How do I (54M) stop loving someone (51F) who no longer loves me? We were in a very LDR for around 18 months up until February this year and I don’t know how to move on. The idea of starting a new relationship feels wrong (viscerally so) but I feel alone in life (but I do have a loving and supportive extended family).
The reasons the relationship ended, so I am told, were due to the distance (several thousand miles) and my circumstances which mean I would not be able to move, so we could live together / marry, for several years.
TLDR; I need to move on from a relationship that has ended but feel unable to do so.
Comments
Be patient with yourself. Breaking up is painful. You need time to grieve.
But don’t let your grief fester and become your entire life, or let it become a positive feedback loop where grieving makes your grief worse. Make sure to take mental health breaks, where you connect with other people and concentrate on other things. Hobbies, work, friendships, health.
Trust that this pain will ebb in time. This is just for now, not forever.
This is no different from the grief process you go through when someone you care about dies.
Because someone you do care about has died: the person you imagined yourself being in the future, had this relationship continued. The relationship is gone, so that person is gone, and you’re feeling his loss like you would if someone else had passed from your life.
So the process for dealing with this is the same way you deal with any grieving process: you work through it and accept that it’s going to take time. You cannot rush a grief process, because all that does is sweep feelings under the rug and make it so that you have to deal with them later instead of now.
So if you need to sit in silence, sit in silence. If you need to get out and do stuff to get your mind off of her, do that. If you need to be busy with chores, put your energy into that. If you need to cry or scream or let your emotions out in some way, do that. If you need to talk about it all, reach out to one of your extended family and ask them to listen while you talk. If you need to spend time in prayer or meditation, put time into that.
If you need support while you do these things, reach out to your extended family and ask for that support.
Then be patient. This will take time. There is no magical thing you can do that will get her out of your mind by the end of the week.