I Hate My Ex For Wasting My Time

No matter how you look at it, relationships are investments. You put time, effort, money, happiness, and sadness into them and expect commitment in return. If you don’t get the same kind of investment back or if your partner leaves you, you feel that your loyalty has been taken for granted and that your partner or ex-partner should have tried harder to make things work.

Your ex should have addressed the problems and reassured you and himself/herself that love is bigger than all the problems combined. But because your ex lacked the tools and willpower to do that and just waited for things to improve on their own, the relationship became a ticking time bomb.

It was only a matter of time before your ex got tired of being in an unfulfilling relationship with you and broke up with you.

That was when the breakup happened and forced you to experience withdrawal symptoms. The breakup probably took you by surprise because you didn’t expect your ex to detach from you and abandon you. You expected your ex to communicate properly, deal with his or her problems maturely, and continue to work on the relationship.

You essentially expected your ex to think, feel, and act like you. But instead, your ex took a different path. One that encouraged your ex to fall out of love and crave alone time. That path felt safer and more comfortable for your ex as it let your ex do things on his or her terms and slowly pushed you out of sight.

Your ex could have realized that he began to distance himself from you and do something about it. He could have fixed his problems before they snowballed into big issues. But your ex didn’t want to do that and get closer to you because he enjoyed his space and chose to ignore relationship problems and personal problems that were in urgent need of repair.

This went on for a while until your ex detached completely and lost feelings for you.

It can be difficult not to hate your ex for wasting your time and hurting you. It can be tempting to think poorly of your ex and get angry with him or her for developing the grass is greener syndrome and dumping you. But despite your ex leaving you and wasting so much of your time, try not to hate your ex.

If you want, you can dislike your ex and acknowledge that your ex isn’t the right person for you. Doing so will help you accept the breakup and move forward. Hating your ex, on the other hand, is a bit extreme. Hatred will force you to develop resentment and make you think about an ex who doesn’t deserve any more of your time.

You plan to stop your ex from wasting your time, right? In that case, hating your ex is counterproductive. It makes you keep your ex on your mind for as long as possible and lets your ex control you emotionally and mentally.

Know that it’s normal to feel anger or even hatred. Most dumpees go through stages of post-breakup grief and need a few weeks to stop feeling angry and vengeful. That’s why you need to do your best not to act on pain and anger and hurt your ex back.

Hurting your ex could force your ex to take you on and hurt you back. Your ex could point out your flaws, ignore/block you, tell you he/she is dating someone better than you, and make you lose more hope than your anxious brain is capable of losing.

In other words, your ex could show you how little your time, affection, and commitment meant to him or her and trigger your worst fears.

So refrain from acting on impulse and taking your anger out on your ex. Anger is your responsibility, and so is healing from the breakup. You can deal with pain and anger by shutting your ex out of your life and learning to live without your ex.

Today, we talk about why you hate your ex for wasting your time.

Why do I hate my ex for wasting my time?

Unreciprocated time, emotions, and expectations have hurt you badly. They told you that your ex didn’t appreciate you as a person and everything you did for your ex. You didn’t expect much from your ex, but you did invest in your ex with the expectation of receiving gratitude, compliments, love, and commitment.

Emotional fulfillment was enough for you to support your ex and be there for him or her when help was needed

Therefore, relationships aren’t completely selfless. Yes, couples help each other willingly, but when they help each other, they do so because they expect to stay together. That’s neither selfish nor selfless. It’s normal and human because it’s in our nature to want love and appreciation for taking our time to help our partner.

We have a name for this simple gesture. We call it gratitude. Without it, a relationship is prone to breaking up when temptations and difficulties arise because there is nothing to remind a person that his or her partner is amazing and that he or she must fight for the relationship.

You’re probably angry with your ex because of your ex’s lack of gratitude. You did so much for your ex and got so little in return. All you wanted was commitment—and your ex couldn’t even give you that. Your ex took you for granted instead and showed you that your devotion and hard work meant nothing to him or her.

That made you feel stupid for trusting, helping, and confiding in your ex and triggered your need to defend yourself. To protect yourself against your ex’s mistreatment and lack of gratitude and validation, you got angry and began to resent your ex for making you suffer.

Anger was going to stop you from feeling miserable and humiliated. Anger is an emotion of power whose purpose is to keep undesirable situations and pain away. If you feel that you can’t regain control of your life because your ex has hurt you, you get angry and try to protect yourself.

And if you feel that anger alone isn’t enough to feel better, you contemplate reaching out and punishing your ex. By punishing your ex and getting a reaction out of him or her, you get to see that your ex is also in pain and that you’re not alone.

Dumpees who helped their ex a lot in the relationship tend to feel the angriest. They sacrificed their happiness, money, and emotions for their ex just to get dumped and replaced with someone else. Such dumpees feel humiliated for helping an ex who didn’t help them and show any appreciation.

They feel their ex wasted their time and that he or she deserves to suffer.

As an ex, your job isn’t to wait for your ex to get hit by karma and have the last laugh. Your job is to heal the healthy way – by processing the breakup and getting your life in order. Vengeance is merely a band-aid. It’s not the solution to your problems.

So why do you keep hating your ex for wasting your time?

You do that because your ex refused to invest in you. Not only that, but your ex also refused to invest in himself or herself and thought that he or she was going to be happier with someone else. Your ex basically stayed an observer because your ex didn’t have what it took to keep the romantic relationship going.

He or she expected more out of the relationship and focused on the negative aspects of it rather than the positive ones. This made your ex lose faith in you and allowed him or her to slowly disconnect from you. To disconnect, all your ex needed was the notion that he or she was happier without you.

That’s why your ex continued to focus on himself or herself and failed to invest in you and the relationship.

Deep inside, you know that your ex could have done a lot to save the relationship. He or she could have expressed his or her problems to you, signed up for therapy/couples counseling, started journaling, and talked to a mentor.

But instead, your ex stood idly by while the relationship fell apart.

The reason you hate your ex is that you thought your ex was going to fight for what he or she believed in. You thought you were safe with your ex and that your ex was developed enough to fight unwanted thoughts and emotions.

Sadly, you were proven wrong, got rejected, and had to forget your ex’s promises and stop your plans because of your ex. Your ex essentially stopped caring about you romantically, destroyed your dreams, hurt you, affected your self-esteem, and disorientated you.

It’s hard not to hate an ex for stripping you of value and making you think you were solely responsible for the breakup. This is especially true if your ex left you for someone else, didn’t give you closure, and treated you poorly during or after the breakup.

Mean and victimized dumpers cause a lot of pain and suffering to their ex. They don’t see how they contributed to the breakup and take responsibility.

Also, it’s possible you hate your ex because you were extremely attached to your ex. If you were codependent, you were possessive of your ex and felt like your ex owed you love and commitment. You considered your ex to be a huge part of you and couldn’t even imagine him or her not being in your romantic life.

That’s why the breakup destroyed your identity and shocked you so much it made you want your ex to take your pain away and restore your inner peace.

Anyway, you don’t want your ex to live a happy life after you’ve helped your ex so much. You feel entitled to the things you helped your ex with because those things were your investments. You’d hate to see your ex live happily with some other person thanks to you.

That wouldn’t just waste your time but also let your ex and his/her new partner reap the rewards of your hard work. Nothing hurts more than seeing your ex with someone else, doing the things you did together and having a great time.

Your ex moving on with another person while you’re struggling is beyond disrespectful. And your ex doing better because you helped your ex is a slap in the face. It shows how much gratitude, respect, and care your ex has for you.

You probably feel betrayed and angry if you helped your ex:

• find a job
• deal with depression/anxiety/health problems
• move countries and get settled in
• take care of his/her kids
• pay for rent/bills
• get a degree before you went back to school

Deeds that made you put your life on hold for your ex hurt the most because they make you feel used and unappreciated. They constantly remind you that your ex received your help and got away without doing much to make your life better.

That’s why you now get angry and want your ex to pay for hurting you.

Here’s why you hate your ex for wasting your life.

Post-breakup anger is temporary whereas hatred can turn into resentment. If you resent your ex, you could stay obsessed with your ex for the wrong reasons and hurt yourself in the process.

You could ruin your mental and physical health (they’re often related), negatively react to the things your ex says and does, put your life on hold for your ex, and expect your ex to help you heal and for your ex to change as a person.

I encourage you not to hold on to anger. You don’t need to be angry with an ex to feel better about the situation you’re in. You just need to focus on yourself and those who matter to you.

When you do that, your ex will lose significance in your eyes and lose power. This is true whether your ex stayed with you for a week or a year. Keeping your ex out of your mind will allow you to give up on wanting your ex to get hurt and/or understand what he or she did to you.

How to not hate your ex?

If you hate your ex’s guts, ask yourself why you hate your ex. If you realize you hate your ex because your ex dumped you, hating your ex is probably not a very healthy thing to do. Hatred makes things worse for your emotional health and healing and doesn’t affect your ex as much as it affects you.

Angry people tend not to understand that. They don’t see that unregulated anger is toxic for them and that it prevents them from developing the skills necessary for dealing with it.

Whether your ex did something to hurt you or not, acknowledge the fact that taking your anger out on your ex won’t help anyone. It will just make your ex defensive and you more eager to be understood.

To deal with anger maturely, aim for a healthy balance. Acknowledge your ex’s flaws and mistakes, but also remember that your ex made you happy at times. The relationship wasn’t completely bad or completely good. It had ups and downs.

You have every right to be angry. A little bit of anger is fine and healthy (especially if your ex did horrible things to you).

But you don’t have the right to message or call your ex and make your ex regret meeting you. You don’t have the right to hurt your ex back. You should strive to be better than your ex, rather than someone who punishes people who leave you.

Usually, I advise dumpees to only focus on their ex’s negative traits so they can realize their ex isn’t perfect.

But if you feel engulfed by rage and want to get back at your ex, you need to understand your ex’s reasons for hurting you and appreciate some of his or her good traits as well. By doing so, you can stop yourself from going crazy and punishing your ex.

A good way to control your emotions is to practice forgiveness. Tell yourself you forgive your ex for hurting you and that although it wasn’t the right thing to do, you understand his or her reasons for doing it. This won’t make you feel better right away, but it will allow you to accept your ex’s behavior and forgive your ex too.

It will also prevent you from doing something you’ll regret.

Secondly, think about your loved ones. They don’t want you to hate your ex to the bitter end. They want you to move on with your life and be happy. And you can’t be happy if you obsess about your ex 24/7 and let rage consume you.

The only way you can heal is to let go of hatred. Once you’ve done that, you’ll liberate yourself emotionally and stop caring about your ex wasting months or years of your life.

Here are some other things you can do to stop hating your ex for wasting your time.

• meditate
• practice forgiveness and self-forgiveness
• journal
• exercise
• and learn more about yourself and your emotions

Remember that you won’t hate your ex for wasting your time much longer. You’ll probably stop hating your ex quite soon provided you focus on yourself rather than your ex. When that happens, your hatred for your ex will turn into dislike, and allow you to find something or someone better to focus on.

Do you hate your ex for wasting your time? What makes you detest your ex the most? Let us know in the comments section below.

And if you want to talk to us about your breakup, visit our coaching page to learn about our services.

Zan

My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.