I Miss My Ex, But I Don’t Want to Date Him

Eda Dolunay

11 minutes ago

6 min read

I think there has only been one person in my life I was truly, deeply in love with. When I found that kind of connection, I used to believe it would never end. Because when you love something that much, you don’t want to believe it can ever disappear from your life. Especially when that connection has taught you so much about yourself. Losing it can almost feel like losing a part of yourself.

But as I grew up, I realised that you can never really control a connection. Sometimes, for a connection to remain valuable, it has to end. Before it becomes toxic. Before you start resenting each other. Before you consume something that was once beautiful.

I’ve never really understood the obsession with first love. I think everyone romanticises their first love, but there is a huge difference between your FIRST love and your first LOVE.

Your first love teaches you relationship dynamics. You learn how to let someone into your life, how to make space for another person, how to build a life with someone, how to fight, how to make up. In a way, you learn life.

But your first LOVE teaches you about yourself. You learn how deeply you are capable of loving someone. You learn what your love can survive. You learn who you become when you attach yourself to another person. And I think there is something incredibly powerful about loving someone who introduced you to yourself.

There has only been one ex in my life that I was truly, deeply in love with. And leaving him was incredibly difficult. Not because we didn’t love each other, but because our lives were going in completely different directions.

He was the first person in the world who taught me who I was. That’s what I think first love does. It introduces you to yourself. To your fears. To your trauma. To the way you love. Sometimes it heals you. Sometimes it simply shows you what needs to be healed. And I don’t think it’s possible not to love someone who shaped the person you are today.

Because by the time we reach adulthood, we have already lived through so many different ages and versions of ourselves. And so much of who we are is made up of those old versions. My 20-year-old self is still somewhere inside me. And my 20-year-old self loved him more than anything in the world. No matter how much I change, I cannot change the love that the 20-year-old woman inside me once had for him.

But I’m not 20 anymore. And maybe accepting a breakup starts with accepting that you don’t get to rewrite what your past self felt just because your present self understands things differently. Because I really loved him then. I really was in love. I really imagined a future with him. And I don’t have to deny any of that just because it ended.

Something ending doesn’t mean it was never real.

I’m not usually someone who falls apart over breakups. Except for my first one, when I was seventeen. I genuinely thought I was going to die from the pain. For an entire year after that, I couldn’t even go on a date with anyone. When you’re seventeen, a broken heart and the end of the world feel like exactly the same thing.

Then you grow up.

And you learn something very important about breakups: if someone starts making you lose yourself, if they start making you love yourself less, there may not be much left in that relationship except your nostalgia for it. Because no matter how much you love someone, no matter how much you would do for them, if you stop respecting yourself in the process, one day you will look back and wonder why you abandoned yourself for someone else.

If you are so afraid of losing someone that you become willing to lose yourself, you have already lost the more important thing.

That changed the way I see breakups. Because sometimes a breakup isn’t a loss. Sometimes it’s the most painful way of finding your way back to yourself. Especially when it comes to toxic relationships. If you’ve ever been in one, sometimes forgetting the person isn’t even the hardest part. It’s forgetting what the relationship made you believe about yourself.

“I’m not good enough.”

“I’m difficult to love.”

“No one will ever love me like this.”

“It was all my fault.”

That’s why, after a toxic relationship, I like to write down the things it made me think about myself. Not just the things they said, but why those words were able to hurt me so deeply in the first place. Because someone can say whatever they want to you. But for their words to become your reality, they usually have to touch a wound that already existed.

I also had a method that I wouldn’t necessarily call healthy, but it worked for me. I kept the insults. The negative messages. The things that were said to make me feel small. Whenever I missed my toxic relationship and fell into that emotional emptiness that comes after a breakup, I would read them. At first, it hurt. Then one day, I realised I felt nothing. Because the things he had said about me were no longer the things I believed about myself.

Sometimes healing isn’t about forgiving someone. It’s about getting their voice out of your head.

But not every breakup is like that. Sometimes you still love the person. You just can’t be with them anymore.

And I think those are the hardest breakups.

Because there is no one to hate. No terrible thing to remind yourself of. No easy way to say, “Thank God it ended.”

Sometimes there are simply two people who genuinely loved each other, genuinely meant something to each other, and still ended up going in different directions.

I can miss my ex today. I can miss the time we spent together. I can miss the way he loved me. I can miss the woman I was when I was with him. Sometimes I can even miss being 20 and the way I saw the world back then.

But that doesn’t mean I want to date him again. I miss my ex. But I don’t want to date him.

Because missing someone is not the same as wanting them back. I think the day you learn to separate those two things is the day a breakup truly starts to end.

Maybe getting over someone doesn’t mean you stop missing them. Maybe it means you stop missing the version of yourself that existed with them. You accept that she doesn’t exist anymore. And you accept that they aren’t the person they were with you anymore either.

Because you are not the person you were when you were with them. And they are not the person they were when they were with you.

And that’s not a bad thing.

People sometimes meet us in a particular version of ourselves. We meet them in a particular version of theirs. Then life continues. We change. Someone who was once the centre of your life becomes a chapter in your story. But some chapters teach you more than the entire book.

Letting someone leave your life doesn’t mean you have to erase the mark they left on it.

I don’t try to erase the people I loved anymore. Because if I erased them, I think I would also be erasing parts of myself.

The woman who loved them was me. The woman who cried over them, laughed with them, grew with them, made mistakes with them, sometimes lost herself and sometimes found herself again because of them was also me.

I’m not that woman anymore. But I am who I am today because she existed.

And maybe growing up isn’t about killing our past selves. Maybe it’s about understanding why she loved the way she did and choosing who we want to be now.

Because we can miss some people for the rest of our lives.

We can love some people for the rest of our lives. And still not want a life with them. There is no contradiction in that. Sometimes the final form of loving someone is not building a life with them. It’s being grateful that they were once part of yours, and continuing to build your own.

Maybe real closure isn’t waking up one day and realising you don’t miss them anymore. Maybe it’s missing them and still knowing how to come back to yourself. Because in the end, it was never really about letting them go. It was about never letting go of yourself again.