When a person is dumped in a relationship, it’s common they want their ex to suffer. They want them to regret what they’ve done. They hope the pain is excruciating. People feel this is only fair, seeing as they’ve been left in a way that seems harsh to them.
It also usual that the dumped person wants the regret to hit their beloved, quickly. If not right now, then by the end of the month. Two months is two long. Two years is meaningless. If a person were to be told their ex might regret their action in ten years, they’d probably be pissed.
In reality, I would estimate that 80% of people who leave relationships do not have regrets. Consequently, I think that waiting on something like this is foolish, though understandable.
I don’t think it matters what your ex does or feels. A person must face their future and head in that direction. I don’t see a lot of choice with this. I have seen people regret leaving relationships but it’s usually over someone they left twenty years prior. Do you really want to wait for that amount of time? You’re better off to take the hit and move on.
That a person does not regret leaving you does not necessarily mean it’s because they made a good decision. They may have made horrible decision, but be too stupid to realize it.
Or too proud.
Or too stubborn.
There are any number of reasons a person might not feel regret. They may be brainwashed! “No regrets” is a popular phrase.
Some people think it’s high-minded to have no regrets in their life. I feel a person who has no regrets is probably pretty shallow. They’re probably also self-absorbed. Because as we age, most of us realize that we’ve done things that are wrong. We’ve made mistakes and others have been hurt by them.
My point is that if you someone dumps you, badly, and they feel no regret, you probably have a good reason to celebrate the fact they’re gone from your life.
Are you waiting on someone else to feel something, so that you can feel something?
I think of another scenario. You may not regret leaving someone but you might regret the way you did it.
I presume it’s probably anger. When you want your ex to suffer or regret, it could probably mean that you’re angry at them. But I think that probably wanes after a while, depending on many factors, like the duration of the relationship, intensity and so on… But after some time, as for me, I wish all my exes (not that there were many :D) all the best. And as for my friends, some are like: I don’t care what happens to them, and other also wish them their best. Well, to be honest, I remember that one of my friends wanted their ex to regret leaving them, and she wanted it for many years; their relationship was very intense, and lasted for many years (she’s Taurus/Gemini, with Venus in Aries and Mars in Scorpio, and he’s Virgo/Leo with Venus-Mars conjunction on Ascendant). And, as it happens, he really regretted their parting, and started to call her, and bug her&her fiance, and now she is pissed off, and is regretting her original wish 😀 She actually wishes her ex to find someone else to be happy with…
sometimes i think, its not really about the ex, at that point. Its really about what they represent
I love the last line in this post 🙂
Yeah, it’s good to keep reminding ourselves of that. Good one.
I must be self absorbed. I could look for some kind of regret and beat myself up but I am too excited by the change factor. Yes indeedy, I love the process. I never was a revenge person, but I think I did some gruelling kind of heart hurting a time or two. I would not go in that far anymore. My heart’s too precious to me and if that be self absorbed, so be it.
I was riding with someone last nite who played their music for me. One of the songs was Redneck Crazy. It was the story of a cheatin woman and the guy who shines his headlights on her bedroom window and throws empty beer cans at their shadows. 😀
Now that’s interesting. The light would have to be behind the two lovers being pelted with beer cans for the redneck to see their shadows. I’m not goin any further. Down neptune down, I got work to do.
Relationships do end…sometimes with good reason and sometimes not! The person “leaving” the relationship is always going to believe he/she is right. I believe the emotional upheaval is directly related to “how” the relationship is ended. Don’t send emails/texts to end a relationship, just sit down and discuss the situation and options for ending it ~ with this approach there is less chance of long term emotional damage.
wow, this was so timely…
The last time someone “broke up” with me (although it wasn’t a proper relationship) was nearly two years ago, it was painful and for a while also accompanied by certain feelings of revenge but at the same time I also knew it was the natural outcome of things. So I didn’t dwell on the fact for much and I focused on moving on. Having really close friends and very exciting projects to carry on really helped and kept me going, although this person was very important to me.
Nowadays, I have regrets about the way I broke up with some of my exes, because I made them suffer a lot. I don’t regret leaving them, because that’s what I actually intended to do. But I did hurt them, and for this I’m sorry.
Personally, FOR NOW I don’t see myself regretting to have broken up with someone. If I do that, it’s for a reason. Some situations can’t be helped, for instance, and regretting something that couldn’t be helped at that time doesn’t make much sense in my eyes.
“if you someone dumps you, badly, and they feel no regret, you probably have a good reason to celebrate the fact they’re gone from your life”
Oh wow, so much this. As a Libra arriving at this understanding has been quite a journey.
Upon leaving a relationship myself I normally feel a great deal of sorrow. Almost like I’m grieving what was or what could have been. These days I am careful to avoid holding it against the other person as if they had let me down.
Asking a good, accurate psychic if your ex is or isn’t regretting dumping you seems like an efficient way to settle that curiosity and maybe feel some satisfaction in the end. If the answer is no, you can forget about the concern until a couple years later and ask a psychic for an updated view.
Once I did a lot … now I don’t care and left everything to the hand of GOD. Just to get some peace in my mind and nothing else. The revenge wish was making me so sick .. so I have given it to the hand of GOD. God has better control over this world. But still the revenge feelings comes to my mind suddenly and I try to calm down myself thinking about GOD !!
https://elsaelsa.com/forum/relationships/when-it-finally-hits-you/#p772103
^ something i wrote today
I have had moments where I have thought it wrong that I left someone but when my head cleared I realized there was reason for it. Time can pass and you move so far away from the problems you had you start to only remember the good times and the fun…unless of course it was hideous.
I have never been left. I do not say that to be cocky …. I have been the master amputator. (is that a word?) I may have been left had I stayed around but I was like a rocket and out of there ….before anyone could leave me. I usually knew when it was over, so before anyone had the chance I always pulled the plug and turned up missing.
3 different men came back and said they wanted closure. I thought it was ridiculous when they suggested it and wanted no part in it. I am married and want no problems in my home. What could they want? It’s been years since I have talked to or seen any of the three of them. One of them went to my sons job….(I was livid) the other came to mine….(even more livid) and one just kept contacting me through the computer. I blocked them….as best I could.
Then I started thinking….. went through each relationship in my mind. Did I make a mistake in leaving? The answer is no. Everything turned out exactly as it was supposed to. This was happening when Saturn was in the last few months of Libra and the beginning of Saturn in Scorpio….. Maybe I was being tested in some way. All I know for certain is that I was not supposed to be with them.
I do have regret if I hurt someone. I wish no one harm. I could have listened to these men (I did read what the one who was contacting me via computer had to say) But I don’t believe its right for me to be married to this man entertaining someone else’s wish to feel better about something that happed 30 years ago, or 20 years ago. They should have moved on a very long long time ago! And, I also think there is the possibility that they were just fishing to test the water….maybe their tank was dry and they thought I might be available…. ugggg which is probably why I left all three of them in the first place….
My ex husband (kids dad) and I were at war for a long time. He has mars in Scorpio….that was a battle I had a hard time winning…..omg,…..what a nightmare. He has never come back. But I know for a fact he wishes I were dead…..I used to tell people if something happened to me…..please send the police to his door first. To this day I know for a fact if he could kill me and get away with it….. he would do it. We have been divorced for almost 25 years and have no connection and he still hates my guts as much as anyone could ever hate. He hates me with a seething passion. Its very sad. I feel nothing for him. And I certainly don’t wish him harm. He is my sons father.
My most recent ex-boyfriend ended our relationship at a very bad time in my life, and he was very callous about it. I’d just finished telling him the bad news, about something happening with my father’s health, and the first thing he said was, “I’m soooo sorry”, in a very insincere tone which he’d never used with me before. Then he actually sighed, and said, “I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.” It was clear he was trying to start a fight with me (and we hardly ever fought), and I let him have it. He wanted me to do the breaking up so he wouldn’t feel guilty. I didn’t take the bait. At that point it hit me that he’d only been with me in the hopes that I would inherit some huge sum from my father. We haven’t spoken since, and I honestly don’t think he’s ever had any regret over the way he ended it. For my part, I regret that it went on so long in a state of limbo with no progress, but I don’t regret the actual endiing of the relationship. He wasn’t the person I’d thought he was.
The other ex that I think of from time to time is the one I dated at 19… he was my first serious boyfriend, and we talked about marriage, but as time went by it became obvious that I wasn’t ready to settle down and our goals were very different — he wanted a wife who would stay at home and have his kids, a SAHM, and I wanted to have a career helping people. I ended that relationship, and naively thought we could still be friends even as I was trying to meet other men, and the breakup again happened during a very bad time in my life. I went a little crazy for a few months and treated my ex thoughtlessly. He finally had enough, and ended our friendship; in the process I also lost other friends, his cousins who had introduced him to me and who we socialized with a lot as a couple. It didn’t take him long to find someone else, and coincidentally his new girlfriend became pregnant around the same date that we’d planned to marry. He married her when she was eight months pregnant, and some of my ex-friends actually came to tell me the news in the hope that it would hurt me. A couple of years after we’d split, his younger brother called me up and tried to date me (!), and also told me that my ex’s new wife was very upset about the way my ex would talk about me. It made me feel pretty bad, and I told my ex’s brother to tell her she had nothing to worry about from me. I did regret ending that relationship initially, and still cringe when I think of some of the things I did immediately following… he was a good person and deserved to have a good life with someone who wanted the same things he did.
I can’t say that I’ve waited on anyone else to feel something, in terms of a relationship breakup. There is one man, who I never actually dated but would spend hours talking to and making out with, who I wish would remember me with fondness… we had a lot in common and I liked him tremendously. He’s widowed now and on Plenty of Fish, so perhaps we’ll meet again someday but I’m not counting on it nor will I contact him.
Perfect timing! Just in the midst of a double return whammy–Second Saturn return trining Jupiter return. I have learned that the re-emergence of those obsessive “what does he really think happened to us?” etc thoughts re-surface,(this is year 7 post-breakup but we share the parenting of a 10 year old; otherwise, I would be so not-here!), is a signpost indicating that I am feeling disempowered and vulnerable somehow. So…up last night much of the night with said thoughts, and then this morning, one very assertive, child-centered email later, poof! the thoughts are gone!
Our breakup was a HUGE betrayal and heartbreak and I have no doubt these thoughts and feelings will return again and again, AND I think that is not just NORMAL, it is a HEALTHY re-visiting of the time in my life when I felt the most disempowered. It’s all about what you do with that kind of experience. These “reminders” heighten my awareness of what is not currently right in my world and the attendant discomfort gives me a needed kick in the butt to do something about it!
hate can be such a strong bond…that’s why the fastest you get out of it, the better for your moving on with your life.
it has helped me a lot to dig into my love/hate function,a dark spot I wish I never had .it turned out to be full of important things for me to know,master and redirect, so that I could move on.I never left anyone, always was the one to be dumped.
in 2 cases I found myself wishing real harm to the men,not denying it helped me to contact a pain so deep(dating back to early experiences in life) that I could navigate through the hate at last, and take back that huge energy of mine which was stuck there.
hate is consuming and keeps you connected with the hated one,so you ‘d better look for your motives..what kind of hurt makes you react in a certain way.
Had I known that they regretted leaving me?I don’t know…it depends very much on the dynamics of the specific relationship and the reason why they chose me to begin with.
for instance, my longest (and wrong)relationship was with a man who literally fell in love with an idea of me(venus qs. neptune), and fell out of “love” as soon as he perceived that I was a person and didn’t fit his ideal.it took him 4 years!
btw, in one case I cherish the idea that he regrets something(not that man,another one), but with no use, he’s made no steps since then to come close again.I use it a sort of perverse,empowering consolation for my feeling of impotence over not having stirred in him the same that I felt for him.
regrets in relationships used to be so close companions for me, now I’m focusing on avoiding further waste.try not to dwell to much on regrets,I just can’t afford it
Excellent post. I completely agree 🙂
Oh Wow. I, for the first time in my life, am going through this and it’s over a man I didn’t even date, he just led me far, far down the primrose path. I recognize my own fault in it and I know a lot of my anger is with myself for being so utterly trusting and pathetic. I vacillate between this calm of knowing I learned a big lesson about myself/ my own fantasies, idealism and extreme revenge. However, my idea of revenge is that I wish that the way he treated me with such selfish intentions gets brought back to him through someone else. I don’t want him, nor do I want him to want me, I just want the old ” a taste of your own medicine”. What comes around goes around.
Oh, and I forgot to mention. This person has a Cancer 13*Saturn T square with Aries 8* Venus and Libra 15* Moon. That Saturn is the point in his Yod too. So, here comes Mars in Libra & April 2014. I’ll take that as some sort of karmic payback heading his way. Thank you very much!!
This is me too. I beat myself up and hate the person for hurting me. But in fact I hurt myself. I try to see the lesson in it always. I know God wants me to learn. I just wish he would leave me alone once in a while
Me Ms Aqua and Mr Taurus recently broke it off and in all honesty I wanted him to burn for the way he did it!
Although Jupiter went retro and I had some major relief emotionally. We’ve had some back and forth emails recently, but I don’t want to hear blah, blah, blah anymore.
I’m in a very good place now and wouldn’t take him back even with all the blah, blah, blah, it’s done!
He’ll always have a special place in my heart because he profoundly touched me in every way, but he’ll never hear it from me anymore. I’m in a better place and I want the same for him now, no more burning him at the stakes! It’s all love from here on out except he’ll not get my sweetness, sweetness anymore just niceness. 🙂
Thank God for Jupiter retro!
This year, THREE former boyfriends have come back into my life, via Google. And they are all from 25 -35 years ago. I don’t think it’s about the heavens, though — it’s about their kids leaving home, and perhaps about Saturn returning. Two out of three splintered my heart — it took me literally decades to recover. And I am still single, mostly because I cannot go through anything like that again. Funny enough, the two and I corresponded enough for me to realize I now find them uninteresting. Not even funny, which they used to be. Old and staid and… boring. They seemed much more adventurous and open-minded when I knew them. Of course, we all are in high school and college, right? But I STILL am. I live in a vibrant city and am taking on a new career and ready to travel anywhere and have kept my Courage muscle firm and strong. They seem tired and… did I say “boring”? it made me sad for them. They have wives and children. I do not. I have fended for myself and compromised very little in my life. I did pine for them both for much of my life, though. THAT is my only regret, now.
My exes never wanted to let go in the first place. The last one i left 3 years ago and he still hoovers. I think they are vile people. I never regretted leaving them, i only regret not leaving them sooner, or hell.. i wish i’d never been with them to start with. I’m with you Elizabethe. I’d like to see them get a taste of their own medicine, unfortunately because they are the type of person they are they wouldn’t react or feel the same way i did. Nothing worse than that vile feeling that you were intimate with someone who makes your skin crawl. People that ignorant are in for a life time of grief served out in a different way. Ughh. I do celebrate they are gone from my life.
@Fusion and Elizabethe’s taste of ex’s own medicine rants…..
One of my ex’s did get a “taste of his own medicine”…am i happy about it? Nope. He had supposedly little children to care for, and a wife left behind. When i mean taste of his own….he died, but i honestly don’t know the “cause” of death. It never stated on the online obituary since it is private for family and physician.
i dont really feel happy about it, i felt kind of weird and had this strange feeling. I had already “cut him off” completely, so it’s not as if he affected my life. But secretly he has been sending once a year one letter to my mother, sending photos of him and his family and progress. I dont know why he kept doing so, and my mother is sentimental and too forgiving – a bleeding heart. I love to forgive but too much bleeding heart can kill you and your family. It is very detrimental. Of course the letters 1x a year stopped, and maybe he sent it because he felt “guilt” but my mother said it’s because he loved our family and loved being in it when i was with him. He felt as if he could ‘belong’ since he saw our family as so loving and nurturing…where he never got one of his own before growing up. (her pov and what he told her)….i, on the other hand, have my own suspicions. (my mother is very religious)
Just something I’d share of my past. I’m completely happy now, with a man who gives me loving support, and i give him lots of love.
i do celebrate that they are gone, but learning that they had died, still young, is a weird feeling.
*mother is super religious, spiritual and very much a martyr. So i can understand, trying from her POV,
to see it. She is like a mother theresa.
reading this back, i can see how my mother is so strong and powerful, she sometimes is, but her water, makes her sooooo emotional and martyr-like, it seems like a huge duality. the strength and vulnerability, it really makes you cry at what they go through; their weaknesses can be looked upon as flaws and people get repulsed but that too is a projection in my eyes cause everyone suffers.
I have regrets, mainly though about the things I failed to try, not so much the things I did do. But…Unfortunately, on relationships I was almost always the hanger-on. Unlike Soup, I wasn’t smart enough to heed the writing on the wall. That’s a big regret. Unlucky in love. But I don’t think of love as a light switch that can be turned off or on. If I cared for someone, I still did, regardless of how they felt about me. Stupid, I know. I kept track of my lost loves and almost all came back later to say they wish they’d been nicer. Hmm. If I could do it all over, I would not bother chasing, though it was sometimes fun. Looking back, it seems like a tremendous amount of wasted time, energy and money in exchange for a lot of heartache.
I don’t think people can go through life without regrets. Relationships are a great source of reasons to have regrets. I find most of the time when I have regrets it is because I either didn’t try hard enough to understand what was happening at the time, or by the time I realized that I had stepped in it so to speak it was to late to correct the situation. The worst regret to me is neglecting to stay in touch with someone usually a family member and finding out that person has passed a regret that can not be corrected.
when you realize you have very deep love, then i guess i dont regret it because it’s something i can maybe compare it to. and it makes you grateful, deeply grateful.
Thank you for this. I really needed it.
“Waiting on someone to feel something so that you can feel something”….
Perfect put.
I did leave an ex. And it was because the pain of loving him was bigger than the joy found in loving him. Because loving him was lonely. And loneliness leads to pain.
I was not 100% sure.
But the only things in life you are 100 % sure about is death and taxes…. ?
Great article & spot on! You have just described my ex in great detail ((big smiles)).
I celebrate the fact he is gone from my life & I can now rediscover myself; the same self that he tried very hard to manipulate away. Woo hoo.
I don’t regret being left,he was never really in it in the first place. I’d like to think that karma will bite ‘im in the ass, if not during his lifetime, then when he exits. We don’t and can’t know. It’s frustrating witnessing what a good life that person has in spite of his evil and negativity. I think a lot of his experience has to do with entitlement. So actually I better get my own entitlement trip together, is the way I look at it. (Easier said than done.)
Periodically I will have wonderful dreams about the ex/babydaddy of my grown children. They are always healing dreams where I feel love, and friendship, and sometimes even wanting to be together again.
At times I say screw those dreams! and other times I just forget about it. It does make me wonder if he has similar dreams. (He actually has lifelong horrible nightmares.) He’s so different than I am that I know it was karmic. We took it as far as we could in this lifetime. Actually, I took it as far as he would let me in terms of finishing up/working out the karma between us. So yeah, we’re better off without these people, like Elsa said at the end. Great line.
My last, a Leo/Scorpio, stressed several times shw liked to see her exes suffer after a perceived wrong, and in the end that included me. I see it as an obstacle to true love. I regretted breaking up with her almost immediately and tried fixing things with her… she considered my regret a weakness, and enjoyed my suffering ever since. It is a trait I simply do not understand, or posess.
I have been wondering a lot recently about an ex-lover. We had an off and on thing for 10 years and I thought I put an end to it in February by telling him to forget me. He married a girl he just met on my birthday when we had plans in Vegas and he just disappeared after that, our mutual friends have been ghosted as well. There has always been a synchronicity between us- in the past when I thought I’d forgotten him and he reentered my mind at random, I’d get a text or call the next day like clockwork. I made peace with his actions by spring of this year and let go, but now I keep thinking about him again at random and I wonder if it’s because he’s thinking of me. He’s a musician and his new album just came out but I don’t know if I want to listen to it yet.
And I don’t know what I would do if he did contact me. Keep up the tough front and pine away on the inside or go all in for another round of delicious chaos. Our relationship has been great artist fuel.
That ex, is the only one who has ever broken up with me. In all of the other relationships, I’m the one swinging the axe to sever the cord. With the others, I don’t want them to suffer, I just want out. I stay in relationships until I feel suffocated and have to fight my way to freedom. I like to test my boundaries like a masochist, how much pain can I handle this time before I break?