The Ex-Girlfriend’s Guide to Getting Over the One Who Got Away

To the ones who can’t let go easily, this is for you

Some people get their hooks in our hearts and just won’t let go. We’re trying to pull them out with one hand while holding tightly onto them with the other. It feels impossible to let go, let alone move forward.

If you’re here to find out how to let go quickly, you’ve come to the wrong place. I have early trauma and abandonment issues so it’s entirely unsurprising that letting go is hard for me. I hold on while all my friends wait in varying degrees of patience for me to get the hell over it and move on. I can’t even get mad at them for losing patience when I, too, have wondered when my stubborn heart is ever going to heal.

The Ex-Girlfriend’s Guide to Getting the Hell Over Them

Everything I’m about to say comes from my education and experience as a former therapist and from my lived experience as both an ex-wife and ex-girlfriend (once for the former and many times for the latter). There’s a process to getting over someone, particularly if you have it in your head that the person you’re trying to get over was “The One”. You know the one I mean. The person that feels like your person. The one who felt like home to you. The relationship is over, and you’re left feeling … homeless.

Healing is an Inside Job, But …

This is not the part where I say that time heals all wounds. That’s bullshit. Your physical body might be able to heal, but if you don’t get the stitches you need for your wound, you’re not going to heal as well as you could. That’s as far as I’ll go with this medical analogy before it becomes obvious that I don’t know anything about the technicalities. What I am saying is this: emotional wounds need help healing, too.

You might need therapy. I know I did. Trauma therapy, in particular, helped me process why I held on so hard to someone who no longer wanted to be in a relationship with me. While I didn’t instantaneously let go and stop loving him, I was able to see that I had stayed in a relationship that was no longer meeting my needs because it was an echo of my childhood experience.

Healing might be an inside job, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it alone — or that we should. We need a strong support system, but it also helps to have a professional who can help give the kind of perspective that the people who know and love us simply cannot provide. Healing is hard, and trying to do it alone is completely unnecessary.

Go Cold Turkey the Sooner the Better

What I say now, I say with love, empathy, and more compassion than you can know: Ghost them. This is not advice I give lightly. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. In an ideal world, we can speak to the person we’re struggling to get over and explain to them that ongoing contact is just too hard for us to manage, and they would respect our boundaries. That’s my first suggestion, but if that doesn’t work out, it’s time to employ the infamous No Contact Rule.

The No Contact Rule is when exes don’t see or speak to each other for 30–60 days at a minimum. No social media. No texting. Nothing. It’s insanely difficult, and if you’re wondering if I did this, I can say unequivocally that I did not — and lived to regret it.

I wanted to hold on, and I even tried to stay friends. But it hurt, and I didn’t feel like it was right to tell him about that hurt because it wasn’t his responsibility to manage. It would just make him feel bad, and it wouldn’t make me feel better. I already felt brutally rejected. I didn’t want to add humiliated on top of it.

It took me longer than I will admit to go cold turkey with my ex. To stop checking social media every time I had a bad dream and was afraid something was wrong. To stop asking friends about him. To stop being tempted to reach out. But I realized that even an impersonal glimpse of social media or a minor mention from a friend could set back my healing. I had to send my love out and disappear from his life entirely, no longer even haunting the memories of our relationship or the public evidence of his life continuing on without me.

To get over an ex, it’s important to go cold turkey as soon as possible. Stop. It won’t make you feel better. The contact will only make it hurt worse in the long run. True healing won’t start until you stop reaching out to them to ease your suffering. Even a brief period of radio silence can help your heart begin to mend.

Drop a Truth Bomb … On Yourself

I have said in the past that the one who got away is not The One. And I stand by that statement. Unless they plan on circling back at some point in the future, someone who leaves us is not for us. No matter how much we wish that wasn’t true. Sometimes, we need to hit ourselves with a little splash of truth — a person who loves us and wants to build a life with us doesn’t leave us or hurt us so much that we feel we need to leave them.

We also have to stop telling ourselves the absolute nonsense that we’ll never love again. Love is a renewable resource. There’s no supply chain issue that will prevent us from loving someone else with just as much passion and promise as we loved the last person. In fact, if we’ve learned anything from the last relationship, we’ll likely love the next person better and hopefully raise our standards so that we’re loved better, too.

We also need to confront what it is we’re holding onto and what stories we’re telling ourselves to keep that connection alive. For me, I had come out of the healthiest relationship I ever had with someone I truly respected, admired, and adored. I loved spending time with him. I loved all the ways he made my life better and all the ways I had become a better person for knowing him. But I could not make him love me — and believe me when I say I tried.

I couldn’t be wonderful enough for him to love back. I couldn’t be perfect enough. Because the problem wasn’t me, and it wasn’t him. It was us. He might have felt like my person, but I only got to borrow him for a little while because it turns out that I wasn’t his person. We cannot control how other people feel, and sometimes we need to remind ourselves that the right person won’t make us beg to be seen, known, understood, or loved.

Forgive Everything and Everyone — Especially You

Part of the process also involves deciding to forgive everyone and everything. I went through all the stages of grief and back again. It took a while for me to forgive him for all the ways he hurt me. It took me even longer to forgive myself.

But I couldn’t move on until I had.

Forgiving ourselves is often the hardest part. We feel foolish for loving with such abandon only to be abandoned. We might feel like we missed some of the signs. Or all of them. We might wish we’d been the ones to end it — or wish we didn’t have to step up and do it. Forgiveness is a necessary step to letting go.

I had to stop taking things personally even though they felt very personal. I had to practice self-compassion for loving so hard and being disappointed so much. I had to forgive him for not being able to see a life shared with me. I had to forgive us both for unwittingly hurting each other in the process of coming together and then falling apart. I couldn’t move on until I could forgive it all.

Time to Let Go — For Real This Time

I have let go in tiny stages. A little here, a little there. I would think I was over it when it would come back in a rush of grief. Fuck! Back to the drawing board.

But when I finally let go, it wasn’t dramatic. No one noticed but me. It was quiet in my house, dark outside, and getting late, and letting go just … arrived. I wasn’t exactly ready. Like parenting, letting go of someone we love is never something we’re going to be completely prepared to do. But my heart was at peace. I could do this. In fact, in the moment I thought it, I realized that I already had.

I’d let go. It was a quiet release — and a relief. I think of him often. How could I not when we were so intertwined for so long? I encounter memories, feel gratitude, and let them pass. I’m not holding onto anyone who isn’t holding onto me. I hope he’s happy. I hope he’s well. I truly hope that he has love in his life. But I hope all of that for me, too, which is why I had to let go of the hook I was holding in my own heart. For good this time.