Why do I feel like I regret "No Contact" with my ex?

of course it hurts, you had five plus years together. but the no contact will help both of you get beyond the breakup, and you owe that to yourself.

ask yourself what continued contact would mean to you. At what point would it end?

I think you did the right thing, and I am sure it hurts. Hang in there, and hugs.

Why did you get the no contact order, exactly?

Well, the continued contact didn’t hurt me. I feel like I felt better that we were on good terms and we could still easily talk to each other. I’m only doing this so I can learn to be happy without him. My mistake was relying all my happiness on him. I need to get used to being without him….I don’t know if I did the right thing now because I felt like we went from good terms to bad terms.

I think it’s funny how he’s upset about this…when I took the break up better than him. But really, he seems like his intentions are nothing but good….

I did no contact because
1. I need to get in habit of not talking to him every day like the past 5½ years.. I don’t want to sit and think and wonder why did he call? Or have the urge to search him on Facebook and look at his stuff…who he’s dating etc.

I feel like I lost not just my boyfriend…but my good friend this week.

You don’t have to lose him completely though…just make a conscious effort to talk to him, just less. Why not?

@chelle21689 Well, no contact orders are generally used when you fear for your life or safety. You are using the courts, the no contact order to do something that you be able to do yourself. You got a no contact order, and that means no contact, you know, for no good reason, because you refuse to take your big girl pill, and are now you are complaining that you fee like you’ve lost a good friend? What did you think was going to happen? You completely cut him out of your life, you played hard ball with him because you couldn’t do it on your own and now your complaining about him not being in your life? Sorry, I can’t do anything for you.

Oh, no not NO CONTACT ORDER…just the “no contact” rule for a while until I feel like I can get over him. nothing that had to do with the law at all.

I told him in a week or two I’ll contact him if I feel like this is a mistake… but if not giv me at most two months.

@Deni I don’t know…it’s just everyone says NC helped them out so much and helped them heal. I’m wondering if I’m just a special case cuz our break up wasn’t bad and we still got a long great…it just sucks that I’m in love still and he isn’t.

@chelle21689 Oops! Sorry! Maybe a generational thing. No contact, NC means a no contact order to me. People can sometimes get them without much evidence if they have a sympathetic judge. My bad!!!!!!! LOL. Again! Sorry, sorry, sorry!

Can you still give me your opinion now that you know what I mean? lol

You went from him having it all to him feeling like you’re feeling. Of course he’s not going to be happy with it.

Your reasoning is sound—all your happiness is tied up in him. He has declared that he doesn’t want to be the source of your happiness; he wants to be just friends. In order to get back to owning your own happiness, you have to be able to stand on your own two feet. Otherwise, when he meets someone else and starts a new relationship, you will be totally abandoned. And that is inevitable that it will happen.

Friends or not, the reality of ending a relationship is that the one who did not chose to end it, needs time and space to recover from the other person’s decision. This was not a mutual break-up; while you understand where he’s coming from, it was not your decision, but his, thrust upon you.

@chelle21689 Sometimes I think I’m the Emily Litella of fluther. Hopefully the vintage SNL reference is one you understand.

I think that for him to just walk in one day and say, after five years, that his feelings have changed and he wants to just be friends, well good for him. That might work out if your feelings could be switched off the minute he tells you this, they can’t. What could be more painful than this? Not much, I don’t think. You have lost both your boyfriend and a very good friend. But I don’t think it’s all fair or reasonable of him to think or expect you to, overnight, lose your feelings for him and be o.k. just being friends. The NC, (I know what that means now! :-)), as painful as it is, is going to be less painful over the long run than trying to be friends. That too much of him to ask of you under the circumstances. It would be one sided. He would be getting the benefits of the friendship from an emotional distance because his feeling have changed and you would be most likely using every bit of psychological and emotional energy and control to try and just be friends because that’s what he wants. Not to mention the sexual longing when you’re together that’s going to make you all crazy in the head. There’s no easy way out of or around this. I’m sorry it’s so painful for you but I would say stick to your guns. What matters is your mental and emotional health. I think if you try to be “just friends” with him now, maybe down the road sometime, but now, you’re just going to get dragged around and will only prolong the pain of this break up.

Thank you for making me feel better about my decision.

You will be able to be friends again—after you’re in a new romantic interest aren’t emotionally tied to him.

His justification in being friends now is that you’re okay with the break-up and it wasn’t just him. It is perfectly acceptable to end a relationship that isn’t working out for you. However, he’s had a lot of time to reach that conclusion and come to that decision that you haven’t had. Your meter for being okay with it is just starting to run. He doesn’t get any say in how you come to terms with his decision.

How you recover will determine what the future relationship looks like. However, it’s not likely that anyone he dates in the future is going to be okay with his best friend being someone he dated for 5 years.

Don’t let him manipulate you. Stick to NC and start looking to the future rather than a dead end past.
It will be difficult since, clearly, you are a nice person and cared about him. But, you owe it to yourself to move on.
At 5½ years this will be as hard as making a lifestyle change like quitting smoking. You can do it.

When you were talking to him every day like just friends, it helped ease his guilt about hurting you. Since he knows now that part of you is hurt and needs time to heal to get over him, he has to face his own guilt about hurting you (if he has any). If that is the case, he’s probably mad because you are making him realize that him ending things hurt you (as it should considering he ended a long term relationship rather suddenly) and you still love him.

He is getting all the emotional stuff he needs from you still, without the commitment of the long term relationship and that’s not fair to you.

Look at how often you talk to all of your other friends. Do you talk to them every day? If not, then why treat him any differently than any other friend you have? Why let him be any more special than your other friends when he is just a friend now?

If he really wants to have a friendship with you, cutting back talking to him isn’t going to ruin that. If he just wants the friendship for his own emotional needs and to get rid of the guilt he may or may not have of hurting you, than the friendship won’t last in the long run.

Think about this, when he gets a new girlfriend, do you really think he’s going to be talking to you everyday anymore? Of course not, he’s going to be talking to her and sharing everything with her. So if you wait until that happens, then you will be suddenly shut out again on his terms. This time it’s on your terms and in a way that will allow you to decide when you are really ready for a real friendship with him.

NC is needed to help you move on. After a deep relationship or long time like you said, you need to have space and time to think. You are doing the right thing and should feel no remorse or regret over this. It is going to be difficult, YES. As changing what your vision of day to day life with him is also difficult.
You need to find yourself again. Find your path, find your inner self. It may take some time and you will go through various emotions during that. You will have all sorts of feelings and are in a vulnerable state whether you think it or not.
Reach out to things and friends that will help you through this time that you trust.
Take a day at a time as each one will be different. No Contact is really the best thing you can do for yourself until you find that place to allow you to the future.

Of course you miss hearing from him and are more sad.

Having no contact is hard. But think of it as the true beginning of being broken up.

You can’t grow and move on if you still have such a tight connection with him. It will be feeding, partially and in a flawed way, your need for him.

There is no way that you will be able to move on while still talking to him every day.

Of course he is upset. Still talking to you was feeding his need for emotional connection. He probably didn’t mean to, but he was using you. Think about that when you are longing to hear from him.

Now that you are not having him to talk to every day, you will begin to look outward and reach outward for connection. That is when you will begin to heal.

Good luck. Stick to the no contact.

This makes me sad. Media has people convinced that love is a feeling. It might start with a feeling, but those butterflies fade and it becomes something more substantial than a feeling.
It sounds like your BF abandoned something really substantial because that fleeting “feeling” had faded. You will probably haunt him for the rest of his life as he spends the next several years chasing that feeling and realizing how much more you had.
Maybe this “no contact” will help him see it sooner, but you need to move on now. He can’t Un ring that bell.
Maybe your paths will cross again in the future when he is mature enough to handle real love, but don’t live your life counting on it.
Good luck to you. Sorry for your pain.

@Judi I agree with your comment on the NC breaking it down to core feelings.
@chelle21689 I wish you all the strength needed to help you through.

If you don’t institute a NC situation, then this whole situation will stay right where it is and fester. You will still feel terrible and continue to love him in the same way. And he will still get enjoy the “benefits” of the relationship without having to “participate” in a real relationship with you. Neither one of you will be able to move forward. Actually that’s not true, he will indeed be able to move forward and find a new girlfriend, but you will be stuck in the same exact place. And it will be really ugly when he gets a new girlfriend and then decides to stop talking to you (because he’s talking to her and having a relationship with her).

By continuing to talk to you, he’s making this situation easy on himself. He’s trying to make it appear as though everything’s ok, when it’s not. You will be in a horribly un-equal situation if you allow this continue.

It will be hard and you will cry and you will probably often get the urge to contact him. Resist the urge, or you will be starting over from square one each time you talk to him. You have to make a conscious decision not to talk to him (unless, as I have said before, it is a dire emergency). Let him know, kindly, but in no un-certain terms, that for you to be able to move forward, you have to cut off contact with him for a pretty long time (I still say 6 months to a year is reasonable). After that long of a period a lot of water will have passed under the bridge. You will have learned to resist the urge to contact him, and hopefully you will have found new paths to travel down. And if you are strong, you will be opening up your heart to new people. None of that can happen if you stay in contact with him. If you keep talking to him it will be like re-opening the same wound over and over and over.

By not contacting him, you are not saying that what you had or what you currently feel is not real. You are simply saying that the situation has changed (drastically) and for you to heal and move forward you have to make some drastic changes with regard to how you live each day. But I will remind you too, don’t mark off the days on the calendar to when you can contact him again. That will prolong your pain too, and not let you get out of the ditch. Instead put other things on your calendar: go out with girlfriends, go to a singles mixer, plan to start that hobby you’ve always wanted to try, start excercising and eating a better diet, take a class that you are interested in, spend some time with the family and friends that probably got neglected during the last 5½ years.

Thank you SO MUCH for the support everyone!! I mean even if we do have partners in the future I just hope we can keep in touch and talk. I’m not saying we have to be BEST FRIENDS or anything like that…I feel better already knowing that I can’t see his Facebook and what he’s doing. Even though he is being a bit selfish right now I still know he is a very good hearted person.

If anyone else wants to add more input I can always use more so feel free to respond still

I agree with the nc. You can’t move on in the situation when you were talking to him everyday, and it was making it easier for him, not you. I am old and have been in this same exact situation a few times! What ends up happening, is a few years from now you will probably both be with other people, and have no interest in each other’s lives, and not even know each other’s phone numbers. And it won’t hurt.

Do you have any exes that you keep in touch with? I know I may sound naive but I hope one day we can keep in touch and be on good terms…I’m not saying be the best of friends because our significant others will be jealous lol.

There’s really not much point in being “friends” with your exes. That is why they are your exes. In the future, if you or he end up having different S/O’s then it really isn’t cool to keep in regular contact with the exes, it just makes the new people feel like there is un-finished business (or that the person is still “secretly” hoping to re-unite with the ex). It just causes all sorts of confusion. The best that you can hope for is that you won’t feel anything (except a distant warm fondness) for your ex down the line and that you will be cordial and polite if you happen to bump into him. But to try to have create a friendship is always like taking one step back into the doorway to the un-successful relationship that you were trying to walk away from. And because you were the one who was dumped (this wasn’t a mutual agreement) you will always be on un-equal terms with your ex, no matter how much time has passed. When you are the person who got dumped, and you still love that person, you can never just be friends. You will really never be able to separate the fact that you loved (and maybe will still always feel a certain amount of romantic love) him as a boyfriend. As much as you might want it, you can’t really feel towards this guy like you do towards a best girlfriend. It’s just not the same thing. There’s plenty of people who will tell you that they have lots of exes as friends (they’re usually male) and I think that it is possible, but not likely. I also think that men, when they’re the ones that have done the breaking up, find it pretty easy to be “just friends” with their exes because they have fallen out of love and no longer see their ex that way. For women (for whom love and sex and friendship are completely intertwined, rather than compartmentalized) it’s almost impossible. There’s a couple of guys from my past that I haven’t seen or spoken to in years (they dumped me). And although I rarely think about them, I think it would be really painful and unpleasant to be around them now. And there’s just no point in it. We’ve all moved forward and those relationships were in the past. It’s better to concentrate on what is NOW and what is possible in the future, with other people.

I have two exes that I am in contact with; one I dated and broke up with three times. We still talk. Turns out it wasn’t love after all, for either of us. But it wasn’t for the lack of trying to make it work. The one I really loved, we cannot talk. It’s too painful, 30 years later. There’s no animosity, but the hole is still there, like lightning going through me. And it still hurts when I poke it.

Barnacle, 30 years? Ouch. I fear that it’ll be years and I look back and miss someone I love completely and still feel somewhat empty.

@chelle21689, It was one of those really intense relationships, where it became the be-all, end-all of existence. It reached the point where commitment should have happened and we should have constructed a life together, and moved forward together, but because of the circumstances of college and family, that didn’t happen because financial self-sufficency was not there. What was bad was that I lost contact with all my other friends during the relationship, because being with this person consumed me. In retrospect, that wasn’t wise.