My Ex Says They “Love Me” But Not “In Love” (What To Do)

When an ex says they love you but not in love with you, they’re talking about feelings. They’re not saying they stopped loving you, they’re saying they stopped feeling the excitement of being in love.

A “feeling” is a reaction to an emotional experience and feeling love is just like all other feelings. For example, something spooks you, you experience fear, and you feel scared. Someone compliments you, you experience joy, and you feel happy. Things happen in the relationship, you feel unhappy, not listened to or validated, and you stop feeling the excitement of being in love. Your ex breaks up with you, you experience deep loss and you feel sad.

But just like all feelings, feeling in love comes and goes. When the issues that caused the relationship not to work are resolved and the relationship is working again or working better, the excitement of being in love comes back and you’re in love again.

What I’m to say is because feelings are a reaction, they can change when the experience changes. This means that you can get an ex back who lost feelings for you to feel those feelings again by taking the following steps.

1. Keep the lines of communication open and communicate 

One of the top reasons an ex loses feelings and falls out of love is poor or lack of communication. And one of the first things someone losing feelings or falling out of love does is stop communicating. It makes sense that if you want to get back an ex who lost feelings for you, the key is communication.

When you cut off communication, you cut off access to your ex’s emotions. I explain later how the flow of positive emotions is very crucial to the feelings of love coming back and how long it takes the feelings to come back.

It’s possible for an ex to miss you and for feelings of love to come back but feelings that come back only because you are not communicating or around should tell you something about your relationship, and your ex. Someone who feels love for you only when you are not around is going to have a hard time sustaining those feelings when you are around. For them to feel in love with you, they need to miss you, which means from time to time, you have to go away to be loved. You can’t sustain a relationship on “go away, so I can miss you”.

As much as it’s within your control, communicate. Every moment of shared positive emotions is essential to feelings of love coming back.

2. Find out why your ex lost feelings for you

This is easy or difficult depending on your ex’s attachment style.

• Securely attached – Are open and direct and will tell you why they lost their feelings for you. All you have to do is ask.
• Anxiously attached – Leave you to guess because they think the truth will hurt you and want to spare you more pain. You may have to ask many questions to get to how they lost feelings and how they feel now.
• Dismissive avoidants – Want to avoid long-drawn-out “discussions” about the relationship or break-up. Don’t insist on talking. It’s best to focus on creating a safe environment for the feelings to come back.
• Fearful Avoidants – Fear you will use their feelings against them or hurt them in some way. Be reassuring and make sure you communicate directly and clearly.

If you can’t ask or get the answers as to why they lost feelings for you, think back to when your ex started to lose those feelings. They were once there, your ex felt them. What caused them to lose that feeling of being in love?

• Too many arguments
• Being needy and clingy
• You fell into a routine and became boring
• No emotional connection
• Less or no intimacy
• Incompatibility problems
• Your ex feel ignored/taken for granted
• You complained too much and your ex felt they were not good enough for you
• Maybe you take too long to commit etc.

2. Create new feelings that make you ex feel in love again

Once you have figured out why they lost feelings, create new feelings. This is easier than trying to recreate old feelings that your ex lost.

Someone losing feelings for you means that you need to change something up to bring back the exciting feeling of being in love. But while all the changes you make after the breakup are valuable and necessary, only certain changes bring back feelings of love. For example, if your ex lost feelings for you because you fell into a routine and things became boring. Going to the gym, expanding your social network or meditating will have positive impact on you as a person, but if all you do is go to the gym, hang out with your social network and meditate, your relationship will still be a new boring routine, same as the old one.

Invest time thinking of how you can create new experiences and bring new energy into the relationship.  New energy, new experiences and new memories create new feelings of being in love again.

4. Make your ex feel safe, heard, appreciated and validated

Sometimes bringing back lost feelings can be as simple as making your ex feel being in a relationship with you is worth it for them. Some of the things you can do to achieve is tell them how thankful you are for having them in your life, what they mean to you, the qualities you admire about them and what the have taught you about love.

This is tricky when you are broken up. An all of a sudden out pouring of love and appreciation will come across as too needy at best and manipulative at worst. This is one reason I discourage writing your ex ‘a letter”. It usually doesn’t turn out as good as it feels when you are writing the letter. It’s probably better to wait until you’ve made a strong emotional connection, and your ex is showing interest before you go all out.

It’s important to keep in mind that it takes time for lost feelings to come back, and how long depends on why your ex lost feelings for you, your ex’s attachment style, how much you’ve changed, and how consistent you are in making your ex feel safe, listened to and heard, appreciated and validated.

Typically it takes avoidant exes much longer to get their feelings back than it takes an ex with an anxious attachment. The reason being that you need a continuous flow of positive emotions for feelings of love to come back. The problem is avoidants tend to shut down all or at least most of their emotions after the breakup, keep contact very minimal, conversations short and often one sided, they don’t emotionally open up making it hard to have access to their emotions, and from time to time deactivate from connection. This makes it hard to have a continuous flow of positive emotions.

It’s up to you to make sure that every reach out, every conversation, every meeting and every interaction is positive and leaves an avoidant wanting more. One way to do this is become very good at emotionally connecting. People very good at emotionally connecting are good at identifying which emotions are easily accessible and create good feelings from those emotions.