It’s perfectly normal to not feel happy without your ex. The breakup rejected your feelings, destroyed your relationship goals, and made you dependent on your ex’s validation and security. It affected your self-love and made it extremely difficult to process the breakup and accept the world in which your ex is not with you.
Your ex may be gone, but your heart still feels your ex’s love and craves your ex’s time, affection, and recognition. It sees your ex as the only person in the world who can make you feel loved and needed. Things will stay that way until you rebuild your self-worth and get your ex out of your system. You’ll remain hung up on your ex and stay miserable without him or her till you emotionally distance yourself from your ex and learn that your relationship with yourself is more important than your relationship with your ex.
It’s an unpleasant experience, to say the least, but that’s how breakups work. They scrape your self-confidence to the ground and suck the life out of you. You’ll have to relearn some basic things, such as how to love yourself and spend your time productively.
Of course, not all breakups disorientate and devastate dumpees. If dumpees didn’t get attached, had good self-esteem, or found someone else prior to the breakup, they usually don’t suffer much. They don’t have to because they don’t think very highly of their ex. They don’t put their ex on a pedestal the way attached, codependent, goal-less, and committed dumpees do.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t have cared about your ex and avoided pain that way, but one of the only ways not to suffer so much after a breakup is to love yourself more than your ex and convince yourself you’ll be okay without your ex. If you do that, you’ll still suffer, but you won’t feel as much pain as someone who discarded all his friends, hobbies, and interests for his partner.
A person who overinvests in his partner will suffer much more than someone who lives a social, busy, and independent life. He’ll feel nostalgic and regretful and won’t be able to continue his life without his ex. He’ll want his life to continue rather than start a new chapter of his life.
So if you’re wondering why you can’t feel happy without your ex, you first need to understand that what you feel is completely normal. Most dumpees feel anxious, sad, lost, and even depressed for a few weeks after the breakup. The breakup comes as a surprise to them, shocks them, and makes it difficult for them to do basic tasks such as studying, working, cooking, and interacting with people.
All they can think about is their ex and ways in which they could get back with their ex. Due to overwhelming separation anxiety and loss of self-esteem, they’re only interested in reconciling with their ex and ending their pain. Dumpees tend to forget that their ex destroyed their trust and caused them immense pain and that reconciliation may not be a permanent solution to their problems.
Yes, it would instantly stop making them feel rejected and worthless, but it wouldn’t fix the issues that led to the breakup and their ways of dealing with romantic rejections.
Breakups are opportunities to learn to deal with difficult emotions and grow emotionally stronger. They’re chances to evolve in every aspect of life, including self-love, communication, self-awareness, self-control, personal goals, ambitions, and self-reliance.
You can’t continue to rely on your ex for emotional, sexual, physical, or financial needs when your ex doesn’t want to be with you. It’s time to sever the reliance on your ex and become independent. You must do that whether you want your ex back or not.
As long as you’re struggling to be happy, you’re expecting your ex to help you deal with problems and pain for you. You’re open to taking a shortcut and relying on your ex for your wants and needs.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the right way to deal with unhappiness and pain. Since your ex isn’t interested in you romantically, you mustn’t ignore the need to grow and wait for your ex to change his or her mind. If you wait, you’ll put your health and happiness in your ex’s hands and gamble with your emotions.
You won’t take an active approach to rebuilding your life and getting back on your feet.
You must understand that the breakup requires a lot of work. It needs you to understand that your ex stopped the stream of happy hormones and that these hormones will take both time and effort to feel again.
They’ll need you to:
- increase your self-love
- find healthy distractions
- be more social
- improve your flaws
- get/stay physically active
- avoid self-blame and deal with regrets
- stay away from your ex
- ignore the temptation to act on pain
- focus on your ex’s negative traits and kick your ex off the pedestal
As long as you think your ex is the one and only person who can help you feel better/fulfilled, it’s evident that you’re still obsessed with your ex and that you need your ex rather than want him or her. You’re attached and dependent on your ex for healing and need to find your own strength and purpose.
Healing takes time, but if you leave your ex alone, you’ll think about your ex less every day. Eventually, your obsession with your ex will decrease from thinking about your ex all the time to thinking about your ex a few times a day. A reduction in emotional setbacks and ex-thoughts will prove that you’re on the right path and that you need to keep doing things that give your life purpose.
Such things can’t have anything to do with your ex. Make sure they’re what you want and that they make you happy.
If the breakup happened not too long ago (a few months ago), it’s obvious why you can’t feel happy without your ex. You’re simply not ready to disconnect from your ex and appreciate your own company. You need more time to process things and let go.
Long-term relationships and short-term relationships that ended at their peak take more than a few months to process. On average, they take 8 months of no contact, but they can also take longer if someone was abusive, codependent, or in his or her first relationship.
First serious relationships tend to be very serious. Couples invest wholeheartedly in them and lack the knowledge to maintain them and let go of them when things go awry. Many times, they keep the channels of communication open in hopes of restoring feelings and getting back together.
Unfortunately, such exes suffer longer than necessary. Dumpers feel cornered, smothered, and disrespected whereas dumpees feel hopeful, anxious, and desperate. They both want different things from each other and as a result, delay each other’s recovery.
In today’s post, we discuss why you can’t feel happy without your ex and what you can do to get your happy self back.
Why can’t I feel happy without my ex?
If you can’t feel happy without your ex because you got dumped, you need to start changing your understanding of breakups. Don’t think of them as personal rejections and that something’s wrong with you. If you made mistakes, you made mistakes, but if your ex failed to communicate problems, blamed you for everything, bottled up negative emotions, treated you badly before, during, or after the breakup, ghosted you, met someone else, or went back to an ex, your ex had more to do with the breakup than you.
Your ex wasn’t ready for a serious relationship or stopped being ready (some people get worse over time) and ran away from problems instead of trying to fix them when it was still possible.
I don’t know what went wrong in your relationship, but it’s not always the dumpee’s fault. Many times, dumpers lose feelings and attraction because of reasons unrelated to their ex.
Reasons such as:
- stress, anxiety, resentment, overwhelm, and depression
- emotional unavailability
- poor relationship mentality
- bad relationship skills
- lack of self-control
- emotional or physical cheating
- reappearing ex
- fear of commitment
- disapproving parents and friends who are a bad influence
- high expectations and little effort
Couples must invest in the relationship to value each other. They mustn’t expect to succeed just because they want to. High expectations and no effort don’t make a relationship work. They lead to emotional exhaustion and a loss of feelings and desire to stay together.
So if your relationship was healthy and you did your best to stay in it, you may not have been perfect, but at least you kept trying. Unlike your ex, you focused on the positives and dealt with doubts, fears, and temptations when they arose. You didn’t let problems change your perception of your ex and destroy your feelings and commitment to the relationship.
The relationship mattered to you enough to invest in it and expect healthy things from it.
Sadly, your ex didn’t see things the same way as you. At some point, the relationship became a burden to your ex and caused your ex to develop doubts. When doubts first occurred, your ex could have talked to you about them and resolved them through communication – the way healthy couples do.
But instead of discussing them, your ex kept them to himself or herself and disliked you for them. Your ex blamed you for his or her problems, pain, and discontent and expected you to fix everything alone. The notion that you were fully responsible for making him or her feel good slowly led to resentment and caused your ex to disconnect emotionally.
When that happened, it was only a matter of time before your ex pulled the plug on you and went his or her separate way.
Hence, one of the biggest reasons you can’t be happy without your ex is that you blame yourself for the breakup. Your ex’s behavior (lack of care, respect, or affection) convinced you that you did something to get broken up with and that you deserve the pain and suffering.
This is, of course, not true. No one deserves to suffer and take all the blame. Dumpers like to point fingers and directly or indirectly pin all the blame on their ex to justify their decisions and feelings. They tend to forget that relationships take two mature and equally invested individuals to work. If dumpers lose interest (or as they like to say, “grow apart”), they only have themselves to blame for taking their partner for granted and ditching him or her.
Every relationship has its own problems, but both parties are responsible for fixing them. If someone has anxiety, the other person must be understanding and supportive. He or she mustn’t think of his or her partner as someone who drains energy and brings him or he down.
I’m telling you this so you don’t worry about what your ex thinks or may think about you. Just because your ex left and blames you for breaking up doesn’t mean you’re fully responsible for the breakup. Oftentimes, dumpers abandon perfectly good relationships. They take their partners for granted and chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Because they appear relieved and happy, they give the impression that their ex was the problem and that they can finally live the kind of life they deserve to live. In reality, they were the problem for not taking the relationship seriously and fixing things before they spiraled out of control.
If your ex appears happy without you (especially with someone else), you can’t feel happy without your ex because your ex appears to be doing well without you. You think that your ex’s happiness is directly related to your absence rather than weeks or months of devaluing you and wanting to escape the relationship.
Since your ex stopped seeing your worth, you’ll have to find a way to see it yourself. You’ll have to detach to the point where you stop caring about your ex’s perception of you and lack of feelings—and rely on yourself for self-love.
It will take some time to stop caring about your ex’s opinion of you and start caring about your own opinion. It will take a lot of positive affirmations and immense willpower. Don’t expect to be happy without your ex in a matter of days. Self-love is not that quick to improve. Most dumpees need a few months of hard work to see themselves and their ex differently.
Rationally, they know their ex doesn’t deserve them and that they deserve better, but emotionally, they don’t feel it. Deep inside, they believe their ex is their ideal partner and that his or her opinion of them is more important than their opinion of themselves.
This changes when they’re almost over their ex and become okay with not getting back together with their ex. That’s when they notice the results of their hard work. They realize they’re finally happy on their own and understand that their ex doesn’t determine their worth. They determine their worth as well as their happiness and success themselves.
I urge you to use the breakup to permanently improve your self-esteem. Don’t just wait to get over your ex. If you wait, you will get over your ex and feel happy, but your self-esteem will remain the same. This means you’ll suffer immensely again if you fall for someone new and get broken up with.
Having said that, here’s why you can’t feel happy without your ex.
The simple explanation for why you can’t feel happy without your ex is that you’re not happy with yourself. The breakup affected you in such a way that you lost your purpose and self of direction. It will take quite a bit of reflection to detach, discover your worth, and be happy.
How to be happy without your ex?
To be happy without your ex, you must regain control of your life. This means you must do things that boost your emotional independence and avoid things that give you anxiety, lower your self-esteem, and give or destroy too much hope at once.
The first thing you must do to be happy without your ex is accept the breakup. You don’t need to give up on your ex completely and get over your ex overnight, but do accept that your ex has lost feelings and the drive to fall back in love. Prepare yourself for the possibility that your ex could find someone else and never come back.
By acknowledging the end of the breakup and that all couples don’t get back together, you’ll consider the breakup a real breakup rather than a temporary separation. You’ll put yourself on the path to recovery and feel a little bit better every day. Slowly, you’ll wean off your ex and find happiness outside of the relationship with your ex.
Accepting the breakup and understanding how dumpers feel and act is essential. It will allow you to not take things personally and encourage you to let go of the idea that you can somehow make your ex feel something for you again.
Once you’ve convinced yourself that reconciliation is out of your control and that your ex’s decisions and behavior have nothing to do with what you’re like as a partner and a person, cut your ex off completely. Go no contact with your ex and show your ex you respect his or her decision and need for space and that you don’t want, nor need to talk to your ex to be happy.
Right now, you may want to talk to your ex very badly, but this won’t always be the case. When you stop talking to your ex and see that not speaking to your ex feels better than speaking to your ex, you’ll want to stay away from your ex permanently. You won’t see your ex as your savior anymore.
So focus on taking back control of your life. Do this by ceasing all contact and reconnecting with yourself. Focus on your hobbies, interests, passions, and things that keep you busy. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as it keeps your mind occupied and minimizes the amount of time you spend thinking about your ex.
Nothing’s wrong with you for thinking about your ex and feeling miserable without him or her. Remember that you got rejected by a person you considered your long-term partner and that you’re in the process of letting go. You will need more time to get over your ex fully and feel happy without your ex.
I know you’re in pain and tired of feeling unhappy, but do your best to persevere. You’ll stop feeling this way when you make more emotional progress and see your ex as a matter of the past.
Feel free to surround yourself with friends and family and seek professional help. Friends will support you emotionally whereas therapists and other mental health experts will provide you with medications, explanations, and healthy advice. They’ll tell you how other people with similar experiences regained their happiness and got over their ex.
To feel happy without your ex quicker, you can also give journaling a try. Write down what makes you unhappy and what usually makes you happy. Write about your emotions and methods for feeling better and practice positive affirmations. This may not be a permanent solution, but it will help you feel better in the moment.
Ultimately, you’ll get over your ex and rebuild your happiness and self-esteem. Be patient and you’ll eventually feel happy or even happier without your ex. When you’re over your ex for good, you’ll see that your ex was far from perfect and that your life has gotten much better thanks to the lessons you’ve learned because of the breakup.
Why do you think you can’t feel happy without your ex? What have you tried to be happy? Post the things you tried or have yet to try in the comments below.
And if you want to talk to us about the reasons why you can’t feel happy without your ex, get in touch with us via our coaching program.
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.
