I Miss My Ex (Why You Miss Them And 12 Solutions)

Learn why you miss your ex and 12 practical ways to stop missing them to finally feel at peace and in control of your life.

10 min readDec 22, 2021

One of the most exhausting parts of a breakup is grappling with the feeling of missing an ex. Thus, a definitive guide on the topic seems pretty damn necessary. Well, here it is — no need to thank me.

I’ll start by delving into why you miss your ex, starting with surface-level reasons and gradually progressing to deeper, more philosophical ones.

Next, I’ll unpack 12 solutions to this often overwhelming feeling. This way, it’ll be easier to stop obsessing over your ex, start enjoying the single life and get a better shot at mending things with your ex or letting them go.

And in the end, I’ll address a common pitfall many people who miss their ex fall for — yearning for the idea of them, not the person itself.

It’ll be a bittersweet ride, so grab a box of tissues and let’s get this shit over with.

Why Do You Miss Your Ex So Much

You may miss your ex because of one or more of the following reasons.

The Surface Level Reasons Why You Miss Your Ex

You miss the way your ex made you feel — loved, secure, worthy, and respected.
You miss the wonderful memories you shared with your ex, painful reminders of what you’ve lost — the day you met, your first kiss, your wedding day
You miss the future you had hoped for and envisioned with your ex — marriage, kids, a home, or growing old together.
You miss your ex because you’re lonely and missing connection, companionship, and sex — the meaningful kind, that is. (1)

A Deeper, More Psychological Reason Why You Miss Your Ex

When we’re in love with someone, our brain tells our body to release a cocktail of adrenaline, serotonin, testosterone, estrogen, and, most importantly, dopamine. We call these, The Love Chemicals. (2)

These chemicals not only make us feel good and help us maintain a sense of well-being, but they also lead us to seek out the stimulus that gave us those positive feelings in the first place. The stimulus, in your case — being near your ex.

The theory goes that the more you’ve fallen for them, the more Love Chemicals your body releases and the more your emotional bond toward them hardens. And the sturdier the bond, the more infatuated you become. And the more infatuated you become, the more you miss them after you break up. (3)

An Even Deeper, More Philosophical Reason Why You Miss Your Ex

When we’re in love with someone for an extended period, our identities — that is, our beliefs, goals, and values — begin to amalgamate. One partner (figuratively) fuses with a part of the other partner’s identity, and vice versa, forming what’s called a shared identity. (4)

A shared identity brings many benefits. It deepens the love, respect, trust, and emotional connection between two people, and it helps them live a longer, mentally healthier, and more meaningful and fulfilling life. It also promotes an intense feeling of oneness, hence the name. (5)

Now think about this: a relationship that gave you meaning and fulfillment and, on a biological level, homeostasis, is suddenly stripped away. What do you think would happen? You’d fall into a deep existential crisis, where you’d eventually start to miss your ex like crazy.

How To Stop Missing Your Ex

When you miss your ex, you may feel the urge to contact them or find ways to distract yourself. However, this may not be effective in putting an end to your longing. In fact, these behaviors often make everything worse. So here are some better ways to handle missing your ex.

1. Cut Contact With Your Ex (Or At Least Distance Yourself From Them)

Another name for this principle is The No Contact Rule. It refers to cutting your ex out of your life or distancing yourself from them by adhering to the following, err.. rules.

From now you…

Don’t call, text, or engage with your ex’s social media anymore.
Refrain from going to places where you may come across them.
Take control of your environment by removing any objects or mementos that remind you of them.
Avoid going to places that trigger painful memories.
Consider returning or discarding any items gifted to you by your ex.
If you have mutual friends, cut them out of your life for a time or distance yourself from them.
If you work or live together or share kids or pets with your ex, only talk about those subjects. Keep your conversations short and polite, and end them as soon as you make some mutually beneficial agreement or decision.

Generally, the longer you make your no contact period, the faster you’ll stop missing your ex. Whereas the shorter you make it, the slower you’ll stop missing them and the more unnecessary obstacles and suffering you’ll need to tackle.

2. Manage Your Stress Effectively

Here are three ways to do it when you miss your ex, based on a popular Harvard study. (6)

1. Relaxation modailites: meditation, mindfulness, journaling, gratitude practices, guided imagery, art therapy, yoga, breathing exercises, and a proper good night’s rest.

2. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): a type of therapy based on the idea that changing unhealthy thinking or replacing it with a different form can change your emotions.

3. Goal setting and healthy habit formation: be that in your career, fitness, health, self-care, business, relationships, social life, or spiritual health. The thinking goes that people who set goals for themselves and cultivate habits that get them closer to hitting those goals feel more in control of their life, which, by extension, propels them to focus more on themselves and miss their ex less.

3. Rally Your Support System And Lean On It

Apart from making you miss your ex less, a well-established support system will also improve your ability to perform under pressure, alleviate emotional distress, increase self-esteem, fend off loneliness, and lead to a more stable lifestyle. (7)

If you don’t have a support system in place yet, here’s how to construct it:

Reconnect with people you perhaps forgot about.
Spend more time with friends and family than usual.
Challenge yourself to make new friends.

Once you have a support system in place, lean on it shamelessly — ask for advice, feedback, or simply a listening ear. Just be sure to do it unconditionally, that is, without expecting a certain answer in return. Because sometimes people, for better or worse, just won’t be able to help you.

4. Date Yourself For A While — Date Others When Ready

Looking for your next partner while you’re missing and obsessing over your ex isn’t a good idea. Instead, use this period to become comfortable with solitude. A decent way of doing this is through dating yourself.

So next time you feel like it, go to the cinema, a museum, a hike, a fancy restaurant; whatever you like to do for fun. Indulge yourself a bit and be selfish.

Now regarding dating other people, start only when it begins to feel fun and exciting. Because the last thing you want is to date only to push your pain deeper down your stomach. That’s a one-way ticket to misery.

5. Throw Yourself Into Hobbies And Responsibilities

The more you double down on them, the more bearable you’ll make those urges of missing an ex.

Hobbies: make a bucket list, pick a random activity from it, and do it. Then optimize further — either pick a new activity or go deeper with the current one.

Responsibilities: work, school, child-rearing, and so on. Pick one of these responsibilities and set a goal tied to it. Then work on hitting that goal. And note that the intensity of this goal should somewhat match the degree of how much you miss your ex. Put differently, if you’re still missing them while clawing towards it, you could probably set an even more meaningful goal.

6. Don’t Resort To Blame

Blaming your ex for your breakup does feel good in the short term but has dire repercussions in the long — inability to move on, rumination, anger problems, and repeated, intense spurts of missing your ex.

So how can you avoid the blame game? By taking responsibility for your breakup — by acknowledging that while it may be your ex’s fault, it’s always your responsibility how you’ll respond and deal with it.

You can feel like shit right now, and it may be because of your ex, but it’s not their job to pick you up and straighten out your emotions — it’s your job to get your emotional shit in order.

7. Move, Make, Meet

Another solid way to stop missing your ex is leveraging Nick Wignall’s popular 3M’s Formula. (8)

Move: hit the gym, go for a walk, lift weights, dance, do yoga, etc. Just do something that involves movement.
Make: cook, create artwork, write a blog post, fix a leaking sink, take up photography, etc. Just do something productive or creative.
Meet: meet up with someone you’re close with and hang out. Note that this is different than what I explained in solution #3. In a support system, your aim is to get help. Here, your aim should be to just bond and relax.

8. Set Time To Miss Your Ex And Let It All Out

This is one of the simplest ways to stop missing your ex. It boils down to four easy steps:

Go somewhere you won’t be bothered.
Set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes.
Let yourself miss your ex as much as you want.
If you’re angry, scream. If you’re sad, cry. If you’re frustrated…er, masturbate.

Once the timer rings, your longing for your ex should deflate a bit. However, this effect will only last briefly. So I suggest you repeat this activity multiple times.

9. Humor Yourself To Stop Missing Your Ex

A nifty cognitive behavioral therapy trick I came across recently: whenever you miss your ex, close your eyes and bring whatever ex-related thoughts are on your mind to the forefront, then give them a humorous twist.

A few examples how to do this:

Illustrate your thoughts through quirky drawings.
Sing about the thoughts in the tune of “Happy Birthday.”
Scribble your thoughts on a set of sticky notes and stick them all over your home.
Songify your thoughts.
Translate your thoughts into another language.

10. Find Something More Important Than Your Ex

Lots of people who keep missing their ex do so because they failed to adequately diversify their identity. They make their ex the center of their world instead of letting them be one of the many meaningful things going on in their life.

And so, they’re completely fucked once their relationship fails because they have nothing else to really care about and look forward to. As a result, they usually fall into a chronic existential crisis, experience spells of depression, and generally suffer more than the average breakup survivor.

If you’re someone who has nothing but a dead relationship going on in their life, start searching for something else to care about — something that feels more important and meaningful than your ex: striving toward some goal, fighting for a particular cause, or following your life purpose.

11. Don’t Force Yourself To Stop Missing Your Ex

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the harder you try to stop missing your ex, the more you’ll miss them. This is The Backwards Law in action.

A great way to illustrate it is with a Chinese finger trap. You’ve probably played with it as a kid. It’s a woven bamboo-shaped tube with two holes on each side. You stick your finger in those two holes or ends, and then it happens: the harder you pull, the more stuck you get. The not-so-secret secret of getting your finger unstuck is to push it farther in the tube instead of pulling it out with full force.

The same philosophy applies when you’re trying to stop missing your ex. Don’t be harsh on yourself. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Don’t force yourself to stop missing them. Try to coast with the feeling, acknowledging it but not attempting to remove or suppress it.

12. Know That There Is Always An End To Missing Your Ex

In the intricate journey of recovering from a breakup, an interesting truth resides: sometimes, the yearning for your ex may not require intervention at all. Sometimes, all you need to do is surrender, allowing time to weave its healing tapestry.

And while time doesn’t heal trauma or needy tendencies or shitty self-esteem, it does get you to feel like yourself again when enough of it passes. So, don’t be afraid of simply waiting for time to make you stop missing your ex.

Chances are, it will eventually — even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

The Dangers Of Missing Something Other Than Your Ex

I’ll end this piece with a warning.

Lots of people think they miss their ex, but in reality, they only miss who they could’ve been — they don’t miss their ex as a person, but simply feel bad for the self-constructed potential they ascribed to their character that went to waste in their opinion.

Oh yeah, and other people simply miss having a warm body by their side to quench their need for connection and sex and don’t even care about anything remotely related to their ex — even when they think they do.

Maybe you’re facing a similar dilemma to any of the above. So, just to be safe, here are some questions that’ll help you get to the bottom of who or what you’re actually missing:

Do I miss the idea of my ex — the person they could’ve been if we stayed together?
Am I projecting my desires, hopes, and expectations onto my ex?
Do I miss feeling less lonely?
Do I miss connection and closeness?
Do I miss being loved?
Am I idealizing and romanticizing my ex?
Do I miss the security, certainty, and routine of a relationship?
Is my thinking based on fear of loss and neediness?

If, after rigorous self-examination, you conclude that you are, in fact, missing something other than your ex as a person, consider getting into therapy.

Because, if the above rings true, you’ve likely adopted some emotional blind spots and limiting beliefs that stymie recovery and sabotage re-attraction. A therapist can help you address these psycho-blemishes and provide a productive way to bounce back to a healthier and more attractive headspace.

A Cheat Sheet For Pinpointing And Maximizing The Odds Of Reuniting With Your Ex

This free cheat sheet will explain every step of the re-attraction process, cut out all the confusion, and catapult your chances of getting back with your ex sky-high. Check it out here.

Originally published at https://maxjancar.com on December 22, 2021.