Hi, @gladystardust. Your ability to get over a seven-year relationship is enviable. My relationship was nowhere near as long and it took me ten times its length to start to feel no feelings, as ironic as that appears. The ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you anymore’ is great is it not? I’d say in some circumstances it would have merit, but definitely not in a near-decade’s worth of relational progress; I find it antagonistic of my idea of long-term relationships – that it gets easier the more you end up banking. Perhaps, now, not always true. Thanks for posting your experience because it’s really close to exemplary of my driving points about the dis-necessity of closure. Ultimately, your ex has highlighted the very real factor at play in so many relationships – cowardice through lack of communication. I don’t buy for a fuckdamn second that someone can be as capricious (or as cognitively dissonant) as simply and suddenly falling out of love with someone. In mature, rational, caring, and self-aware relationships, these things happen over time. So, for someone to start feeling like this in January but not bringing it up until December, at which point they’ve meticulously self-assessed it, is completely balls. In my opinion, there is not one issue in relationships that cannot be benefited (either fixed, accepted, or abandoned) by bringing it to light in the appropriate environment. Anything else is misguided.

Accepting such finality with grace is impressive and not to dishonour your heart by questioning an already concluded situation is even more so. It’s shocking to be treated so callously, so neglectfully but it is what it is. We are so damn obsessed with why, to the point that it becomes unhealthy. I’m reminded now of psychopathic serial killers, whose motives we are always so eager to hear. ‘How could someone do that to a child?’, ‘Do they even have a heart?’, and ‘I can’t believe they’re not even sorry for what they did!’ can all be re-emphasised in the vein of relationships and the people who damage us. Their motives and reasons are useless. Closure is not useless, but it does not lie wholly in reasonable explanations.