When you and your ex are still in love, things will unfold naturally. You won’t have to explain yourself, persuade your ex to come back, and work hard on earning your ex’s trust back. Your ex will willingly trust you, invest in you, and rebuild the relationship.
Your ex will do that because being with you will feel better than losing you and starting from scratch with someone else.
An ex who loves you after the breakup won’t just tell you that. He or she will show you love with actions by making a plan on when and how to reconnect. He or she will talk about ways to get back together as quickly as possible and try to obtain various relationship benefits from you.
I’m talking about reassuring benefits and feelings that make his or her life better.
Lots of dumpers claim to love their ex. They say things like, “I still love you, I want to be with you but can’t, I care about you so much it hurts.” They say such things because they feel sad, depressed, or bad for hurting their ex and ruining their ex’s relationship goals.
Some dumpers also confuse love for guilt and anxiety. They think love is complicated when, in reality, it’s either there or not there. Mainly dumpers who were forced to dump their ex due to cheating or something disrespectful feel that they still have feelings for their ex.
But even such dumpers don’t love their ex. They feel attached to their ex and need more time to create a life without their ex. Rationally, they know their ex isn’t the right person for them, so they keep detaching until they eventually stop missing their ex and craving their ex’s affection.
If you and your ex still love each other, you do so rationally and emotionally. You’re convinced you’re the right people for each other and that getting back together is the only option. It’s the only way to stop hurting, missing each other, and feeling unfulfilled.
If you truly love each other, you have nothing to worry about. Love will encourage communication and bonding and guide you back to each other. Reconciliation is imminent because you’ll be eager to reconnect and/or feel scared of losing each other.
Assuming you’re the dumpee, your ex will text or call you to get back together. Whether your ex is prideful and stubborn is irrelevant. He or she will easily overcome any obstacle when love is there. It’s only a matter of time because your ex won’t want to suffer and move on without you.
On the other hand, if you were the one who left the relationship, then your ex may or may not come to you. This depends on your ex’s separation anxiety and the breakup plan he/she follows. If your ex is doing no contact, trying to heal, you shouldn’t expect your ex to contact you.
That wouldn’t make sense to your ex because he or she knows that contacting the dumper is weak and strange.
When you and your ex are still in love, love will do the job for you. It will romantically interest you in each other and compel you to get back together to feel secure. You’ll want to be exclusive and spend as much time as possible with each other.
That’s what mutual love does. It releases love hormones and makes you feel validated. If your ex doesn’t love you, reconciliation won’t happen. Your ex will make excuses, delay things, blame you for the breakup, appear scared and uncertain, date other people, ignore you, get angry with you, and show no romantic interest.
He or she will find hundreds of reasons why not to be with you instead of a single reason to be with you.
An ex like that shouldn’t be near you. He or she should be left alone and kept far away from you. The last thing you want is to think that your ex still loves you when he or she doesn’t.
Someone who loves you will give you love and want your love back. He or she won’t be happy without receiving your acceptance and validation.
So don’t take your ex seriously if your ex merely told you that he/she loved you. Many exes do that to ease their ex’s anxiety and lower their guilt. They have no intention of actually putting any work in and trying to get back together.
They just say and do what’s best for them, which coincidentally, isn’t best for you. If they cared about you, they wouldn’t give you false hope and delay your healing. They would either let you go or get back together with you.
In this post, we discuss what it means when you and your ex are still in love and share some tips on what you can do about it.
What does it mean when you and your ex are still in love?
When you and your ex are still in love, you communicate in a loving way, look at each other in a loving way, and expect the relationship to restart and improve. You want each other to be present as much or more than before and wholeheartedly invest in each other.
Love gives you cravings for security and connection as it makes you want to know that you’re committed and willing to stay together long-term. If you know that you both want to be together, you can focus on setting goals and reaching them.
Goals give the relationship purpose and give you something to look forward to.
Ex-partners who love each other don’t stay away from each other and do their own things. They reconnect emotionally and do everything they can to fix the issues that broke them up. Love motivates them to identify their flaws and warns them they’ll lose everything again if they mess it up.
Hence, you can expect an ex who loves you to want to prove changes and improvements to you. Your ex will do this to impress you and gain your reassurance, forgiveness, and loyalty. The consequences (pain) of not having your love will be the main motivator for getting back together with you.
Dumpees and dumpers feel hurt when they love their ex and want their ex back. They see their ex as someone who can accept them and help them deal with their failures and pain.
A relationship with their ex allows them to cling to their ex for acceptance and helps them forget their problems.
So bear in mind that when you and your ex are still in love, emotions will guide you toward each other. They’ll instruct you to reconnect and get what you need from each other. The sooner you reconnect as partners, the sooner you’ll deal with problems, feel validated, stop hurting, and stop missing each other.
With that said, here’s what it means when you and your ex are still in love.
What to do when you and your ex are still in love?
If love is mutual, everything will work out in the end. You just have to reciprocate your ex’s feelings and let things progress naturally. Your ex won’t reject you when he/she regrets breaking up and wants to make things right.
Regardless of whether you dumped your ex or your ex dumped you, you’ll get back together in a matter of days. It won’t take longer than that because if it does, your ex is missing one of the most important catalysts for reconciliation.
That catalyst is called a sense of urgency. Exes feel it when they realize they made a mistake and need their ex back to be happy. When they understand their ex’s importance, they become afraid of not ending up with their ex.
They fear their ex will find someone else and forget about them.
An ex who isn’t in a hurry to reconcile sadly doesn’t love you. He or she is probably doubtful and thinks he or she will be doing you a favor by getting back with you. If the dumper thinks that way, he or she will be in total control of the breakup and won’t develop romantic feelings and urges to be with you.
The dumper will continue to remember things that made him or her unhappy and look for other ways to be happy. Other ways include other people and hobbies that entertain or validate him or her.
So if you and your ex are still in love and want to make the relationship work, all you have to do is talk about the plans to reconcile. Normally, the dumper brings up reconciliation of his/her own accord, but if you already know the dumper loves you, it doesn’t matter who talks about getting back together.
Start the topic so you can see how your ex feels and if you should keep communicating with your ex. You can say, “What do you think we need to work on to get back together and avoid breaking up in the future?”
In the worst-case scenario (if your ex doesn’t want you back), you’ll know that your ex doesn’t love you and that you must start no contact and do what you need to heal.
No contact will let you let go of hope and show you that you’ll be fine without your ex.
The main thing you need to do when you and your ex are still in love is 1)figure out if your ex means what he/she says and 2)talk about reconciliation. If your ex loves you, your ex will appreciate you starting the topic and use the opportunity to get back with you.
A quick reconciliation will allow your ex to feel valued and important.
On the other hand, if you and your ex don’t love each other but merely like each other and want to be friends, then neither of you will want to reconcile as romantic partners. You’ll instead use the word love synonymously and confuse each other.
I suggest you avoid using the word “love” with your ex. Whether you’re friends, friends with benefits, or on your way back together, you should save that word for your partner – the person who commits to you. That person deserves and needs your love whereas your ex doesn’t.
He or she shouldn’t hear it as long as you’re just exes.
So if you’re still in love with your ex, make sure that your ex is too. Do so by talking about the relationship and plans to get back together. If your ex is open to the idea of being partners, you can reconnect very quickly.
But if your ex makes excuses and leaves things up in the air, you need to understand that your ex doesn’t love you. Your ex is pretending that he or she does just to avoid rejecting you and hurting you.
In that case, you should go no contact with your ex and get as far away from your ex as possible. You need to keep your distance from your ex, fall out of love with your ex, and fall back in love with yourself.
Self-love is the only love you need when your ex doesn’t love you or doesn’t want to fall in love with you. As an ex, you must know what to do when your ex doesn’t want to return your feelings and give you what you want.
That way, you’ll avoid getting strung along by someone who claims to love you and want you back.
What do you think you should do when you and your ex are still in love? Do you think you should talk about getting back together only when you’re the dumper or that you should avoid reconciling altogether? If the relationship wasn’t healthy and can’t grow, you should let the relationship be and take some time to process it. Share your thoughts below.
And if you’re undecided and need some help with your breakup, feel free to reach out to us. We help dumpees and dumpers understand breakups and make positive changes that boost their self-love and chances of reconciliation.
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.
Even as a dumpee and a cheatee I tend to agree with Daniella here, it is also another big question here towards all dumpers after years and years of a relationship or marriage, did they ever love their spouse, did they get out of love over time or due to circumstances ?
I also agree with Zan trying to make decisions easier and providing a safe passage to a dumpee especially in the early stages of rejection.
Hi Nick.
Most dumpers lose feelings. They don’t leave because their ex cheated or because they gave their ex multiple chances to improve. Thanks for your comment, Nick. I’ll try to make future posts more concise.
Best,
Zan
I understand your mission is to kill our hopes Zan, but I don’t think life is this black & white that if a dumper doesn’t have a fake-up with you & come crawling back to you in days it automatically means they don’t love you; that’s narrow-minded thinking, no offense meant. People can love you very much but still feel the need to stay away from you for many reasons, especially us Avoidant folks. It just isn’t this simple.
I agree what you are trying to say Daniela. I think some of Zan’s articles tend to be narrow minded since I had experienced it both ways. I have been dumped before and I also been the dumper twice so far. None of those experiences had been the same outcomes and their reasonings of the end of those relationships. And assuming his articles lean more towards dumpee perspective, especially those who may be struggling and have a very immature dumper, but claiming all dumpers do what he says, I don’t believe this completely either. Sometimes, two people are not working out or someone knows they are not compatible. Even if communications are happening, both were trying or only one was, sometimes it is obvious for someone that it is not sustaining the relationship for whatever reason. There are many forms of love, and I understand this too.
Maybe Zan is just trying to help those to not go rush blindly back into a recent breakup? Especially those who been betrayed, lied often, manipulated, get used up, and worse for those who been doing this for many years? I don’t know.
I understand everyone makes mistakes, and I made mistakes too. And I understand his ‘black and white’ thinking if it were one scenario per say. And I do think it happens more often for a dumpee, but I know it does not speak for my experiences either nor were my dumper experiences.
As a dumped and dumper, I never rushed back to a breakup and I refuse to rush into a new relationship. I had to get my own issues, pain, my head and heart repaired as much as possible. And the older I got now that I am in my 30s, the more responsibility I have on my plate, despite I am childless and not married but I do work and have to help my mom’s health has been going downhill. Being a caregiver is a difference scenario. So, I don’t have the spare time right now to find a monogamous relationship and every guy who has been interested of me are usually 15+ years old which I am not interested in.
I think the process and recovery for breakups and keeping a distant from an ex is different reasonings and I hope most dumpees and dumpers truly work on themselves but that is just assuming someone is trying to improve themself and not for the sake for their ex.
Usually you can tell base upon someone’s actions when they are ready or not for a relationship. Words might be easy to say but just watchout for those base on their actions. Some can be more tricky then others because one never knows if someone is being secretive with another relationship unless you can spot something in time or if they were honest with you. Not trying to be paranoid nor pessimistic. One must be very aware if that makes more sense when it comes to a starting, new relationship.
Commitment these days does not seem consistent when it comes to monogamous relationships. I think times have changed again thanks to technology, our role models who we grew up with, and whatever external sources such as social media, entertainment, and education. However, everyone makes a choice too. Some do handle it better then others. I cannot discredit for those who were harmed more but as a past dumper, not all dumpers do what was said here. Maybe some inklings are true and some are for certain with the immature dumpers. It does not speak nor explain for all dumpers as to why they loved you despite they had to let you go and keep a distant.
In my perspective, once a relationship is officially, there is no reason to maintain contact and it would not be right to string along the person you ended it with. Of course, this may seem harsh but why harm the other person even further if you know it is not working out anymore? I get it, this is too vague but it is just one explanation out of so many.
Yes, I agree what you are saying Daniela. Assuming the relationship was not abusive nor toxic, then sure some dumpers can potentially love from a distant until that love is very minimized because one has to accept the outcome no matter how painful it is or was. Does not speak for the dumpers who did monkey branch, which I didn’t do this. I think those have bigger problems and best to avoid at all cost. The ones who had to dump because sometimes a dumpee is not being fully honest with the current relationship then it is fair to reflect, try to talk, or end it if there is a legit reason.
My last relationship ended because I knew my ‘dumpee’ was not honest with me and he wanted to go back to his ex which he already did anyway. I did the hard part for him since he was the fearful, avoidant one, scared of confrontations. It hurts regardless, broken trust, and it was not something I wanted. The more I reflected over the year(s), the more I know it was the right decision. I wanted him to be happy and I needed to take care of my aging family, my college, my work, and a side caregiver. Hopefully his ex-girlfriend and him worked it out. And that is just one experience out of many others out there with breakup stories. I am not a victim, just another lady who has to keep improving herself and continue living on like everyone else.
I am guessing for those who wonder what one dumper feels after keeping their distant. I been there and it hurt every time I saw my ex in person, and it was often at the time. I had to accept it was over between us. I did love him, and now I only care about him as a human being but nothing deeper like it used to. It is better to let him that I once loved, did appreciate what he did for my family in the past, but I will not force something that it was not meant to be when he wanted his ex’s reconciliation. And it is not good to string along regardless what feelings linger. One has to move forward in life, even it takes one small step at a time. Learn to improve oneself, find happiness of your own, your family and friends, and other activities in life that one does continue to enjoy and learn. It does take time of course to heal but that is OK. I had to be patient about the process of pain, and learn to forgive him and myself. So, I can be ready for the next relationship, with minimized baggage as much as possible. Everyone has a past, but I don’t want that chipped experience to let me down either. No matter what the roadblocks and suffering endured, one has to live life to the fullest because we only have one life to live in this world.
Hi Daniela.
You’re right, Daniela. Avoidants, people dealing with grief, and those with trust issues can stay away from you despite having feelings for you. But that doesn’t change the fact that they can’t/don’t want to work on the relationship. They must deal with their issues before they can come back.
Best,
Zan