this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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Absolutely cut contact. I don't really have any other advice because it depends on a lot of things about you, but it really sounds like you shouldn't be talking with her and you shouldn't be "keeping up with her" in any other manner (e.g. if you're friends on some social media thing, do whatever setting to hide her posts so you don't need to see them going forward).
It really sucks but you'll need to find a way to conceptualize your life without her in it, and clinging to the memory of a terminated relationship where she just hopped to someone else is not the way to accomplish that, it's just a way to hurt yourself.
good advice but hard to follow. We did have several days of NC after this first happened but we also live together and still feel strongly for one another.
I'd really look into moving (or maybe encouraging her to) because that arrangement will kill you.
moving is gonna be tricky bc we have a contract that goes until next july. I don't think either of us are really confronting what it means to actually separate either. It's in a weird place but I'm doing my best to just move on.
Well, if you can't move you can't move, but then it becomes really critical to set firm boundaries so a) you minimize the extent to which you cling to the idea of things reverting and b) you don't get used by your ex as a one-way emotional support dog. You can't make her confront it to herself, but then it becomes all the more important that you confront it so you don't end up in a degraded state of being, for example, a momentary, fake romantic partner that acts as a crash pad for her when her real relationship has turbulence. You deserve better and it's better for her too.
Wanting things to go back the way they were is all the more reason for you to treat the old arrangement as completely and irrevocably dead and to reject even the slightest gesture of it returning. Based on what you said in another comment, she clearly made her choices and decided on what's important to her, and it wasn't you, however much she might like having you around for the attention or validation or whatever it is she's interested in. You cannot allow yourself to be taken for granted.
This is validating for me to read. I was talking with my ex about being friends, but the question that got her to cut contact is whether I would be more to her than someone who worries about her.
Yeah, I probably make it obvious from how I write about it that I've been stuck in that situation before, where my partner takes me completely for granted to the point that, at least for a while, what dumping me meant was not that they lose anything but that they have me on hand whenever they feel like it (such as when someone they're actually into treats them poorly and they have no one else who is willing to listen to them, or maybe they just want to fuck around with me) and I don't exist otherwise. In a perverse way, dumping me was like a lifestyle upgrade because they didn't need to give me any thought but I was still just as willing to do anything for them, and they actively counted on that being true. While it was cruel of them, fundamentally it still only happened because I didn't have a spine and didn't set firm boundaries for my own sake because I was so desperate.
I'm glad that you had the lucidity to ask what you did. That took me way too long to develop.
Unfortunately, it took me about a year after I stopped feeling like she really loved me to break up with her.