Confession: I Miss My Ex

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I miss his eyes, I miss his smile, I miss the sound of his voice…

I’m lying, I don’t miss any of those men. Ugh, that felt disgusting to write. But there have been many times in the past where I did miss an ex and that was the loneliest, most conflicting feeling I’ve ever had.

Human relationships are never that straightforward. Coupled with the complexity of human emotions, it sometimes feels like one big shit show. This means that, unfortunately, the end of a relationship doesn’t always mean the end of your feelings. It can take months and sometimes years for those feelings to fade away, and in my case, it took a couple of years.

With my first big love and now ex, I can’t say that my feelings after our relationship always felt like love. Some days I desperately missed the good times; the physical touch, the effortless banter, feeling small and held and taken care of by him. I loved who I got to be which was someone explicitly in love. That experience didn’t exist in other areas of my life and so I savoured it with him. He was dishonest, reckless, toxic and everything he needed to be to ruin the relationship and my feelings toward that seem to comfortably co-exist with the positive ones. I so badly wanted to hate him when we broke up and to only think about his wrongdoings, but I couldn’t. And I felt ashamed about this.

It’s hard to admit to the people who care about you that you miss your ex. How can they possibly meet you with empathy and understanding knowing what that person put you through?  How do you not feel like an idiot also knowing what person put you through? I certainly felt like an idiot for a long time. I hardly spoke about these complicated feelings with anyone because nobody understood how I felt. Looking back, I didn’t have to feel like an idiot because this feeling is so normal.

You can miss someone who hurt you because there was once a time where you loved and/or cared about them. There were also positive memories with them. They also had qualities about them that attracted you to them in the first place. They might even be a close relative, which is a whole other whirlwind of feelings. For me, this was someone I met at 16 and left in my early 20s. That’s a good few years of knowing and growing with a person. I don’t know how I expected myself to go from 100 to 0, but I really did. I wish I would’ve allowed myself to gently and compassionately move on from him but I was very demanding of myself and met all the limerence, reminiscence and longing I had for him with shame. It was unnecessary.

I knew that I was never going back and I finally had enough love and respect for myself to stay away from him for good. I knew that I deserved better. I knew that missing him wouldn’t inspire me to reach out and try to reignite anything. Knowing all of this, I really could have allowed the feeling of missing him to just pass through me without shaming myself. I wasn’t ‘weak,’ ‘insecure’ or an ‘idiot.’ I was just human. I think this goes for any feeling. Sometimes it’s best not to intellectualise a feeling, but to let it pass through you even if it’s not what you want to feel about a person or situation. Many feelings and truths can exist at the same time.

I’m glad to have an unyielding ick for him that I thought I’d never have. I don’t miss him at all but I do miss who I got to be with him and I hope to meet that person again soon. Growing up has taught me I was the best thing about that toxic relationship and at least I’ll always have myself.

I hope you can exhale today and allow those taboo feelings to flow through you so you can be truly free. It’s okay to miss them even if they hurt you. You’re only human.

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Speak to you soon.