Better Than They Sometimes Were
Memory is a pretty shameless editor, because after a while it starts quietly cutting out everything that ruins the story.
You remember perfectly well how he looked at you across the table, how he made you laugh in the car and how, one night, you drove off somewhere for no reason at all, but you remember far less clearly the evening you spent two hours arguing about something ridiculous, then sat in silence and spoke to each other in the tone of tax inspectors.
That is why longing after a breakup does not actually prove very much. It does not necessarily mean the relationship was wonderful or that you should rush back to it; sometimes it simply means that somewhere in that story there were moments when you genuinely liked your own life, and the version of yourself who was living it.
It is especially hard to forget the people around whom we unexpectedly came alive, and they are not necessarily the right partners, which would obviously be far more convenient, because as an adult you would prefer to fall exclusively for free, reliable, emotionally mature people with clear intentions and, ideally, decent credit. Unfortunately, the psyche appears not to read our list of requirements, so sometimes nothing fits: his character, his circumstances, his lifestyle, his plans, his relationship status, and somehow the lights still come on inside you anyway.
Sometimes that feeling pushes you towards decisions much bigger than a new dress or a haircut. At one point I left St Petersburg and moved to Tbilisi, and I think it was the first decision I had made in a long time that was not dictated by reason but by exactly that feeling: I wanted to feel alive again, not just right.
And this is where the brain draws a perfectly understandable conclusion: if I feel this good around him, then he must be what I need. Though sometimes the more accurate version is simply this: I really like who I am around him.
The Most Useful Question Here Isn’t About Him
After a breakup, it is astonishingly easy to spend an enormous amount of time on questions that change nothing in your life: will he text, is he thinking about me, why did he look at my story, why after seven minutes instead of two, what does that like mean, and why was there a like yesterday and none today. With two friends and a bottle of wine, the whole thing can turn into a full-scale analytical conference, though it has very little bearing on your actual future.
A far more useful question is what exactly you liked about yourself around that person, and the answer is often considerably less romantic but much more useful. Maybe you felt sexy again, maybe you stopped micromanaging every little thing, or maybe you simply enjoyed being looked at like a woman rather than like the person who knows the online banking password, the vet’s number and when the rent is due.
And if the real discovery of that relationship was that being around someone finally allowed you to feel alive, the question becomes bigger: why did you need another person for that in the first place?
You Can Miss Someone and Still Not Get Back Together
I think one of the more adult things about relationships begins when we stop treating a feeling as an instruction to act. You can miss someone and still understand that a life together would lead straight back to the same place; you can love someone and not want to relive what brought the relationship to an end; you can remember the good parts without using them as proof that the bad ones never happened.
Sometimes a person genuinely gives us something important, even if he was never meant to remain in our lives forever. He might show us that we are still capable of falling for someone, of wanting, laughing, taking risks, liking ourselves and doing things not because they are sensible but because we really want to, but none of that actually belongs to him.
If you felt beautiful around him, that beauty did not leave with him. If you wanted to travel again, he does not own your trips. If you started wearing dresses, you do not have to fold them back into the wardrobe after the breakup like evidence in a closed case. He may have switched something on inside you, but the person who turns on the light still does not own the room.
Maybe that is why some relationships only really end long after the last conversation: first you have to survive his absence, then stop waiting for a message, then learn to remember the good without immediately wanting it all back, and only after that do you begin to understand what you were actually so afraid of losing along with him.
I thought I was afraid of losing him, but it turned out I was much more afraid of losing myself again. And I didn’t have to leave myself behind.