Why Do I Miss My Ex More As Time Goes On?

If you miss your ex more as time goes on, you’re not detaching and doing everything you should be doing.

Whether you’re checking up on your ex, talking to your ex, learning new things about your ex from your friends, refusing to prioritize yourself, or dating others without much success, you’re trying to be happy in the wrong ways and before you’ve fully processed the breakup.

You’re expecting to heal from the breakup by ignoring healthy breakup advice and not putting in the necessary work.

If you want to stop missing your ex and eventually get over your ex, you have to follow the rules of no contact. You have to regain control of your emotions and encourage growth and detachment.

The more you improve and disassociate from the person you were throughout the relationship, the less you’ll blame yourself for the breakup and miss your relationship.

Although healing is never linear, you should be healing over time, not becoming more anxious and desperate to be with your ex. You should be getting used to not having your ex around and becoming emotionally strong and independent.

If you’re not making noticeable progress (after months), you’re either making breakup mistakes or in dire need of professional assistance that would help you understand why your attachment style is the way it is and how your thoughts and actions affect your daily life.

Nevertheless, you have some work to do and some changes to make. The best way to get started is to reflect on your pre-breakup and post-breakup behavior and ask yourself why you feel the way you do.

Is it your ex’s behavior or your thoughts, feelings, and behavior that make you miss your ex more as time goes on?

Normally, it’s a combination of both. Dumpees pester their ex with affection, questions, and demands and push their ex to the limits. By failing to understand their ex’s emotions and needs and refusing to give their ex space, they receive unempathetic responses that make them feel even more rejected and hurt.

Additional rejections decrease dumpees’ self-esteem, reopen their wounds, and make them want their ex back even more than before.

That explains why dumpees who keep trying to get their ex back stay dependent on their ex for a very long time. Some dumpees stay hung up on their ex for years as they constantly express their love and try to prove their worth.

They don’t know that their actions caused by a lack of understanding of breakup dynamics are the reason they miss their ex more as time goes on. Such dumpees need to learn more about breakups and develop the willpower to adhere to the no contact rules.

They need to remind themselves that certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors hinder their detachment process—and then get the help they need.

Therapy can help them process unwanted thoughts and emotions (especially when they lack explanations for the breakup) and encourage them to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In today’s article, we discuss why you miss your ex more as time goes on and share some tips on how to detach and stop missing your ex.

Why do I miss my ex more as time goes on?

It’s impossible for me to say you miss your ex more as time goes on because of this or that because I don’t know what you’re doing and thinking and what your coping mechanism is like. But despite that, I’ll try to give you the most reasonable explanations for why you might be having a hard time letting go of your ex. 

First and foremost, it’s probably got something to do with how you’re handling the breakup. If you’re communicating with your ex, begging for another chance, analyzing your ex’s social media behavior, obsessively watching breakup videos, and telling yourself it’s only a matter of time before your ex realizes your worth and comes back, you’re constantly poisoning your mind with self-destructive thoughts and ideas.

You’re convincing yourself that your ex is the one and only person for you and that you must do your best to wait for the right opportunity to pounce. Such convictions keep you trapped in the past and glued to your ex as they make you wait for your ex rather than encourage you to move forward and be happy.

It’s also possible that you have an anxious attachment style and that you became dependent on your ex for validation, financial support, or something else. If you needed your ex rather than wanted him or her, you weren’t independent but rather codependent.

Your ex became the center of your world while your life outside of the relationship shrunk. 

This means you overinvested in your ex emotionally and time-wise and failed to create a healthy lifestyle for yourself. Because you wanted to feel secure with your ex, you’d put all your eggs in one basket and showed your ex you valued the relationship way more than your hobbies, goals, friends, family, and ambitions.

You essentially went all in and unprepared yourself for failure. There’s a good chance that you expected more from your ex than your ex was capable of giving you and that you smothered your ex at times.

Again, I don’t know your situation, but if you lived solely for the relationship, you neglected your life outside of the relationship and hoped that your ex would fill the gap.

By doing so, you got extremely attached to your ex and now miss your ex more as time goes on. You’re hoping to feel validated like you did when you were with your ex, but instead, you feel invalidated as you see no signs of regret.

Another reason why you might miss your ex more as time goes on is that your ex is refusing to give you closure, treating you badly, and acting cold or hot and cold. Strange, mean, and confusing dumper behavior is one of the biggest reasons why dumpees take longer to heal than usual.

That’s because dumpers string their ex along. Many times, they don’t even know they’re doing it. They lack self-awareness, breakup knowledge, sympathy, and empathy, so they keep saying and doing weird/hurtful things, and making their ex go through a series of ups and downs.

By sending their ex mixed signals and confusing their ex, they keep their ex hooked and force their ex to think about them and miss them.

Dumpees especially become nostalgic when their post-breakup life isn’t going the way they want it to go. When they have trouble loving themselves, providing for themselves and their family, making or keeping friends, and maintaining relationships, they may feel down/depressed and miss their ex.

Mental health is extremely important when it comes to getting over the dumper. If you’re not surrounded by people, financially stable, and happy with who you are and what you’ve accomplished, chances are you’ll miss your ex like crazy for months or years.

This depends on your ability to deal with unwanted thoughts and emotions.

But generally speaking, people tend to miss their exes the most when they’re unhappy and want to rely on their ex for happiness. A lack of self-reliance makes them want their ex back to feel safe.

Also, if your relationship was unhealthy or toxic, you now crave the way you felt when you patched things up. You miss the feeling of highs after experiencing a deep low and think that anxiety followed by relief and elation means your relationship was special.

What it actually means is that you were trauma-bonded to your ex-partner and that you’re missing your ex for the wrong reasons (not because of love but because you had a deep unhealthy bond). This bond will need time, effort, and proper breakup behavior to break free from.

Don’t expect to instantly stop feeling attached to someone you were emotionally reliant on for a long time. The more intense your relationship was and the longer it lasted, the more you lost yourself in it and the longer it will take you to find yourself.

Be prepared to give it time and work on it for as long as it takes. It will benefit your health and well-being and allow you to have a better relationship with yourself and your future partner. 

All things considered, here’s why you miss your ex more as time goes on.

What can I do if I miss my ex more instead of less?

If you want to stop missing your ex, you have to identify your triggers for nostalgia and do something about them. You have to stop what you’re doing, think about your behavior, and break your unhealthy habits and patterns.

If you’re reaching out to your ex and getting hurt because your ex doesn’t care, you must stop reaching out.

If you’re stalking your ex in person or online, you must delete/unfollow your ex’s social accounts and stop going to where your ex is.

If you’re unhappy about your finances or living situation, you must become more ambitious and earn more money.

If you’re getting breadcrumbed and strung along, you must put an end to breadcrumbs.

If you’re dating people and rebounding with them, you must stop dating.

If you’re telling yourself your ex is the best you ever had, you must realize you’re putting your ex on a pedestal and that you must focus on your ex’s negative traits and see things realistically.

And if you’re blaming yourself for the breakup and thinking you don’t deserve love and commitment, you must learn to forgive yourself and stay busy.

Whatever the reason for missing your ex may be, breakups are complex and bring out dumpees’ and dumpers’ shortcomings. That’s why you need to take them seriously and identify your problems (reasons for missing your ex).

Once you’ve identified the root cause of your problems, you can begin working on your problems and developing the ability to not be affected by them.

Know that it’s okay to miss your ex for a while. It’s okay to miss your ex for months or even a year because if you were in a serious/intense long-term relationship, it’s perfectly reasonable to miss your ex for that long. You got attached and now need to detach.

Some (very few) dumpees need weeks whereas most dumpees need over half a year. Anywhere up to a year and a half is considered normal and reasonable. Especially if you’d put your heart and soul into the relationship and have various unresolved issues.

Issues such as:

• trust issues
• abandonment issues
• mental health problems
• an anxious attachment style
• career pressure and financial crisis
• alcohol and drug addictions

So if you want to miss your ex less and eventually stop missing your ex altogether, reflect on your mistakes and shortcomings and work on them. When you do the necessary work and disconnect from your ex emotionally, you’ll realize that your ex is just a human and that you can find someone better.

Someone who makes you feel good and gives you the things you need.

What are your thoughts on the reasons why you miss your ex more as time goes on? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

However, if you want our help with figuring out why you miss your ex more as time goes on, reach out to us and we’ll help you get to the bottom of things. 

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.