Let me start off by saying that the inspiration for this article came to me during a few separate moments in the past week. One being a weird dream I had in which I ran into one of my exes at a wedding. The other was when a mutual friend that an ex and I both know mentioned him in conversation. The last instance was when he called me out of the blue.

My heart began to beat outside my chest, and I did not know how to form actual sentences. I was surprised at first, then confused, and even a little angry. At the base of all of those emotions, I was glad to hear from him. And this made me think of something that I had not thought about for a long time.

Even though I had not seen or talked to this person in almost a year, I still genuinely care about him as a person. However, that does not mean that I want us to be back together. If you spend months, years, or even decades with someone, it is hard not to care about them. You know them too well to completely forget about them, and you cared enough about them to have them in your life for all of that time, so that means something.

That care you had for that person and the emotions you felt when you were in a relationship with them will probably never really go away completely. They will definitely change over time and often feel more like memories than primary emotions, but caring about someone and wanting to be in a romantic relationship with them are not the same thing.

Relationships run their course. They either end or last your entire lifetime. But whenever a relationship ends - no matter if it was official or not - it should stay ended. There should not be a sequel to the disaster movie that was this past relationship.

That movie kind of sucked. So much, in fact, that you walked out before the end credits ran.

There was a valid reason for the relationship to end, and if you get back together with that person, those same issues will arise.

Almost every single one of our relationships will end in a break-up. It can be difficult to imagine right now if you are in one, but unfortunately, there is a huge possibility that the person you are with now could potentially become your ex. There is nothing wrong with it; it is just a part of life.

I do still care about my ex, and I know that there is not much that I can do to change that. I do not regret the time that I had spent with that person, but that does not mean that I want that person to be in my life in the same place that I left him in.

Let me put this in simpler terms: You can miss the person and not miss the relationship. The people that come into our lives affect who we are and how we feel. The people that we care about are always going to be the people we care about, whether we like it or not.

Ending a relationship is hard, but it happens. Just because that relationship ends, doesn’t mean you just stop caring about that person. It is completely okay to still care about an ex but not want a relationship with that person. And you know what, that is when you know you have completely moved on from that relationship.

When you can think about your ex and not feel any resentment or hate towards that person, that is how you know that you are in a good place and are ready to be in a new relationship with someone else.