8 Signs You Lost The Breakup

1. You are still stalking your ex.

Even though you know that you should have gotten rid of them from your social networks — that having them around to stare at when you can’t sleep at night is the opposite of helpful — you just couldn’t let them go. So, instead of attempting to move on and focus your online attention on people who actually matter/are still in your life, you spend your time clicking through their activity and seeing if they’re talking to other people and/or potentially having sex with them. There are only so many times you can look at old photos of the two of you back when you were happy before it becomes unhealthy, and you crossed that line while drinking an entire bottle of wine and crying at their Twitter account.

2. You’re obsessed with who they’re dating.

In all honesty, they’re probably not dating anyone. And even if they were, you know deep down that it’s none of your business. But this doesn’t stop you from obsessing over the possibility, and hating with a fiery, bleeding passion anyone who comes within ten feet of the beloved ex. You still feel ridiculously territorial over someone who no longer factors into your life in any real way, and no matter how childish it makes you look, you can’t help but be absurdly jealous. Every time they go on a date, you feel like someone personally stabbed you in the heart, and even though you can’t tell them not to do it, you’ll take every passive-aggressive measure possible to make it known how hurt your feelings are.

3. You aren’t interested in anyone else.

People keep telling you to join OKCupid. They tell you that there are other people out there for you, and that you broke up for a reason, and that you have to get back out there and try, or you’ll never fall in love again. And it’s all you can do not to slap them in the face and be like, “Fuck you, I’m not interested in falling in love again, I’m already in love with someone and I just want that to work out. I’ll be fine.” Ryan Gosling could literally walk up to you naked and be like, “I love you, I need you, I want to take you away forever to go lay poolside at my mansion and perform oral sex on you at regular intervals” and you’d be like, “Nope, I’d rather sit in my room and cry and listen to Dashboard Confessional.”

4. You’ve let yourself go.

If you used to exercise regularly pre-breakup, you no longer do. If you dressed nicely before you went out during the day, you are now lucky if you manage to change your sweatpants once every few days. If you used to take care of yourself in any respect, you now basically look like you just walked out of a wind tunnel at all times. You just generally no longer give a shit about what you look like or what impression you give off to the rest of the world — you hate everyone, and the one person whose opinion you actually care about isn’t going to see you, so there is no point in putting in effort. A pigeon might crap on you while you’re walking to work, and you’ll just spend all day with a giant white blotch on your shoulder, because you are not trying to impress everyone. You want your overall look to say, “No matter what you do, do not talk to me.”

5. You can’t be bothered to go out.

There was once a version of you who enjoyed going out to bars and restaurants and having a good time with friends and cool new strangers you might meet along the way. That person curled up in the fetal position and died a little while ago, and now you’re not planning on leaving your bed ever again.

6. You talk about your ex all the time.

You get the general impression that people have started avoiding you because they know that literally every conversation with you is going to be a thinly-veiled premise for you harvesting information about what your ex has been doing. It’s not that your friends don’t love you, it’s just that they can’t keep going around in circles and pretending like they don’t know your ex has been seeing someone new to spare your feelings, nor are they sure what to do when you inevitably break down in tears because someone mentioned their name in passing. If every other word out of your mouth has to do, either directly or indirectly, with what the two of you had together, you can’t really blame them for not wanting to start a conversation with you at parties.

7. You would get back with them in a heartbeat.

You want to pretend like you’re so glad you’re done with that asshole, and moving onto better things, and hate them for all that they did, and consider yourself in a much better place emotionally — but really, all it would take is one well-placed phone call and you would be back in their arms without a moment’s hesitation. You would literally get in a taxi wherever you were standing and barrel roll out onto their front lawn while the car was still moving, all while still on the phone with them.

8. You think about it in terms of who is “winning” and who is “losing.”

At the end of the day, if you’re considering the fact that anyone is winning or losing anything when it comes to something as complex and ugly as a breakup, it’s a good sign that you’re on the losing side of it. Whenever you boil it down to someone being quantifiably better off, it’s usually because you know that you aren’t stacking up too well. People who are actually moving on and being happier with their lives are not usually sticking around to think about how well the other person is doing, and what your respective trajectories would look like written out on an infographic. In an ideal world, you’d be too busy being happy to notice what anyone else was doing.