Why was I still trying to live my ex's life with someone new?

[From my diary]January, 31st 2023At the time we started to date, I was single, but I probably did not quite end the previous relationship in my head, even a year later.My previous ex always seemed too good to be true, even more so than the new one.I now think I missed him and I kinda … tried to fit us, me and my new partner, in his way of living: like, drinking wine, buying expensive food, and doing other fancy things that did not fit with any of us.Like his shadow was still there, but I pretended I did not see it.When we start a new relationship before fully grieving the old one, we sometimes keep performing the previous relationship inside the new one — recreating its rituals, tastes, and habits, even when they don't fit either of us. Psychologists call this unfinished mourning, and it's one of the quieter reasons rebound relationships struggle.Why we keep performing an old relationship inside a new oneWhen a relationship ends, two kinds of things end with it. The first is obvious: the person, the daily contact, the future plans. The second is harder to see — the shape of the life you had built around them. The cuisine you cooked. The places you went. The version of yourself you became in their company. The values, real or borrowed, that you organized your weekends around.Therapists who work with people after breakups sometimes call this the “relational identity” — the self that exists in relation to a particular partner. When the relationship ends, that self doesn’t end with it, at least not right away. It stays around, looking for somewhere to live. And if you start dating again before that self has been allowed to dissolve, it can quietly install itself in the new relationship, regardless of whether the new partner fits.This is part of what makes rebound relationships fragile. Not that they happen too fast in calendar time — some are fine, some last for life — but that they sometimes carry a passenger neither person agreed to.Why the wine, specifically The detail from before — wine, expensive food, “fancy things” — is worth pausing on, because it’s a recognizable pattern. People rarely re-enact an ex’s personality. What gets reproduced is usually the aesthetic: the small consumer rituals that signaled, in the old relationship, that you were a particular kind of couple living a particular kind of life.Illustration has been kindly provided by Supportive Stranger AppThere’s a psychological term for this: symbolic continuation. We use objects and rituals to maintain a connection with what we have lost — the way bereaved people sometimes keep a partner’s coffee mug in the cupboard, or wear their sweater for a year. In a romantic context, the same instinct can show up as importing the previous relationship’s tastes into the new one. The wine isn’t really about wine. It’s about a version of yourself that drank wine with someone, and a hope that if you keep doing the gesture, the meaning will follow.The painful part is that it usually doesn’t. The new partner sips along, slightly puzzled. You feel slightly hollow. Neither of you can name what’s wrong, because the ghost is invisible.What it doesn't meanIt doesn’t mean the new relationship was fake, or that you didn’t love the new person. It doesn’t mean you were using them. The grief and the love can be true at the same time — that is what makes this so disorienting in retrospect.It also doesn’t mean rebound relationships are doomed. They aren’t. What matters isn’t when a new relationship starts, but whether both people are actually present in it, or whether one of them is still living, partly, somewhere else.The useful question, looking back, isn’t “was the new relationship real?” It is “Who was I trying to be in it, and for whom?”If the answer involves someone who isn’t even in the room, that’s not a verdict on the love. It’s just information about what hadn’t finished yet.How you finish it is a different story — and one I will probably write another time.A note on the ideas behind this postI have a PhD in communication science, but grief and attachment are not my field — I am a curious reader here, not an expert. If any of this resonated and you’d like to read further, the concepts I drew on come from these places:* Unfinished mourning and grief trajectories. George Bonanno’s work on how people actually grieve, including his book The Other Side of Sadness, is a good starting point. The ideas apply to breakups as well as bereavement.* The relational self. Susan Andersen and her collaborators have written extensively on the way we develop selves that exist specifically in relation to particular people.* Continuing bonds and transitional objects. Klass, Silverman, and Nickman’s 1996 book Continuing Bonds introduced the idea that healthy grief often involves maintaining a connection with what was lost, rather than “moving on.” Donald Winnicott’s older work on transitional objects is the deeper root.I have simplified all of this for a general audience. If you work in any of these areas and I have got something wrong, I would genuinely like to know.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments — where you write, a supportive stranger draws a quick visual (like the one above), and you decide whether to keep the entry or let it go. This is a public episode. 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