Michelle Elman on going ‘no contact’ with an ex

Why cutting ties might be the best way to start healing your heart, post-breakup

There was a time when a breakup would mean the end of seeing your ex. You didn’t have a number to text them at 2am when you’re sad and lonely. You didn’t have social media to scroll through when you’d consumed a few too many drinks, and begun telling yourself the relationship was better than it actually was. Now, we have more ways to be in contact with our exes, and track their lives from afar – which is why going ‘no contact’ with your ex is more important than ever.

The term ‘no contact’ was originally created in reference to abusive situations where the person needed to, for their own safety, cut contact with an individual who was harming them. Since the term has gone mainstream, it is now being used more broadly in the context of setting boundaries, whether that’s with an ex-partner, an ex-friend, or even a family member.

How this works in practice often involves blocking their phone number, and removing them from all your social media. In terms of boundaries, it is about limiting the access they have to your life, and removing their ability to not only contact you, but also see what you are up to.

Especially in the context of a breakup, I believe it is necessary for healing. Within a romantic relationship, there is not just love but attachment, and therefore to truly detach from a person and process the breakup, you need to learn how to live your life without them. When their number is on your phone, or you have access to their social media, it becomes all too easy to reach out; that was your norm for the length of your relationship, after all. It is almost a reflex that you have to unlearn.

I have recently been through the process myself. My situation was made easier by the fact that my partner doesn’t have social media and never has, but within a day of the breakup, I had removed all his friends and family from my own social media accounts, and removed myself from all group chats with the people in his life. Deleting his number would have been pointless as I have his phone number memorised, and we had more complications as we lived together, so we spoke on the phone and over texts for a few weeks following the breakup.

It took us a while to untangle our lives, from transferring the internet bills to moving his stuff out, but once the details were taken care of, we both knew it was time to create some distance. We needed to learn how to live without each other, and you can’t process the feelings of the breakup if you are still getting validation, attention, and interaction from that person.

When it comes to social media, I believe that stalking an ex on social media is a version of self-harm. Sometimes we stalk because the breakup wasn’t as final as we hoped, so we are looking for the ending to the story, but often that’s an illusion to keep clinging on to the hope of closure. The ending was closure.

Sometimes we social media stalk because we feel bad, and therefore choose a behaviour to confirm how we are already feeling. When you think about it, do you know exactly what you are searching for? If you see them post a happy photo, you deduce you were meaningless and that they are not as affected by the breakup as you. If you see a sad quote about heartbreak, you feel bad and want to reach out to comfort them. Both outcomes lead to you hurting yourself, and that’s not even considering the chance you could see a new person they are dating, or them talking about dating. The truth is that social media only paints half the picture anyway, and you will use whatever you find to depict the narrative you want to paint.

Going no contact is hard, but maintaining contact is harder. You aren’t ending contact for the strong, empowered version of yourself, you are doing it for the more vulnerable version of you that exists at 2am when you can’t sleep, and are convincing yourself that you are going to be alone forever, and they are your soulmate. Within a breakup, it is normal for both parts of you to exist, but it’s important that your wiser self is the one who makes the decisions. No contact not only protects you, it protects them, too. It gives you both the opportunity to move on and let go.

When you feel tempted to get back in contact, the best question you can ask yourself is: “What would a person who loves themselves do?” The truth is a person who loves themselves would not return to the person who caused the harm. No matter how it ended, it ended for a reason, and you must remember that.