The Hardest Part of Falling Out of Love With Someone
Ending a relationship with two well-meaning people who just aren’t right for each other hurts like hell.
There are all these feelings of what “could have been” or “what should have been”. You wonder what you could’ve done differently. The other person lives rent-free in your head as you think about all the things they should've done differently.
But in the end, there’s no getting around it… it’s all just painful, raw, and emotional.
I once saw a quote by Taylor Swift where she said “A heartbroken person is unlike any other person. Their time moves at a completely different pace than ours. It’s this mental, physical, emotional ache and feeling so conflicted. Nothing distracts you from it.” And I find this to be so true — you can’t really compare the feeling of anything else to heartbreak. I can’t, at least.
However, while heartbreak is often talked about in our culture, I find the process of falling out of love with someone to be just as painful of an experience, if not more. You already have heartbreak after the relationship ends, but when you’re falling out of love with someone after breaking up — or worse, you already began to fall out of love before the relationship ended — the pain from the heartbreak becomes even worse.
Falling out of love with someone who meant enough for you to love them in the first place is exhausting. And while I could focus on the very intense feelings that come from it, I think the hardest part of it all tends to be more mundane.
To me, the hardest part of falling out of love with someone is when the memories you had with them just start… fading.
I don’t know if you can really predict when this will happen, but all of a sudden, you notice that you’ve started to forget things about the person you were with — what their voice sounds like, what they look like, and what it feels like to kiss them, for example. The memory of your first date gets spottier and spottier. You begin to lose track of all the plans you made with them… or what the plans you made with them even were, for that matter.
When you’re just getting out of the relationship and going through heartbreak, these memories hit you tenfold. It’s like you can’t get them out of your mind sometimes, and they’ll hit you whether you’re going out to dinner or you’re in bed and can’t sleep. And at that point, it’s just kind of annoying and sad. You just want to forget about them. You want to move on.
But when you get a bit further into being out of the relationship, life moves on, and you move on with it. You might think about your ex sometimes, but it’s not the overwhelming feeling you once had. You’re back to living your life, meeting new people, and making new plans. Before you know it, trying to remember the smell of your ex’s clothes is like trying to remember the face of an old friend you haven’t seen in ages.
If you’re anything like me, when you’re in the coping process of ending a relationship, you try to grasp on to the memories of the other person… but you can’t hold onto them. It truly is this emotional and mental ache that leaves you feeling so conflicted and hurt.
But in the end, falling out of love is akin to trying to walk down a windy street with a bunch of paper in your hands — some pieces are inevitably going to fly away and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Learning that was one of the most painful experiences I’ve had to go through. And it’s also so frustrating because most of the time, you really do want to move on from your ex, but losing the memories of your relationship means that you have to come to terms with it truly being over. And I think the concrete and final parts of knowing it’s over — forgetting the memories with your ex, unfollowing them on social media, deleting their phone number, and things like that are truly the simplest and most difficult parts of falling out of love with someone.
Eventually, your wounds begin to heal — you move on, create new memories, and losing the memories with the person you loved becomes another part of the process of falling out of love with them. It still sucks sometimes, and I’m not convinced that time heals everything, but it can definitely make things sting a lot less.
I do believe that when one door closes, another opens. It might take no time at all or it might take a while to find your next love (special thanks to Covid-19 for making dating harder than it already was). But when the memories of your ex finally glaze over, I like to think that it’s an opportunity to have all the more space to make memories with someone new.
