u/Away-Primary4886

Six months after my breakup, I’m still trying to understand how someone can move on like you never existed
It’s been six months since my relationship ended, and I honestly still have days where I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.
The relationship ended after a period where I was emotionally drained from my job and depressed for many months. Looking back now, I realize I was neglecting my relationship in ways I wasn’t fully aware of at the time. I wasn’t showing up emotionally the way I should have, and I can see that much more clearly now than I could when I was actually going through it.
I have a lot of regret about that.
But there was another side to our relationship that I’ve been thinking about a lot since the breakup.
He was emotionally distant for a lot of the relationship. Whenever we’d have even a relatively minor fight or disagreement, he had this pattern of going onto dating apps and looking for other people. It wasn’t necessarily that he would immediately start a new relationship, but he would throw himself into dating apps, talking to women, or looking for attention elsewhere whenever things between us weren’t going well.
And I think I normalized it for a long time.
Now that I’m looking back, I realize how painful that must have been for me, even though I didn’t fully acknowledge it at the time. Instead of working through conflict with me, it often felt like his way of coping was to distance himself from me and seek validation somewhere else.
So when we actually broke up, I think part of me already knew what was coming.
But I still wasn’t prepared for how quickly it happened.
Within about a week of the breakup, he was already on multiple dating apps. He started adding a lot of girls on Instagram and going out on dates. It felt like he immediately threw himself back into the same pattern I’d seen during our relationship, except this time there was no relationship left to come back to.
And while he was doing that, I was still trying to understand what had happened to us.
What made it even harder was that he could be incredibly emotionally distant, but then there would be moments where he’d still reach out, tell me things about his life, talk to me normally, or give me the impression that I still mattered to him.
Then he’d pull away again.
And he left me put of nowhere one fine day and never looked back.

It wasn’t just the breakup.
It was watching someone who had once been such a huge part of my life become so emotionally detached from me.
It felt like he had already created a completely separate life in his head, and I was the only one still standing in the ruins of what we had.
And I keep asking myself:
How can someone be emotionally distant from you for so long, repeatedly turn to dating apps whenever there’s conflict, and then seem to move on so quickly once the relationship actually ends?
Was he emotionally checking out of the relationship long before I realized it?
Was dating and seeking attention from other people his way of avoiding difficult emotions?
Did he actually process the breakup while we were still together?
And if he could move on so quickly, does that mean he stopped caring about me long before he officially ended things?
I know I’m not completely innocent in the story. I know I neglected him emotionally when I was struggling with my own life, and I wish I’d understood what was happening to me at the time.
But I also don’t think that means I have to pretend his behavior didn’t hurt me.
I can take responsibility for the ways I failed him while also acknowledging that I was hurt by the way he handled conflict, the emotional distance, the dating apps, and ultimately the way he seemed to detach from me after the breakup.
I’ve spent these six months trying to rebuild myself. I’ve been going to therapy, exercising, running, doing yoga, trying to sleep and eat better, socializing more, and learning how to actually take care of myself again.
I’m doing much better than I was at the beginning.
But sometimes I still wonder how someone who once knew me so intimately can now behave as though I barely existed.
How can someone remember everything you shared and still become a stranger?
How can someone go from loving you to dating other people within weeks?

I just want to get to a point where I don’t care anymore.

For people who’ve been through something similar: how did you stop obsessing over how quickly your ex moved on? Did you ever find out that their behavior after the breakup had nothing to do with how much you meant to them? And how do you make peace with someone who seems to have emotionally detached from you while you’re still grieving the relationship?