Learning to Unlove

i never thought I’d have to learn how to unlove. Nobody teaches you that part. People talk about falling in love like it’s magic, and heartbreak like it’s tragedy, but they never talk about the space in between the slow unraveling, the endless tug-of-war between your heart and your mind, the nights where you find yourself whispering someone’s name even though you swore you wouldn’t.

Unloving is different from moving on. Moving on sounds clean, like packing up boxes and walking away. Unloving is messy. It’s staring at the memories that haunt you the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that still taste sweet and teaching yourself not to feed them anymore.

Some days, I don’t even know who I’m trying to unlove. Is it the people from my past? The ones who taught me how to break before they ever taught me how to be held? Or is it the ones who are still here, standing beside me, yet somehow farther away than strangers? Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s everyone I’ve ever given too much of myself to.

There are mornings when I wake up and feel the heaviness of them all the ones I’ve lost, the ones who left, the ones I had to let go of even though my heart was still begging me to stay. Their faces float in my chest like ghosts, each one carrying a different version of me. And it hurts, because I don’t know how to unlove them without also unloving the parts of myself that existed with them.

Unloving feels like betrayal sometimes. Like I’m standing in front of all the promises I once believed in, tearing them apart with my own hands. I still hear their laughter. I still remember the way certain people held me like I was their world. And I still feel the sting of the nights they turned their backs on me, leaving me to wonder if I was ever really enough.

Music makes it worse. A song comes on, and suddenly I’m seventeen again, or twenty-two, or standing in a kitchen where love felt alive. I can smell the air, hear their voice, feel the way my heart used to beat differently when they were around. And then the song ends, and I’m left with silence so sharp it feels like it’s cutting me open.

The truth is, I don’t think we ever stop loving completely. I think love just changes shape. It softens. It fades. It tucks itself away into corners where it no longer has the power to break us. But getting there learning to unlove is like peeling your skin off, layer by layer. You lose pieces of yourself in the process.

And yet, I know I can’t keep carrying everyone. I can’t keep filling my chest with people who no longer see me, people who took everything I gave and still asked for more. My heart isn’t a shelter for the ones who left. It’s not a museum for broken promises. It’s mine. And it deserves rest.

Sometimes I still care too much. I wonder if they ever think of me, if I ever cross their mind when the night is quiet. I wonder if they ever regret letting me go. And then I catch myself because caring like that keeps me chained. It keeps me in a cycle of holding onto love that only hurts.

So, I practice unloving. Slowly. Quietly. Some days I fail, and I feel their weight in my bones. But other days, I feel lighter. I breathe without them pressing down on my chest. I smile without guilt. I wake up and realize that the grip they had on me is looser than it was before.

Maybe that’s all unloving really is a process of loosening the knots, of letting the rope fall from your hands little by little. It doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t even feel like victory most of the time. But one day, you realize you’re free.

And maybe I’ll never unlove completely. Maybe the people I’ve cared for will always live somewhere inside me. But one day, I hope their presence won’t ache. I hope they’ll just be stories I tell myself, soft at the edges, no longer heavy to hold.

Because in the end, learning to unlove them is really about learning how to love myself again.