How To Stop Loving Someone: 5 Steps That Might Help
Love is confusing, messy, strange, wonderful, inexplicable, and a million other things that sometimes we wish would go away. But love is a gift. It’s a natural part of life, and it’s universal throughout cultures and time. The fact that you fell in love shows that you are human. Do not punish yourself for the love you feel.
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But maybe you are struggling with unrequited love. Or perhaps the person you love isn’t right for you. Perhaps you are in love with a person who has problems with addiction, infidelity, or abuse. And yet, you continue to love them with the same intensity as before. You think it would be most comfortable to stop loving them, but, as you’ve probably noticed, it’s not that simple.
In this article, we will offer some advice to people wondering how to stop loving someone, and we will talk about some suggestions that might help you overcome your feelings and fall in love with yourself first and foremost.
Can You Stop Loving Someone If You Truly Loved Them?
It is possible to stop loving someone.
The love, as you feel it now, will change. Different people serve different purposes in your life. You can be grateful for the time you shared with this person and deeply care about them, then also move on romantically and stop loving them in the way you once did. Even if you were still with this person in a romantic way, the love would change, grow, or even fade away with time.
True love means that you loved and trusted that person like a family member or best friend. If that was the case, then you will always have affection for this person and hope for the best from them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t move on from them romantically and stop loving them as a sexual or romantic partner. It is absolutely normal to know that you love someone but don’t work as a couple.
Relationships change constantly. You can go from being in a relationship with someone to strangers to best friends, then back to strangers. You can love someone, then stop loving them, then love them again! There are no rules, and there is no timeline. There is no reason to fight this process or resent it. Everyone you love becomes a part of you and helps you grow and learn.
Ultimately, you control your perspective, and you can control your mind. Become mindful of your thoughts. Think deeply about what you really want and why. Think about what you believed this person fulfilled. What did you really want from them? Now, why do you want to stop loving them? Separate the person from the desires you attached to them and realize that you can fulfill those needs with someone else, or even just on your own.
If you truly want to move on, stop loving someone, and leave this person in the past, you can do so. People fall out of love all the time. But there is no need to villainize them or speak poorly of them. Due to the time you’ve spent with them or thinking about them, this person has become a part of you. Loving the people who made you who you are is part of loving yourself.
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How Do You Leave Someone You Still Love?
A difficult reality is that love isn’t enough to maintain a relationship. Countless other factors influence whether you stay with someone for life or break up to look for something better. Sometimes it feels absolutely impossible to leave someone who we still deeply love. Maybe you know it’s not working, and you want to stop loving them, but your heart stubbornly holds on.
Firstly, focus on building up your confidence. Often, people accept relationships even if they know it’s not right because they don’t think they will find something better. Believe that you will accept the best love you believe you deserve. You won’t find anything better until you believe that you deserve something better.
Build up your self-image and self-love. Explore. Learn. Have your own adventures outside of this person. You will grow so much that when you try to go back to this person, you won’t fit into that same smaller worldview that you once held, and leaving will suddenly feel not just possible but necessary. Whether or not you managed to stop loving them suddenly becomes irrelevant when you know it’s time to move forward.
Understand that you haven’t done anything wrong, and you don’t need to feel guilty for hurting this person. Hurting someone you love can be painful, especially if the other person makes the breakup more difficult. But simply because you can’t stop loving someone, that doesn’t constitute a solid basis for a relationship. A partner who constantly drags you through dramatic ups and downs as they struggle with addiction, mental health issues, or insecurity hurts your life.
Breakups can be painful, but they can also be some of the most exciting, pivotal moments of your life. A breakup can be the moment when you finally said, “I want more than this,” and took your life into your own hands.
Be decisive and clear. Then, find peace with your decisions. You may be caught between option A and option B. For example, maybe you’re asking, “Should I stay or should I go?” But there is actually an option C: failing to decide at all and floundering in limbo. Option C is almost always the worst-case scenario.
Only you know what is right. Follow your gut. Then, once you decide, be clear about why and how you feel the way you do. There is nothing wrong with breaking up with someone who isn’t right for you. Just be clear and honest with them. If it really isn’t working, they probably know, too. You don’t need to stop loving each other to face reality and do what’s best for both of you.
5 Steps To Stop Loving Someone
1) Accept The Love You Feel
Don’t think that you need to stop loving someone by forcing the love away. Again, love isn’t a bad thing. Instead, accept that you love this person. Accept yourself and the way you feel. Once you do that, you can move forward in accepting the reality of your situation. Accept that, even though you love this person, and even if you feel like you can’t stop loving them, maybe they aren’t right for you.
Take that love and turn it inward. Take care of yourself in the same way that maybe you once cared for this person. Throw yourself into your present life. Fall in love with a new hobby, sport, or class.
Try to understand what you feel. Feelings of love are complex and multi-faceted. There is an element of love that is logical, rational, and formulaic. There is also a part of love that is magical, inexplicable, and chemical. You need both parts of love for a relationship to work.
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Love requires attention. Perhaps you feel like you can’t stop thinking about this person. But all the time you spend thinking about them, you are feeding into the love you supposedly want to overcome. Distractions are helpful when you’re first trying to stop loving someone, but after a while, you will notice that weeks, then months, then years have gone by without even thinking about this person.
2) Stop Idealizing
Real love is a choice. If you deeply love someone, you’ve seen their ups and downs, and you decided to be there on the bad days as well as the good ones. For that reason, love takes some serious courage and strength.
But it’s also possible that you’ve fallen in love with an idealized version of someone. You may be remembering the best parts, or maybe that person only ever showed you their greatest qualities.
You don’t need to harbor resentment and anger towards this person. In fact, it’s best if you forgive them. But you should stop loving the false version of this person that you put on a pedestal. Remind yourself of the moments that were not ideal. Consider why you want to stop loving them. Remember, the person you love is a human being. The person you love is neither a monster nor an angel.
3) Focus On You
You can recognize your mistakes and flaws, but never stop loving yourself.
If you’re in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, remember that that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. You don’t know what is going on in your or her life. You don’t know what external factors might be influencing their decision. You may have heard it said, you could be the juiciest, most delicious peach in the world, and some people prefer pears. It doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong or that you should change any part of yourself. Their impression of you doesn’t reflect your worth as a person.
4) Speak With A Counselor
You may worry that until you stop loving someone, you won’t find love with a new person. If you think that your lingering love for this person is so powerful that you can’t move on, and if it’s affecting your daily happiness and quality of life, then it might help to find a person you can talk to.
A counselor will offer an unbiased opinion, speak with you honestly, and look at your personal situation. On sites like ReGain.us, you can speak with a professional expert in love and relationships. After one free session, you can choose to continue speaking to the same person online from the comfort of your home.
Share with your counselor that you worry about your ability to stop loving someone. It can be frustrating when you want to stop loving someone, but you feel like you can’t; it suddenly takes control away from you and might leave you feeling very anxious. A counselor will understand these feelings and work on them with you.
Many people report feeling much better after expressing their feelings to a nonjudgmental person.
5) Don’t Worry
Don’t stress yourself out about how you can stop being in love with someone. Change the language of your goals. Instead of trying to stop loving this person, try to focus on the future instead of the past. Throw yourself into your daily activities and be present. You can become so distracted and involved in what you’re doing that one day you wake up and realize that you stopped loving them a long time ago.
You don’t need to wait until you stop loving someone to make your life better.
People come and go, and relationships change. It might feel now like you can never love again. But you can. It might feel now like you can never stop loving this one person. Still, you can.
Practice mindfulness and meditation to become more aware of your thoughts and feelings. Try to be more present in every moment. You are in control of your thoughts and actions. You can always change the narrative of your life and make it better.
There are ways to stop loving someone, and it is possible to fall out of love over time. Feelings of love are compelling, and you may worry that you will never stop being in love with a person.
Stop loving an idealized version of this person. Take a rational approach and consider what you really want. When we can’t stop loving someone, it might make us feel like we are losing control. But you can always take that control back.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Can you lose feelings for someone you love?
When you are in love, it can be not easy to imagine you’ll ever stop feeling that way. You feel affection for your love interest and want to spend all your time with them. Even when you’re not physically with them, you can’t stop thinking about them. These feelings and emotions don’t always last.
You can easily fall in love, and you can just as easily fall out of it. A lot of times, when people fall in love, they don’t love the real person. They fall in love with an idealized version of their love interest. After being with them for some time, they realize that their interest does not match their ideal. This can lead to a feeling of disillusionment. Slowly the emotions that once seemed permanent start to drift off, and you realize that you’re no longer in love. This is the type of broken love sex can’t even heal. When non-sexual intimacy is no longer possible, then you might be losing feelings for them.
The case could also be that you still love the person but no longer desire to be with them. In this case, losing feelings for someone you love is a choice rather than disillusionment.
Whether you want to stay in love but no longer love the person, or you are in love with someone who isn’t healthy for you and want to stop loving them. It is possible to lose feelings for someone you love.
How do you end it with someone you love?
Letting go of someone you love is difficult. When you start a relationship with someone you love, they almost become a part of your identity. Ending things with them can feel like losing a part of your identity. To make things easier for both of you, the best thing you can do is end the relationship amicably.
Some steps you can take end things the right way are:
- Understand your reasons and motives:
Having a clear understanding of why you want to break up with them will help you end things properly. You will approach the break-up without any bias or suppressed emotions. Knowing exactly why you want to end things will help you have a non-toxic breakup.
- Prepare:
Before breaking up, take time to decide the best way to approach it. Rushing into a breakup will increase the chances of things ending badly. Plan the breakup before actually breaking up. Think about what you want to say and how best to communicate it. Consider things from their perspective; what will be the best way not to hurt their feelings? Don’t overthink it, but try to have a clear idea of what you want to do before breaking up. Research indicates that effective communication during a break-up makes it easier to move on after.
- Give them space:
Staying in contact after a breakup might seem like a great idea, but you might be causing them pain. Breakups hurt, especially if you get broken up with. So if you break up with someone, staying around them might do more harm than good. So give them space to process the breakup and heal from whatever pain they might be experiencing.
- Allow yourself to heal:
Breaking up with someone you love stings. It might hurt you more than you’d expect, so it is important to give yourself space and time to heal. This could mean,
- Focusing on a new task
- Getting back into the dating scene
- Staying at a friends place to distract yourself after the breakup
- Writing out your thoughts and emotions
- Spending time doing activities you enjoy etc.
How can I stop love pain?
Love is known to be beautiful and precious, something worth spending a lifetime waiting for. While this can be true, toxic love can also be tragic and devastating. When you fall for a person, you become increasingly attracted to them and begin to feel a sudden and sometimes overwhelming wealth of emotions towards them. This could range from joy to sadness, nervousness, loneliness, thrill, desire, etc.
When great love becomes heartbreak, it is very painful and difficult to deal with. Studies show that heartbreak can increase the risk of depression. Ending a relationship or not starting one because the person doesn’t love you can be very painful. Stopping the pain that often comes with love is possible; what isn’t certain is how long this process will take. We cannot force ourselves to stop loving somebody so that the next best thing would be accepting reality and letting go of any negative feelings. Some effective ways of stopping love pain are:
- Writing down your thoughts.
- Distracting yourself by engaging in activities you enjoy
- Dedicating yourself to a challenging task
- Writing a letter to them detailing exactly how you feel without any filtering, then discarding the letter. (This can help provide a sense of closure)
Can you regain feelings for someone?
Human emotion is unpredictable. You can feel different ways about the same person over varying periods. What makes this even more random is the fact that people change every day. We all evolve and shed certain qualities in favor of others. This is why you might start loving the person you once hated and, over time, start falling out of love with those you once loved.
You can regain feelings for someone you stopped loving. Sometimes poor communication can skew your image of a person and cause you to dislike them. If you meet that same person in the future and can see them in a positive light, lost feelings or new love may redevelop and reignite your love life. Sometimes people never stop loving the person they love.
How do you know you’re losing feelings for someone?
A person you no longer love can be unbearable to be around. Either that or you could grow apathetic to their presence. These are both awful scenarios, and both depict a relationship hanging by a thread. The whole point of a relationship is that two people have expressed and acted on their desire to be together. Once you stop feeling the desire to be around someone, which carries on for an extended period, you may have fallen out of love with them. This is the type of broken love sex can’t even heal. When non-sexual intimacy is no longer possible, then you might be losing feelings for them.
