Why Am I Still Hung Up On Someone That I Couldn't Even Break Up With

Okay, so there's more than one person I'm hung up on... kinda. Three to be precise. But why on earth am I still hung up on this one person that I couldn't even break up with, nor could they with me? Because after all, we were never anything to each other, and as Andi sings, "if you never had him you can't break up". 

See, the thing is, I was in a textationship for almost a year with this guy who ticked literally every box until I noticed that he seemed distant before he broke it off. Broke what off? Well, I don't know exactly. But whatever it was that ended between us has burned me badly for the past eight months and I don't know how to shake the 'what ifs' out of my head and heart. The "what if we'd met up?" and the "what if I'd shown him just how interested I was?" and the "what if we never speak ever again?".

Talking for months on end really got my hopes up and I could really see it all coming to fruition. We were close to meeting up and I thought we would have been kind of perfect together. Same values, similar backgrounds, and everything else that makes a box tickable – I thought I was finally going to get the romance book ending I wanted. But I was wrong. Clearly. And now I'm still hung up on this guy that probably never had any intention of anything other than the constant conversation we kept up for the best part of 11 months.

As a chronically single woman in my mid-twenties, it's hard to accept the fact that I'm still single as I creep closer to thirty each day – yuck. He was my way out of this rut, I thought we had something, and now he's probably fallen in love with someone better suited to him and I'm left asking myself if I fell for him or just the version of him in my head. 

See, that's something I'm prone to doing – falling for the version of someone I make up in my head. I get my hopes up, make up situations in my mind where we're in-love and together, and then I get hurt when things don't go the way I envisioned them. And this combined with an 11-month-long textationship, well, it's not a great recipe for success is it? 

Wasting days, weeks and months on this fool's game was not how I wanted to spend my mid-twenties, but here we are 19-months from when we started talking and I can't can't stop talking about it despite the fact he stopped eight months ago. And it's not a case of being desperate, because I often receive messages of boys vying to take me on dates, but for some strange and unknown reason I'm hung up on someone that isn't hung up on me.

I've written about my textationship before for the Huff Post, so I won't got into all of the details, but let's just say they're way more common than you might think – especially in this day and age, and even more so after a global pandemic that forced us all (well, most of us) to dabble in dating apps and online dating. So when this whole thing arose – when I wasn't even looking – in the spring of 2022, I thought it was fate. Reconnecting with someone I already knew even led me to think there was an invisible string tying us together (yep, thanks for that one Taylor). 

So, how do I move on from this? And if you're reading this in a similar boat, how do you? Well, I honestly have no clue. I guess time's the only true healer, but then again, the 'what ifs' will still persist and it's hard to block them out completely – and I know this from experience. 

Have you ever been in a textationship before? Let me know in the comments section!