I wAant to tell you I’m going through something similar. Good for you for staying strong! Grieving a relationship was described to me as being like walking along a beach by the ocean… The waves come up and overwhelm you, and them they fade back into the sea. This will happen many times…so when you are sad and those feelings come, let it flow over you and accept the sadness (I’ve cried too this Christmas) knowing it will flow back out to sea. I haven’t always done a very good job of keeping distance, and I’ve found that when I do “cave” and contact him it causes a lot of stress… Waiting for the response, stressing, analyzing every word. I feel like I gives my power to him and my emotions are dependent on his response. It is only over the past couple days that I’ve done better. Stay strong and remember that the pain of missing him is under your control and will help you heal, in time.

Here is a different perspective, for what it might be worth to you. I am 78 years old and my Love is 79. We have both been married to other people for well over 40 years. The marriages were, ‘over’ many years ago but both of us (like SO many older people) continued to go through the motions of our lives, in our respective roles of professional careers, parents to grown children, parents to grown grand children, etc. We see each other, maybe once a week at a friend’s house (bless her). She is the only one who knows about our, now, 8 year, ‘affaire’ for lack of a better term. ‘Affaire’ is not even close, at our age, and is it way more complicated than it seems. He believes, truly, and is probably correct about this, that his grown children would completely disown him if they knew about us or if he left his current wife for me. His current wife is their step-mother but she has them all wrapped around her because she is a nice person and she has a great deal of money. She makes life happen on a high level for all of them and their children…their educations, homes, vacations, etc. My love is dependent on her to do the work of the family while he continues to work like a 25 year old to finance the lives of his first wife and the 5 chidden (grown) who came from that marriage. It is complicated. Now, we are old. It is too late to start over. It is too late to blow up our lives and try to live through the stress of divorce and remarriage. We don’t have it to spend years in court fighting over, ‘stuff’ and the support we will all need soon, going into ‘assisted living’ or whatever will be next. We are in love like we have never been. We are becoming brand new people, people we have never known and whom we really enjoy. We have no social lives together, only apart, with our respective spouses. We have work lives and family lives that do not include one another. That part is very sad. We have dreams that can only be possible through some miracles. We believe in miracles and they keep us going but the years continue to go by and we are still stuck.
There is no, ‘going back’ for either of us. We have learned how to, ‘live in the moments’ as they say, at a whole new level. He will retire this year and he and his wife will travel-a lot. My husband is 85 and his health is chronically difficult so we will not travel. He is retired and we live with little financial security which is rapidly being exceeded by medical expenses. Our children are busy with their own lives and became busier as our funds dwindled over the years. It happens. It happens more often that young people think. If you are young, you might be tempted to say, ‘I would never behave that way toward my elderly parents’ and perhaps that is true. But, just in case you believe you know your parents, try to be sure, that before they die, you make an effort to know who they really are, for your own sake and theirs. Sometimes I think, ‘I’m not going to contact him anymore’, ‘I should just let him go and be with his family, etc’ but I know that he would be broken hearted without me and visa versa. Life really is too short sometimes. Good luck to you as you move on to whatever is next in your life. I believe that the best is way yet to come for you!

Reading your post was comforting. The person I had an intense relationship with went quiet a few weeks after leaving the country for studies in September. After telling me how much I meant to her and that she wanted to still be close. I learned that she moved on a month later to someone who had been texting her quite a bit while we were together, though she kept assuring me that they were just friends. There’s a deep sense of betrayal that she still strung me along and made me believe that he felings for me ran deep when there was someone else in the picture. Anyway, she was supposed to be home for Christmas, and it became a period I dreaded, to remember the plans we had that were not going to be. I’ve crafted out many emails that I didn’t send and in many ways have tried to build myself up again. The relapse does happen from time to time and I try to catch myself before it spirals too much. I’m sure we’re all growing from this, and it’s good to know that we are not walking this path alone. Here’s to less relapses!