Breakups are awful, and what can make them even worse is when he’s moved on but you haven’t. It may feel like you’re in a rut, stuck in the same place. It may feel like you just need more time to heal. But maybe you’re rationalizing things and deluding yourself into thinking you’re over it when you aren’t even close. If you suspect you haven’t quite fallen out of love, you likely haven’t.
If you think you’re not over him, you may still need further confirmation of that so you can figure out what to do next.
MORE: How to Get Your Ex Back in 5 Steps Guaranteed
Being honest with yourself is the first step. Only after that can you figure out where you’re at and where you want to be so you can begin moving forward.
Here are the signs you’re still in love with your ex.
The Biggest Signs You’re Still In Love With Your Ex
Take The Quiz: Can You Get Your Ex Back Or Is He Gone Forever?
1. You think about him a lot
Everything reminds you of him, so he’s always on your mind.
You constantly have to fight the urge to act on these thoughts by calling or texting him. There’s always something you want to talk to him about. Maybe you want to share your day with him, tell him something you heard about, send him something you know he’d find interesting, or ask his opinion about something.
You wonder what he’s up to and can’t get the possibilities out of your mind. It’s tough because you used to spend so much time with him and now your time is filled with not knowing what’s going on with him. If you’re not over him, you’re going to fill that empty space with thoughts of him.
MORE: Hidden Signs Your Ex Still Loves You (Even if He Says He Doesn’t)
2.You get emotionally triggered by everything
Everything that reminds you of him produces a strong emotional reaction in you.
You can’t eat at certain restaurants, listen to certain songs, watch certain movies. In order to save your sanity, you spend your life dodging these emotional landmines. If you find you’re avoiding things that trigger you because they make you think of him, you’re not over him yet.
If re-reading conversations you had with him makes you cry, or you have to change the station when a song you associate with him comes on, or you feel a pit in your stomach when you pass the restaurant you used to go to, and can’t go in, you’re definitely not over him.
MORE: 6 Ways to Get Over Even the Worst Breakup
3. No other guy can measure up
If you compare every guy you meet to him and they all fall short, this means you’re idealizing him and emotionally refusing to move forward.
It’s hard because everyone tells you that you need to date other guys to forget him, but you date other guys and it just makes you think about him more. Your heart is literally not in it. That’s because your heart is still taken.
If no other guy can measure up, you have some work to do to get over your ex before you can get back out there.
MORE: Undeniable Signs You’re Not Over Your Ex
4.You idealize the relationship
This relates to no other guys being able to measure up. If you see the relationship you had as perfect and believe you were perfectly in love and perfectly happy and never had problems and fought, well, you’re not over him.
The question is, was any of that real? If you’re idealizing the relationship it will be very hard to get over because you’re hanging onto a fantasy and nothing else will ever be able to compare. If, on the other hand, you see the relationship realistically and you remember his flaws and the bad things about the relationship -— the things that caused you to break up -— you can begin healing.
That doesn’t mean you’re over him, but it’s a start. Idealizing the relationship means you’re not being honest with yourself, and as already pointed out, being honest with yourself is the first step in getting over him.
MORE: How to Tell if Your Ex Boyfriend Still Loves You
5. Your friends are over it
While you might not be over him, your friends are certainly over hearing about it!
When it comes to knowing whether or not you’re still in love with your ex, don’t just rely on how you feel and what you think—-look to your friends.
Are they sick of hearing you talk about it? Do they try to shut you down, but you can’t help yourself? He’s always on your mind so he’s the only thing you want to talk about, but everyone has their limits, even your closest friends.
If they’ve stopped listening, chances are you’re repeating yourself and going in circles. If they thought you were onto something, going through a thought process that was going to be helpful, or engaging in productive analysis about what happened so you could move forward, your friends would be all in, doing everything they could to help you get there.
If they’re not, it means you’re spinning your wheels, not moving forward, or longing for something that’s not in your best interest.
MORE: These Are the Signs You Can Get Your Ex Back
6. You stalk him on social media
You scrutinize all his social media behavior. How often he’s posting, when he’s online, and what his pictures and updates might indicate about his emotional state.
Has he followed any new girls lately? Has he liked any girls’ pictures? If he does, then you stalk the girl too, determined to know exactly who she is and what her relationship to him is.
You also stalk his friends’ and family’s social media, searching for new pictures of him or comments by them that might shed light on what he’s been up to, if he’s made new friends or started new activities, if he’s happy.
If you’re over someone, you’re not this intense about stalking his social media and knowing what he’s up to. You might feel a slight pang at the thought of him with someone new if the breakup was recent, but you won’t be devastated, and you won’t spend lots of time and energy trying to learn everything you can about her.
MORE: 13 Unmistakable Signs Your Ex Misses You
7. You can’t let go of relationship keepsakes
Every gift he gave, every card he wrote, and any memento of him or your time together is now sacred to you and will never be disposed of.
It’s literally all you have left of him, so you can’t let any of it go. This means you can’t get rid of pictures, and you won’t delete his texts or emails.
If you’re over someone, these mementos just won’t mean so much. You’ll probably actually want to let them go, since this can be almost like a cleansing ritual that signals you’re ready to start fresh.
The key is, when you get rid of relationship keepsakes, there should generally be a calm and peaceful feeling about it. If you’re furious and hurt and you throw it all away in a fit, well, that level of intensity does not look like someone indifferent and lacking in feeling. So if you get rid of everything to do with him in a fit of rage, this may mean you’re not over him, too.
MORE: The Real Reasons It’s So Hard To Get Over Him
8. It hurts to think about him
You can’t stop thinking about him even though it hurts every time you do. When something reminds you of him, you may feel a pang in your chest, a painful ache. This is the pain of longing, of having an emptiness and a void deep inside that he used to fill. You may feel like you’ve been punched in the stomach or had the wind knocked out of you.
Basically, the pain when you think of him transcends the emotional and becomes physical. Your whole body hurts with the loss of him. If you’re having this reaction when you think about him, you’re still in love.
9.You post things on social media with the sole intention of getting his attention
It’s not enough to stalk his social media, you’re hoping that he’s stalking yours, too. If he’s checking out your social media, maybe it means he still cares.
So you post things to get his attention and make him aware of what he lost: pictures of you looking amazing, dressed sexily, hanging out with hot guys having fun, all in the hopes of getting a reaction out of him and making him want you again.
If you care what he thinks and are trying to attract him and get him to chase you again, you’re still holding out hope that things will work out. If you were in the right kind of place getting over him, you might be tempted to engage in this kind of activity on social media, but you’d recognize that temptation for what it was and do the healthy thing instead to help yourself move on, like hiding his profile or unfriending him.
MORE: Signs You Still Love Him
10. You try to run into him
Do you find yourself hanging out in places where you think he might be, hoping to see him?
Maybe you tell yourself you just like the coffee or the food or the live music, but when you go to these spots, you always make sure you look amazing—totally made up and dressed to kill—and you’re constantly on the lookout for him.
If your friends suggest moving on to somewhere new, you’re reluctant to go somewhere different that he’s not likely to be, and if you do finally agree it feels like the night was a waste and you got dressed up for nothing.
When you go about your life, if the focus is still on him and trying to run into him, you’re not over him.
MORE: Huge Signs You’re Not Over Your Ex
11.You fantasize about getting back together
If a lot of your thoughts about him involve fantasizing about you two getting back together, you’re clearly not over him.
Thoughts have a lot of power. If we constantly think about something or someone, we’re showing that we place a high value on the thing or person, and the more we think about it the more valuable it becomes to us. If you spend a lot of time and energy imagining you and your ex getting back together and living happily ever after, you’ll make it impossible for you to get over him because he’ll have become the most high-value thing, the thing you have to have.
To get over someone, we need to be able to imagine our life without him.
12. You’re kind of happy when you hear things aren’t going well for him
It gives you smug satisfaction to hear his new job isn’t going well, he got fired, or he got dumped by his new girlfriend.
This is because you’re still hurting, and so you want him to be hurting, too. You’re not over him and you don’t want him to be over you.
If his life is going well, even with things that seemingly have nothing to do with you, like his job, it means he’s happy, and how can he be happy without you in his life?
If the thought of him being happy without you hurts, it’s probably because you’re still in love with him.
MORE: Signs You’re (Finally) Over Your Ex
13. He’s the only person you want to tell things to
You want to talk to him after a bad day. You want to talk to him when you need advice. When you need support, he’s the one you want to lean on.
When you still want him to fill this role for you, it means you’re longing for what you had before and you’re not ready to give it up. The reality is that you have friends and family you can lean on, but it’s not the same thing as having that one special person. He filled that role for you, and he’s the only one you want to be there for you in this way.
It usually takes some time after a breakup to break the habit of wanting to tell him everything, but if you can’t seem to shake this urge, it’s a good sign you’re still in love with him and not doing what you need to do to get over him.
14. You have a strong physical reaction when you see him
If you do run into him, you react strongly. This will be a very physical reaction: you’ll get weak in the knees, your heart will race, and your face will flush. Your mind may be able to rationalize, and you can convince yourself logically that you’re over him, but your body can’t lie.
MORE: 8 Signs Your Ex Misses You
15. You replay the happy memories on loop
The only thing that keeps you going is daydreaming about happy times.
When you’re over someone or at least on the way to being over him, you don’t just focus on the positive because you know it’s not healthy and won’t help you move on. If you want to be over someone, you’ll focus on a lot of the negatives—all the reasons the relationship ended, things you don’t like about him, the bad memories.
If you’re replaying the happy memories on loop, it means you’re not even trying to move on. You’d rather stay in the past and shut out reality.
16. You feel self-loathing
If you blame yourself, constantly replay what you did wrong, and think about all the reasons you’re supposedly not good enough, this is a sign you’re not over him. It’s also a sign you’re not in a good place yourself, whether in a relationship or single, because this just isn’t a healthy way to approach a breakup.
Even if you did things wrong and helped to cause the breakup, you didn’t operate in a vacuum. He contributed to what went wrong, or you weren’t right for each other, to begin with.
If you’re feeling self-loathing and self-blame and fixating on those feelings and thoughts, then you’re not over him or the breakup and won’t be able to get there without some hard work on yourself.
17. You just feel empty inside
You feel empty inside without him, and that feeling doesn’t go away as time passes. It’s normal to feel sad and empty after a breakup, but this feeling should gradually fade.
He took up a large part of your life, and it felt like you were connected in every way. Now that that connection is severed, you may feel strangely numb. Your friends, no matter how close, can’t help, and even activities you’re passionate about can’t lessen this type of emptiness.
If a lot of time has passed since your breakup and the emptiness hasn’t lessened, you’re probably still in love with him and need to come up with some strategies to begin moving forward.
MORE: Am I Just Convincing Myself That I Love Him?
Final Thoughts
It’s important to know all these signs, and it’s also important to not let yourself remain in a rut for too long.
It’s tricky because you want to give yourself time to heal, and that can’t be rushed. But you don’t want to do things that will actively prevent you from getting over your ex, either. Some of the signs listed here, like thinking about him constantly, trying to run into him, and stalking his social media, will actively impede your ability to get over him, and that can mean adding months or years more than necessary for you to learn from what went wrong, grow, and find someone better for you.
Look at these not only as signs that you’re still in love with your ex, but also as things you need to avoid doing in order to fall out of love and move on.
Take The Quiz: Can You Get Your Ex Back Or Is He Gone Forever?
In summary…
These Are The Signs You’re Still In Love With Your Ex:
- You think about him a lot
- You get emotionally triggered by everything
- No other guy can measure up
- You idealize the relationship
- Your friends are over it
- You stalk him on social media
- You can’t let go of relationship keepsakes
- It hurts to think about him
- You post things on social media with the sole intention of getting his attention
- You try to run into him
- You fantasize about getting back together
- You’re kind of happy when you hear things aren’t going well for him
- He’s the only person you want to tell things to
- You have a strong physical reaction when you see him
- You replay the happy memories on loop
- You feel self-loathing
- You just feel empty inside
