After taking a required Intro to Psychology course as an undergrad, I have never looked back. Since my doctoral program, I have specialized in adult relationship therapy. Through my studies and clinicals, I wrote several articles for professional journals and currently in the midst of writing a book.
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Moving Forward: Your Guide on How to Stop Loving Someone
From the very beginning, you have thrown yourself into this relationship with everything you have. You showered them with affection, brought them countless gifts, and used every single chance to express how much you love them. You cannot imagine how to stop loving someone like this person, how to kill this feeling inside of you. But you can no longer ignore certain patterns they fall into after a while.
Perhaps, it’s something small – like they don’t respond right away to your messages or seem mildly unimpressed with the gifts you give. Or maybe you notice something bigger – like they always seem to cancel plans with you or dodge responding to your ‘I love you’ statements.
You start to see more and more of these patterns, and your emotions are painfully twisted in a tight ball. The truth clarifies: he doesn’t love you, even if he cares. Hearing this can be incredibly hurtful, but it doesn’t make it any less true. How to help yourself through these painful emotions? How do you even look into how to stop loving someone?
While what we’ll describe here is not a one-size-fits-all method to one-sided love, these time-proven recommendations will make your healing journey go by faster. Let’s look at tips and steps we have for you on how to stop loving someone who doesn’t love you back.
How to Heal Yourself Faster: 5 Top Tips
It all starts with the realization that you’re in one-sided love. It can be incredibly damaging, but you need it to start the process. After all, love is one of the most intense feelings anyone can feel, and having those feelings disappear overnight is just something that won’t happen.
You may always feel something for them, but that doesn’t mean your unrequited love needs to be a source of pain for you anymore. Once you acknowledge that, here are some of our favorite tips on how to speed up the healing process.
1. Focus on Your Mental Health
Romantic trauma such as finding out someone you love doesn’t feel the same way about you can adversely affect your mental health. Some steps may seem impossible to complete as you learn how to stop loving someone. But you shouldn’t wait for the right time and final conversation to allow yourself to put yourself first in the relationship with the one you love. Your mental health should always be a priority.
Start focusing on learning which coping skills work best for you. Remember that each person is different and has different coping mechanisms that work for them. Look for the things that work best for you. Don’t hesitate to seek professional help as mental health issues and negative emotions may impact your well-being.
2. Spend Time Focusing on Other Relationships
As you attempt to heal, try to indulge in different relationships. This doesn’t even have to be about romantic love, because you don’t need to escape pain. But you need fulfilling relationships and a strong support system to go through the hard healing process, find the strength to raise like a phoenix, and try to find your true love again.
By focusing on your other connections, you also help to extend your own personal growth. So take the time to spend quality time with family members, friends, and even start new relationships. You may even find yourself with a new romantic partner with the help of your friends, colleagues, and family members. Who knows? But your future relationship will have all the chances to be better than this one with all the lessons learned.
3. Practice Self-Awareness
It’s a good idea to try online therapy to increase self-awareness and concentrate on analyzing your thoughts and actions. Do it instead of constantly thinking about this failed relationship and experiencing self-pity. Remember: love is a complicated emotion, and you can only do so much to help yourself once you focus on your emotional needs.
Talk with friends and family or ask a professional therapist for advice on where to look first. Talking to someone in your real life about your hidden pain is a difficult process, but you need it for true relief. You need to lose feelings of anger and hurt to find a new partner and build better relationships for yourself.
Speaking to a professional is possibly one of the biggest ways to step forward. When you have the ability to talk to a therapist, you manage to square away your strong feelings. You find ways to do things differently and see what works in your best interests. It also allows you to indulge in self-growth as you regain the self-esteem that you feel like you may have lost. And with the skills that you learn, you can find yourself in a loving relationship with the right partner.
4. Find a New Hobby
Spending time thinking about your previous love can make you feel hopeless in regard to healing. Try to change it, and spend your free time on a new hobby instead. Once you find a thing you love, it can be surprising how easy it can become to stop loving someone when you find a thing you love instead.
This is why finding a hobby to indulge yourself in is one of the best ways to heal and continue living life. It is also a great method of self-care when your intense emotions get to be too much. So whenever it feels impossible to stand the pain, find a place to practice your new skill.
Look at some of the fun activities your friends are into, or maybe get your best friend to join you in participating in this new hobby. Also, remember that your hobby doesn’t have to be all-consuming in your thoughts. You may find yourself thinking of that love interest no matter what you do. However, a hobby can and will help you fill your mind with things other than that. Imagine how much time you spend thinking about your bad love, and convert it into hours of practicing the thing you love.
5. Consider Some Light Dating
You don’t have to stop loving someone completely in order to move on. Why not open up to dating in a casual way? You can already do it, just hold no expectations that you will commit to anyone or even develop feelings.
At first, this may just be a way to socialize. Think of it as a way to get your mind off of one relationship that is never going to happen. Over time, you may develop feelings for someone else.
However, don’t feel pressure to do that. This is about meeting new people and enjoying yourself. Although, sometimes the perfect match comes when you aren’t bogged down by high expectations.
Try dating on Hily!
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11 Steps to Stop Loving Someone
When you want to stop loving someone, there are certain steps that you can take to move forward with your life. As you take each of these steps, what once may feel impossible will actually get easier as time goes by. Start with any one of these 11 steps to stop loving someone, and you will be on your way to acceptance and happiness.
1. Accept That Your Feelings May Never Completely Go Away
When you want to stop loving someone, one thing that needs to be accepted is that feelings don’t necessarily go away. Even when the healing process is complete, you may find yourself unable to stop thinking about them and caring about them.
Even with a broken heart, these feelings may never completely go away. That love may change into something else. But learning how to stop loving someone doesn’t mean that you enter an emotional abyss towards them. The sooner you accept this fact, the sooner you will be able to move on.
It may help to see this as a grieving process. You are losing someone you thought was the right person for you. Additionally, you are letting go of dreams and expectations. You may be feeling sadness, disappointment, or anger. All of these are valid. It’s a lot to go through. Consider working with a licensed counselor to help you sort things out and get a new perspective.
Related reading: Right Person Wrong Time – It is Really All About Timing
2. Identify Your Own Needs
Right now, you are either suffering the end of a relationship or coming to terms with the fact that this relationship really never existed. In addition to being difficult, it’s a very personal experience. You have to tap into your own emotions and figure out exactly what you need to process this. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to relationship grief.
Once you go through this and identify your own needs, you will be able to navigate this in a healthy way. Also, if you choose to lean on a family member or close friend, this will help you articulate what you need from them.
Even if you love them and will never stop loving them, you can no longer be in a relationship with them.
3. Acknowledge the Truth
The truth is that the relationship is over because it may not have ever been what you wanted it to be.
It’s important to acknowledge this if you ever want to stop loving this person. Be direct with yourself. Be blunt, even if it hurts your feelings initially. Otherwise, you won’t be able to move on with your life but simply continue justifying your feelings and expectations.
Acknowledge that your view of another person was wrong. Perhaps they feigned a strong connection with you that was never really there. Whether it was maliciously or not, it doesn’t even matter now – don’t waste your time trying to figure out the motivations of another person.
A small note: It is easy to focus your blame and anger on the other person. That may even be justified. However, as the relationship becomes a part of your past, you may realize that you were the one who misread the other person’s feelings. Love has a way of creating wishful thinking.
Be honest with yourself. Did you project your feelings onto the other person? Talk with friends who will hold you accountable. They will keep things real for you.
4. Reframe How You Think About Them
You are feeling heartbroken because someone you loved doesn’t love you back. That’s difficult, but it’s often the result of you projecting feelings and fantasies onto them. Essentially, you have built an image based on your perceptions and what you wanted, not what truly existed.
To get past all of this, reframe your thoughts about them as well as your inner dialogue. First, stop thinking and speaking about them as your lover or girlfriend. Don’t deny or tiptoe around their faults. This doesn’t mean you should badmouth them. It’s just that you need to let go of any idealized vision of them that you have. You won’t recover from this if you constantly put them on a pedestal.
5. Think About the Future
To move away from the past, you have to start making plans for your future. Make plans to get on with your life. Start with something light and enjoyable. For example, you could plan a day trip or sign up for a couple of enrichment classes.
Later, as you are more prepared to rebuild your life, you can make more impactful plans. Just don’t make any life-changing decisions while you are dealing with sadness or any other powerful emotion.
6. Spend Time Alone
Not everyone who is falling out of love is focused on a particular person. What they may really be mourning is the loss of being in a relationship. This is painful if you have been accustomed to being part of a couple.
You may need to learn to spend time alone. This is uncomfortable for many people. However, if you can do this, your life can be so much more fulfilling. You won’t need another person to be present at all times for you to feel complete.
7. Find Other Sources of Unhappiness And Fix Those
Men often find themselves pursuing unrequited love when there is something else going on. They are unsettled and unhappy in their lives. So, they either create an unrealistic love fantasy where one doesn’t really exist, or they struggle to let things go when a relationship fades away. Why? Because it’s often easier to create something nice and affirming to focus on than it is to work on things that are going wrong.
Fortunately, this is now the best possible time for you to refocus your energy and time on creating a more fulfilling life for yourself. However, you have to know what is going wrong before you can fix things. It’s time for an honest assessment of your personal and professional life. Figure out where you are dissatisfied, and make a plan to improve things.
8. Think of What You Want in a Partner
This person didn’t work out for you. But, there will be someone who is going to connect with you. This is a good time to stop focusing on the past and think about the future.
What do you want in a future partner? How does your ideal relationship work? This experience may have taught you what you don’t want in another person, but have you focused on what you do want?
When you list the traits that you truly want, you will be able to find the right person when you are ready to move on. Also, you might realize that the woman you loved wasn’t really such an idealized version of herself.
9. Give Yourself Time to Grieve
Just because the relationship meant nothing to them doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean anything to you. As you move through the steps to stop loving someone, you may find these feelings still bubbling up.
After all, even if you want to move on from those feelings, they still existed and can put you in a dark place if you don’t handle them properly. Go ahead and grieve for what you lost, even if you never really had it to begin with.
Grief is a natural process. If you don’t get it out of the way, it can be hard to find the energy to make new memories for the better.
10. Completely Break Away From Them
If it’s possible, consider taking a clean break from this person. Otherwise, they may only serve as a constant reminder of your own heartbreak. This will also remove any danger of you convincing yourself that you still have a chance.
It will be hard letting go of a person. However, once you aren’t exposed to them any further, you may find that you think of them less and less as time goes by.
Start with social media. Mute your conversations. Block them. Avoid gatherings if they are there, at least until you gain better control of your thoughts and feelings. Do you have anything of theirs? Arrange for a mutual friend to return those, and ask them to do the same. Don’t create excuses to make contact with them.
11. Consider How This Impacts Them
When it came out, the movie 500 Days of Summer was wildly popular. For many viewers, the takeaway was that Summer was the evil villain for rejecting Tom, and he was her victim. After all, he loved her so deeply, but she cruelly rejected him.
Today, people are rethinking this. Even the actor who played Tom, Joseph Gordon Levitt, says that it was his character who was the antagonist. Tom projected his wishes and fantasies onto her, and he refused to listen when she didn’t reciprocate.
In your case, “Summer” either stopped loving you back or simply never started. How has your hanging on impacted her? If you were in her position, how would you feel knowing that someone you didn’t love was hanging on or insisting there was a relationship where one never existed? Part of this process is respecting her wishes, and being honest with yourself and others about the state of your relationship.
It’s Time to Find Someone With the Same Feelings!
Your person is out there. Don’t give up. You know what you want from a relationship. So, keep that in mind as you create a dating presence online or in real life. Eventually, you will make the connection you have been looking for all along.
Geoffrey Williams
