I (26F) still feel love and hate toward my ex (26M) after being together since 14. How do I let this go?
I (26F) was with my ex (26M) from the time we were 14 until adulthood. He was basically my entire teenage and adult life.
What makes this so confusing is that part of me still loves him, but another part of me feels so much anger and disgust toward him. He didn’t physically cheat on me, but I eventually realized a lot of the relationship was unhealthy and damaging in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.
I spent years trying to be “better” for him. I even remember asking him what I could change about myself so he could love me more. Looking back, that breaks my heart because I genuinely believed if I changed enough, he would finally love me the way I loved him.
The thing that completely changed how I saw everything was when I found chat logs between him and one of his friends. At first I thought maybe it was recent, but the messages went back years. Years of seeing how he talked about me behind my back, sexual things that made me feel sick, and comments about wanting to sleep with my sister. At one point he even said something along the lines of, “Whenever me and her break up, I’m going to find a way to fuck her,” talking about my sister. I screenshotted and saved everything.
Reading that broke something in me. It made me question whether he ever actually loved me, or if I was just being used financially, mentally, emotionally, and sexually while I convinced myself things would get better. The red flags were there and I ignored so many of them because I loved him.
The confusing part is that I still occasionally see him, and sometimes things feel normal. But then I look at him and feel anger, hurt, disgust, sadness. I hate that after everything, part of me still cares. I hate myself for it.
how do you let go of someone you loved for so long when part of you feels like the relationship wasn’t even real? How do you stop loving someone who hurt you this deeply and move on from the resentment?