I Miss Who I Thought You Were

Sometimes the person you love the most can hurt you even more. 

BY Leah Dolaher ★ October 15th, 2026

Photo Credit: Lizzie Furlong

Heartbreak is strange because the world does not stop when your heart does. 

You can be having the worst day of your life, sitting on your bedroom floor with crumpled tissues by your side, trying to understand how someone who was once your person could betray you like that. Everything around you may feel like it's frozen, but in reality it continues on. People keep going to class. Your friends make plans for the weekend. Nobody knows that your entire world has just been crushed. 

Heartbreak is more complicated when you’re grieving the person who hurt you. When someone cheats, you are not only grieving the relationship, but also the version of the relationship you thought you had. 

You thought the memories were real in the way you understood them. You thought the late-night conversations meant something. You thought the promises were mutual. You thought you knew the person, in reality the person lying next to you was someone completely different.

You can still remember the good times. The times you would laugh until your stomach hurt. The things you did together. The way they made you feel. That's one of the strangest things about heartbreak: you can love someone and know that you shouldn’t be with them. 

You can wish they did not make that choice.You can wish the relationship had ended another way. You can miss someone who hurt you. After betrayal, it is easy to wonder whether you should have given them a second chance. Maybe they apologized profusely. Maybe they promised you it would never happen again. Maybe they blamed the alcohol. Maybe part of you wanted to believe that the person you loved was still there underneath their mistake.

Part of you wants to hate them. Part of you wants to never see them again. But part of you also still cares for them even though you did not realize who they really were.

You do not have to turn someone into the enemy in order to move on. You can acknowledge the good memories and the betrayal at the same time.

Maybe that is what makes heartbreak after cheating so difficult. You are not just letting go of a person, you are letting go of the version of them you believed existed. You are letting go of the future you planned together. The person you thought would be by your side for months, or even years from now. 

It takes time to heal. At first you may replay conversions, blame yourself for something they did, wonder whether you could have done something to make them stay. But someone else’s decision to betray your trust is not a reflection of your worth. It is not your fault because someone else chose to be unfaithful. You do not need to become prettier, easier, less emotional or more like “her” to explain their choice. 

Finally,you begin to notice the smallest signs that you are letting go, that you are getting better. Just hearing their name does not make you want to cry or make your heart drop anymore. You aren’t constantly checking their social media. You stop wondering if they regret what they did. You are finally moving forward because that is what you deserve.  

You start putting yourself first again. Maybe that is the most important part of heartbreak. Realizing that choosing to leave does not mean you stopped caring, but that you started caring about yourself, too. Heartbreak may feel like a piece of you was crushed. But you eventually realize that the girl who was hurt and down is still here and capable of being happy again. The girl who loved is still here. The girl who trusted him is still here. The girl you are deserves a life where she never has to question whether she is enough. 

Maybe that is what heartbreak teaches us. Sometimes loving someone means knowing when to walk away and realizing you deserved better. Some people are meant to stay. Some people are meant to teach us lessons. Sometimes, the most loving thing we can do in the end is let them go, not because they meant nothing, but because we finally realize that we mean something, too. 

Edited by Olivia Longabardi