Valora, How did you get so smart?  Seriously.  You have so much good and wise advice.  I really appreciate it.

You make a really good point of letting go of the past.  If i’m understanding this right.  I can let go of what i had with her.  with everything.  But i don’t have to let go of her or still having feelings for her?  I hope that’s what you meant.  That’s what i’m getting from it.  I’m sure I will always love her and letting go of the past doesn’t mean i’m deleting her from my heart?

Thank you!  And yes, exactly. You don’t have to push her out of your heart. I don’t think I could push my ex out of my heart if I tried and I think, if I tried to, that would be going against what my heart wants and would just cause me a ton of grief. You just can’t let yourself continue to ache for her.  Think of it like this…. just make a nice little spot on a shelf in the back of your mind for the memory of your love and leave it there while you move on with your life. If she does come back around, as you guys get to know each other, that love for her will still be there on that shelf and you’ll be able to pull it right back down and let those feelings grow again if that’s what you want… so you don’t have to have that fear of her coming back and you feeling nothing. If it’s meant to be, you will still want it to be.  This is just something that will allow you to move on and be open to other love, but you deeeefinitely don’t have to delete her from your heart.  Frankly, I have a nice little shelf for all of my ex’s in memory, even the ones I’m good friends with now. It’s a different kind of love for them now, but they will always be special to me in their own ways. And that’s totally okay!

  Instead of making myself better for her, or to be the man she wants.  I need to make myself better for me.  To be the man I want to be.

Yesssssss! This is exactly what you need to do. Do it for you.  And then believe it or not, doing things for your own well-being and self-improvement for the sake of your own wants rather than someone else’s will actually attract the things you truly want into your life… which is basically just that feeling you had with your ex. You want all of those feelings back, not the old relationship with the turmoil and issues and maybe not even specifically your ex. You want those feelings she gave you and the good experiences you had. Improve yourself and get to a place where you are truly feeling good, confident, secure, and happy with the life path you’re on, and that’s when you can attract that love and those feelings that you want back into your life, and it may be with your ex or someone new entirely, but you won’t care because whoever it is will give you those feelings that you loved so much AND you’ll know that that person likes the REAL you because you’ll have done the work on yourself and won’t be trying to change yourself for someone else anymore.

This is why it’s so important to just work on yourself and go with the flow… cause think about it… if you have to work to get her back or convince her to come back, you will ALWAYS feel insecure about the connection/relationship…. but if you let her go for now and work on yourself to get to a point where you really love where you’re at and you’re confident and secure in yourself and the direction you want to take your life in and THEN she comes back naturally, then you’ll know it wasn’t because you talked her into giving you another shot… it’ll be because she genuinely was attracted back to you. And you kind of just have to leave the HOW up to God, the universe, fate, whatever you believe and just have faith that it’ll happen on its own if it’s supposed to, but it’s so important that you both do the work to change any issues beforehand or you’ll just have the same problems again.

I need to learn how to be happy with what i have and forget about what i had.  It is so hard to do though.  So hard to get out of the mindset of thinking that i need to be this certain guy and say the right things instead of just being myself.

Honestly, I think it’s only hard for you because you keep telling yourself it’s hard. All it really takes is a firm decision and then suddenly it gets easier. Trust me on that. I was literally sobbing to my therapist one day about needing closure, and then the next day I asked myself why?? What would that REALLY do for me?? It likely wouldn’t change anything and I know I still have work to do on myself and my own issues, so I made the decision that day to just let things go and it was like a weight lifted and everything got easier. I quit crying every day. Thoughts of him are fewer and far between and really don’t have any emotional impact, they’re just kind of thoughts that pass through and I don’t mind them so much. I’m not fighting with myself anymore. All because I made the decision to take him off the pedestal, put him in a nice little space on a shelf in the back of my mind, and let the past go.  Things got a lot easier after that.  But if you keep telling yourself it’s hard to do, you’re going to keep believing that it’s hard to do… when it doesn’t have to be.  Start telling yourself it’s easy and you can do it… over and over.  Seriously. You have no idea the psychological affect that can have. It’s a mind trick that truly works. 🙂   Google Kerwin Rae “This is simple. This is easy. This is fun.” to learn more about that. I’m a psychology major and I’ve learned what he says is absolutely true.

You’ve learned a lot of lessons from this. Just take them to heart and remember them and recognize the value this experience has given you. It sucks, but it has been valuable.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Valora.
• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Valora.