I (23M) saw my ex (22F) again after long time, why do I feel emotionally connected, but not in a romantic way?
**TL;DR;** : Saw my ex after 3 years. No romantic feelings and my life moved on, but I still feel a weird emotional connection and curiosity about how she sees me. She acted distant and I’m wondering if this is normal.
Last week I went to a party organized by some university friends and I casually met my ex girlfriends, with which I broke up almost 3 years ago and I hadn't seen her for a year (we were classmates at the university).
At the time she was a lot for me, so much that when she left me I went through very rough time. Today the life moved forward, the time healed old wounds and we are building our lifes. Count that I had a relationship (that I ended) and she's now happy with her new relationship that she had since one year.
There's a but in all this, despite seeing her again didn't cause me some anxiety or some "romantic" feelings (has it would have happened a year ago), I still feel like there is something that connect us but I don't know what. Although we don't speak to each other and barely we greet. Yes, after all this time she conserve a little bit of hatred towards me. Okay it was a very bad break up but nowadays I'm at peace with this situation, despite we did wrong to each other.
In the past, when we were still classmates, I tried to reconnect to her in a friendly way, because we had some common friend (so for the group benefit), but I felt that was not right for me and it hurt me, so I preferred to safeguard my mental health and maybe I still felt like tramatized.
At the party there were also some her friends and at a certain time her best friend comes to me to speak, and she told a lot of things, maybe due to the fact that she was tipsy. She started telling me that she struggled with the brake up at the time, that I have to apoligize for the mistakes that I made (I did it multiple times in the past years), she also asked me why I didn't congrat her for the graduation and that she (my ex) would be pleased if I told her these things.
Anyway, I want to ask if is normal to feel like connected with a person that was in you life long time ago or maybe there is something to resolve. Thanks to everybody that will share their experiences :)