“I’m Not Mad, I Just Don’t Miss You Anymore”: Love, Control, and the Need to Let Things Be

My friend (let’s refer to her as Pansy) just got out of a five-year relationship. No great scandal, no dramatic exit scene. Just the slow erosion of a once-gleaming thing — chipped bit by bit by time, mismatched priorities, and a fatigue that neither of them could name until it was all that remained. The kind of ending where the silence isn’t angry, it’s just… resigned. A half-packed suitcase in the hallway. A toothbrush still in the glass, but nobody’s reaching for it anymore.

She called me a few nights ago, not to cry, those tears had already dried somewhere between month four and month five of pretending they were “fine”, but to confess something stranger: “I don’t even miss him anymore. I’m not mad. I’m just... done.” And there was something holy in the way she said it. Not triumphant. Not bitter. Just honest. Like real closure doesn’t arrive with fireworks, but with a sigh you didn’t realise you were holding.

We talked for hours. About how love, when it’s good, feels like freedom. But when it’s decaying, it feels like a job you’re no longer qualified for but can’t quit because you once loved it so much. And maybe that’s the hardest part. Admitting that sometimes, the healthiest thing you can do for love is let it go unrescued.

This isn’t about heartbreak in the Hollywood sense. It’s about the softer, sadder kind — the one with no villain, no affair, no slammed doors. It’s about the quiet dissolution. The human impulse to clutch at things long after they’ve stopped being ours. And the strange grace of realising you don’t have to anymore.

When Love Becomes a Grasp

There’s a moment in most relationships, especially the long ones, the stitched-over years with shared flats and toothbrush drawers, when the love stops flowing freely and starts to harden. It calcifies into routines, defences, requests disguised as compliments. You stop saying “Love you” and start saying “Be careful,” “Don’t forget,” “Where are you going?” The tether gets tighter, not out of affection, but out of fear, as though closeness might be mistaken for certainty.

That’s when love becomes a grasp. And the problem with grasping is that it’s one step away from strangling.

Pansy, freshly unmoored after five years, told me she couldn’t quite tell when it shifted. One day, she said, it just felt like she was being held onto, rather than held. Like her life had become a suitcase someone refused to let go of at baggage claim. Heavy with meaning, yes, but no longer moving.

We don’t often admit how controlling we get when we’re scared of losing someone. Not in the villainous, movie-monologue way. In quieter, more insidious forms — the need to know where they are, the anxiety when they don’t reply fast enough, the ache that blooms when they have fun without you. It's not love that hurts. It’s the surveillance masquerading as care.

There’s a difference between presence and possession, though the line thins with time. We say “my partner” like we say “my coat” or “my bag.” We treat intimacy like a lease, something we can renew with good behaviour, something we expect terms on. And when that lease is broken, when they leave, or drift, or change their minds — we react not just with sadness, but outrage. “How dare you?” becomes the battle cry of the abandoned.

But nobody is yours. Not really. And love, when it works, doesn’t need to be held onto so tightly. It breathes. It trusts. It knows that people are not paperweights, and if they’re still here, it’s because they want to be. Not because you’ve penned them in with shared phone plans and holiday deposits.

I think about the metaphor of a butterfly, overused as it is. Not the one pinned to a board, but the one that lands on your arm in the garden. You don’t trap it under glass. You don’t tell it to stay. You go, still. You let it be. That’s the kind of love we should be taught to strive for. Not the grasping kind. The gentle, fluttering kind that feels like a privilege, not a possession.

But of course, we’re rarely taught that. We grow up in a world that sells love as conquest, romance as achievement. Fairy tales end with marriage, not mutual understanding. Songs are written about obsession, not quiet coexistence. And somewhere along the line, we begin to believe that love means securing someone: tying them down, keeping them close, even if it’s at the cost of air and growth.

The irony is that love held too tightly often suffocates the very connection it’s trying to preserve. We grasp because we care. And then they leave because we grasped. It’s a tragic loop. A snake eating its own tail and calling it commitment.

So how do you loosen the grip?

Perhaps it begins with the hardest admission of all: that people are allowed to outgrow you. That love can be real and still end. That the story might not get the closure you wanted — no dramatic goodbye, no neat arc. Just a Sunday morning where they pack a bag, or a Tuesday night where they don’t call back.

And in those moments, the best thing you can do (or rather the most loving thing you can do) is let go without needing to rewrite the ending. No villain. No hero. Just two people who stopped being right for each other in the way they once were.

There’s peace in that, eventually. Not right away. But later, when you no longer flinch at their name, when you forget the sound of their keys in the door. When you realise that you’ve started using the word “mine” again, but only in reference to yourself.

Your space. Your quiet. Your life, returning.

That is what you deserve.

Ghosts in the Algorithm

The end of a relationship used to be clean, at least logistically. A few awkward run-ins at parties, perhaps. A returned jumper, folded neatly but perfumed with distance. You could delete the number and pretend it had never lived under “Favourite Contacts.” The person became a memory. A ghost, if you like, but a silent one. Respectful. Distant. The kind that haunts a hallway now and then but knows not to knock.

But now? Now people seem to break up and carry each other around in our pockets. At least from what I’ve seen.

They vanish from your bed but remain in your phone, like a virus that’s benign but persistent. You check their “last seen” on Instagram or see their Snap Score go up, and wonder who they’re speaking to at 1:43 a.m. See if they reposted anything about you on TikTok. Just in case. You don’t care, of course. You’re just curious. Detached. Academic about it. Just a passing glance. Like a burglar “just checking” the door’s still locked.

And then there are the Stories… the curated agony of a three-second clip. A wine glass. A group of laughing people you don’t recognise. The kind of passive-aggressive performance art only the modern heartbreak could produce. They’re not even in the frame, but they’re there. A shadow in the corner. A tagged name. A subtle resharing of someone else’s happiness, which of course, is code for “I’m doing fine without you.”

I do think social media has managed to turn grief into a spectator sport. A solo event, but with many spectators, all of them in your head. There’s a special kind of masochism in heartbreak now: the self-inflicted kind. You don’t need closure when you can refresh. You don’t need answers when you can decode captions. You don’t need contact when you’ve got content.

The algorithm doesn’t care about your dignity. It only cares about engagement. So it hands you photos of them with friends you’ve never met. It dredges up shared memories on the exact date you were trying to forget. “Two years ago today…” Yes, thank you. Very helpful. Let me just bleed a little more prettily, shall I?

We talk a lot about ghosts in the digital age. Lost followers. Dead people’s accounts. The ex who still likes your posts but never speaks. The echo of someone who was once constant, now reduced to a profile picture that hasn’t changed since October. We don’t bury people anymore; we bookmark them.

And in the midst of all this, people perform. Heartbreak has become an aesthetic. You post something cryptic, but artful. A picture of a candle. A quote about growth. Something about closing doors and opening windows, as if grief is just a home renovation project. You don’t tag them, of course. That would be gauche. But you watch. You always watch.

There’s something deeply unromantic about the way people grieve now. It’s administrative. Notifications. Deactivations. Muting without blocking. Complaining without unfollowing. Trying to disappear without declaring it. Wanting them to notice your absence but not your effort.

And yet, even in this chaos, there’s something oddly comforting. The knowledge that we all do it. That there is a shared language in the silence between pings. That everyone, at some point, has stared at a screen that won’t light up and wondered if silence is the answer or the punishment.

Pansy told me once that she left her phone on airplane mode for two days, just to give herself the illusion of being unreachable. As if heartbreak was something you could outfly. As if love couldn’t pass through clouds. She cried watching an Instagram Story set to a song her and her ex used to hum. Not because she missed him, but because she missed being the one he curated those songs for. The ego bruises harder than the heart.

Eventually, though, even the algorithm gets bored. It stops serving you scraps. It forgets your preferences. The feed is filled with dogs and recipes. Their name slips from your suggested search bar. And that, strangely, is when the healing begins — not when you delete them, but when the machine forgets for you. The silence becomes quieter. Less haunted. Less begging. Just space. Just peace.

Maybe we don’t get real closure anymore. Maybe we just get better at not checking.

Butterfly Logic: The Case for Release

There’s a kind of beauty that crumples when clutched. You see it in petals, in soufflés, in the bruised velvet of a plum. And most of all, in love. Try to possess it too tightly, and what was once warm and breathing becomes something resentful, cold, and museum-still. Pretty, perhaps, but no longer alive.

I’ve always been suspicious of the idea that love is proved through endurance: that staying, even when you’ve both wilted, is the ultimate act of devotion. I think the media has romanticised longevity to the point of cruelty. As if years are medals, even if they’re rusted. As if staying until the end is always a virtue, even when the end arrived long ago and you’ve both just been loitering in the ruins out of habit.

A friend of mine (not Pansy, another) once told me a story about trying to keep a butterfly in a jam jar as a child. She punched holes in the lid. She gave it sugar water. She wanted it close, wanted to admire it, to keep it from being swallowed by wind or birds or pavement. It died, of course. Not from malice, but from love without understanding. That story stuck with me. That’s what many of us do with relationships — we build the jar, we tell ourselves the air holes are enough, and we wonder why the beautiful thing begins to wilt.

The truth is, we often confuse love with control. Not out of cruelty, but out of fear. “If I can just hold on long enough, they’ll stay. If I say the right thing, prove I’m enough, remind them of the early days, then they’ll remember. Then they won’t go.” But love isn’t a courtroom. You don’t win by presenting evidence. You don’t convince someone back into your arms. That’s not romance, that’s hostage negotiation.

Letting go, truly letting go, is not a dramatic act. It’s not a door slammed or a number deleted in rage. It’s slower than that. Quieter. It happens when you realise the version of them you were fighting for no longer exists, and maybe hasn’t for some time. When you stop checking if they’ve watched your Story. When your mind no longer narrates what you’d say if they texted. When you stop writing imaginary letters they’ll never read.

Prior to Pansy’s call to me, he hadn’t crossed her mind in days, not really, and suddenly, she realised she wasn’t carrying the weight anymore. She’d stopped performing heartbreak. Stopped auditioning for a reunion that wasn’t coming. It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t triumphant. It just was. A small, private graduation.

Letting go isn’t the opposite of love. Sometimes, it is love — the part that isn’t selfish. The part that doesn’t need reciprocation. The part that says, “You’re free to go, and I’ll be fine.” It’s not passive. It’s not giving up. It’s gardening, not harvesting. It’s tending to what still blooms in you, even if they don’t get to see it anymore.

We want people to stay. Of course we do. We want their laughter in the house, their toothbrush next to ours, their socks always half-dry on the radiator. But people aren’t permanent fixtures. They are guests, however long they stay. Some build a life with you. Some just teach you how to hold the door open with grace.

Butterfly logic, I call it. The understanding that what’s meant to flutter might not nest. That your love might be real, but fleeting. And that doesn’t make it less sacred. If anything, it makes it more.

The world is full of people who confuse possession with presence. Who clutch and label and trap. But the ones who learn to release, to let beauty come and go without chasing it, they live lighter. They love clearer. They move through life with open palms and fewer regrets.

Because at some point, you realise: if you love something, and it needs to leave, you don’t lose it by letting it go. You only lose it by forcing it to stay.

The Mid-Sentence Goodbye

Some endings feel like earthquakes. Others feel like car crashes, thunderclaps, slammed doors echoing through your chest. But the worst ones, the quietest, leave no sound at all. No final scene. No last line. Just a half-finished sentence, floating like dust in a sunbeam. You wait for the next word. It never comes.

There was no fight. No betrayal. No theatrical walk-out or shattered wineglass. Just a slow tapering. A few unanswered messages. A pause that grew legs. One day, you realise it’s been weeks since you last spoke. Then months. Then, somehow, a year.

We’re taught to seek resolution. In books. In films. In conversation. Even breakups, we’re told, deserve a closing act — a scene where everything’s unpacked, explained, left on the table like an emotional buffet. But real life rarely offers that. Real life prefers the slow fade. The ghost dissolve. The kind of ending where you’re left refreshing a chat thread that hasn’t blinked back since May, wondering if they even noticed they left.

There’s something uniquely cruel about a love that ends like that. Not in anger, but in absence. It denies you a performance. You don’t get to cry in a street or scream on a doorstep. You just quietly recalibrate your days around a silence that wasn’t scheduled. And yet, in some strange way, that kind of ending might be the most honest. Because not all stories need a period. Some are written in ellipses.

There’s no handbook for endings that never announce themselves. They don’t give you the satisfaction of rage. They don’t lend themselves to dramatic anecdotes. You can’t even tell your friends what happened, because you’re not entirely sure yourself. “I guess… we just stopped?” is not a satisfying narrative. It doesn’t tweet well. It doesn’t soundtrack a breakup montage. It just hangs in the air, damp and unresolved.

But there is a strange, quiet power in that. A dignity, even. Because not every love needs a fireworks finale. Sometimes it’s more truthful to admit that you simply drifted, like two boats whose ropes came loose in the night, slipping into separate tides. No betrayal. No villains. Just tides.

The ache of that kind of ending is different. It doesn’t punch you in the gut. It hums. A low, persistent frequency. You feel it in the way you no longer reach for your phone in the mornings. In the way your dinner playlist changes. In the small moments when you realise they’re not part of your reference points anymore. Not in your jokes, not in your dreams. They simply… fade.

And yet, the mid-sentence goodbye teaches you something most clean-cut closures don’t: how to sit with the unresolved. How to resist the urge to tie everything in a bow. We live in a world obsessed with definition: of what we are, of what we meant. But some people arrive not to complete your story, but to interrupt it, gently. To place a comma in the rhythm of your life. And that’s okay.

You learn, over time, not to crave their words. Not to dissect their silence. Not to construct imaginary dialogues where they finally explain. You let the lack of ending be the ending. You place it gently in a mental drawer labelled unfinished — not because it didn’t matter, but because some things are more honest left open.

And I’m sure when Pansy passes the oat milk aisle again, eventually, she doesn't wince. She doesn't remember his voice or the way he laughed in the mornings. She'll remember how strange it was, for a while, to speak into an empty room. And how, slowly, her own voice returned to her.

The Day You Forgot to Check

You don’t remember the day you stopped looking. That’s how healing always begins — not with fireworks, but with forgetfulness. Not with ceremony, but with silence. One day, without meaning to, you simply forget to check.

No dramatic act of closure. No muting. No archiving. No final flourish of control. Just... forgetting. Their name on your screen stops hijacking your pulse. You scroll past it like any other. You don’t stop breathing. You don’t write a poem about it. You don’t even screenshot it for your group chat. You just keep scrolling. And that’s how it starts.

It doesn’t feel like strength. It feels like washing your hair on a Tuesday. Like finishing your lunch and noticing you haven’t thought about them all morning. Like hearing your song in a café and not needing to look away. Not because it doesn’t mean something, but because you’ve made peace with the fact that it used to.

Heartbreak has such an ego, doesn’t it? It wants to be noticed. Wants to be written about. It paints itself in gothic hues. Candlelight, red wine, and aching. But healing? Healing is almost rude in how casually it arrives. No slow-motion montage. No light pouring through the window in just the right way. Just you, stood in the middle of a train platform, realising you haven’t cried in a while.

We build rituals around pain. Post-heartbreak, everything becomes ceremonial — the sacred agony of checking if they’ve viewed your story, the quiet heartbreak of a profile picture change, the masochistic detective work of scrolling through new likes. You think you’re gathering information, but really, you’re just building a shrine to a version of them that no longer exists.

And then one day, you forget to visit.

It’s strange, the first time you see their face and feel nothing. Not relief, not longing… nothing. A neutrality so quiet it feels like betrayal. You almost want to grieve the absence of the grief. You remember how obsessed you were, how deeply you felt, how loudly your chest screamed their name. And now... it’s like walking past a house you used to live in. The curtains are different. The garden’s overgrown. But you don’t knock.

Healing never delivers a press release. It slips in like breath returning to a room after a long-held sigh. You don’t notice it until you do. And then, you start to realise how heavy you’d been holding everything. How tightly you’d clenched your memories. How often you’d been revisiting a museum no one else was walking through.

You learn to stop narrating your pain. To stop imagining them reading your captions. To stop constructing your healing like it’s something they’ll ever see. Because healing isn’t about being seen. It’s about seeing yourself, again — not as a survivor of someone else’s story, but as the author of your own.

The day you forget to check is the day you come home to yourself. Quietly. Almost boringly. No applause. No orchestral crescendo. Just a little more space in your mind. A little less weight in your gut. A new joke that doesn’t include them. A playlist that doesn’t need skipping.

And the real magic? You won’t even realise it’s happened. Until someone asks about them, and you have to pause to remember why they mattered.

You’ll still carry the story, of course. But it won’t be burning in your pocket anymore. It’ll be folded neatly into your past, like a letter you no longer need to send.

On Not Wishing Them Ill

There’s a peculiar moment, post-heartbreak, when you realise you no longer need them to suffer. You don’t need their new relationship to implode. You don’t need them to stumble across an old photo of you and feel their chest cave in. You don’t even need them to miss you. The theatre of revenge starts to feel childish. And what takes its place, bewilderingly and quietly, is indifference. Not bitterness disguised as detachment. Actual indifference. A holy, weightless shrug of the soul.

It’s easy to pretend you’re over someone when you’re still hoping they’ll regret letting you go. Easy to coat your anger in aesthetics: the haircut, the fire captions, the flirtations carefully positioned in public. But none of that is release. That’s still orbit. Still performing the breakup like an opera where you’re both checking the stage notes. True peace is when you no longer need an audience.

Indifference is not apathy. It’s not cruelty. It’s a kind of sacred detachment — a refusal to be defined by what didn’t last. You stop needing to curate your life for their hypothetical viewing. You stop scripting imaginary conversations where you finally win. Because the truth is, by the time you get there, there's nothing to win. There’s just the quiet satisfaction of no longer caring.

I used to think forgiveness was about the other person. That you had to grant it like a pardon, a moral mercy. But now I think forgiveness is mostly selfish. It’s deciding you’re too tired to carry the weight of their memory. That your spine deserves better than a grudge. You don’t forgive because they deserve it. You forgive because you deserve peace. And nothing is heavier than unresolved rage dressed up as righteousness.

Revenge, after all, is a young person’s sport. It burns hot, then burns out. There’s something far more elegant about the emotional neutral. The shrug. The unsent message. The decision to let them be a mystery again — to the world, and to you. You stop checking who they’re with, what they’re wearing, whether they’ve grown a beard or finally read that book you once begged them to. They’re not your business anymore. And what a relief.

It’s easy to hate people who hurt us. But hate, like love, is an energetic investment. It keeps them tethered to you in a story that should have ended. At some point, you realise the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s not caring whether they’re happy. Not in a malicious way, but in “a no longer your problem” way. You stop playing God in their life. You release them from the role of villain, not to be noble, but because you’re tired of the script.

This is where healing matures. Not when you finally land the cutting text or win the imaginary post-breakup glow-up contest, but when you find yourself genuinely hoping they’re well. Not in that passive-aggressive, bless-your-heart way. But in the quiet, human way. The way that says: we were something. And now we’re not. And that’s fine.

You don’t wish them a tragic downfall. You don’t hope their new partner treats them like dust. You don’t dream of your name lingering in their mouth like regret. You just hope they find whatever it is they’re still looking for. And you keep walking toward whatever you’re still becoming.

Because in the end, the best revenge isn’t success. It’s serenity. It’s a Sunday morning where you don’t think of them at all. It’s realising your life has grown so rich, so layered, so deliciously yours — that their name feels like a trivia answer in someone else’s game.

And if they do think of you one day? Let it be with a strange fondness. Let them wonder, briefly, where you are. What you’re doing. Who you became.

But let it end there.

Loving Without Owning

Perhaps the truest kind of love is the kind that doesn’t insist on staying. The kind that doesn’t claw or beg or reappear drunk at midnight to say things it should’ve said at noon. The kind that doesn’t need to be witnessed to be real. Because sometimes, loving someone means you don’t get to keep them, and maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s the love.

We’re taught to measure love by endurance. By how long it lasted. By whether it came back. But some loves aren’t built for distance. They burn, then fade, then plant something quiet in us that stays. A thought. A softness. A lesson wrapped in a kiss.

It’s strange how powerful letting go can feel. Not passive, not surrender, but a full-bodied act of grace. Like pruning a garden not out of indifference, but because you love it enough to want it to thrive without choking. Love without ownership is risky. It requires trust, not in the other person, but in yourself, that you’ll be okay even if they don’t stay. That you were whole before them. That you’ll be whole after.

And maybe that’s what makes it love at all — not the grasp, not the promise, not even the story. But the fact that you let them be free. That you were free with them. That it ended not because you stopped caring, but because you stopped needing it to prove something.

You loved them. You don’t need to anymore.

And that’s enough.

S xoxo

Written in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

19th April 2025