How do you completely get over someone?

[AteRiri]

It was eight years ago. It was brief, but intense.

You're married now. You love your husband. He loves you.

Yet, it still stings when you hear news about the other guy.

What do you mean by "stings'? Did he reject you?

No. He didn't reject me. But life happened. I needed to go (we live in different continents).

GoldenOrb

I can't understand why I still have these feelings.

So was it your decision to leave or circumstances?

It sounds like you regret it.

You do have control over your thoughts, perhaps when a thought enters your mind, train your brain to think of a lovely time with your husband and that will bring you back to present time.

I don't think you can force yourself not to feel something. It's better to accept the feelings you have but try to understand rather than attach too much significance to them. I imagine if this was a brief but intense affair it could be a case of over-idealising the person and the relationship that 'could have been'. It never became real and solid in the way that long-term relationships rather unromantically do. So you are comparing a real, flawed committed relationship with an impossible ideal. If it's something that preoccupies you a lot it could be there is something missing from your marriage in terms of passion and connection, so if you can fix that, this past affair naturally loses its emotional power over you.

Are you fantasising about him. He's a different person and so are you. I wouldn't dwell on what could have been.

Don't exist in the past, it's done.

2008 was a long time ago, you have to move forward for your sanity.

AteRiri - you can't change the way you feel. But you can change the way you think about the way you feel. When you think about a past hurt, you put yourself in the past moment. It's not who or where you are now. The best way to move on is to accept the way you feel, and see that the feelings the person had then can't change the way things are now.
One of the worst things to linger are those that you wanted so badly that didn't want you. Honestly though? Get over it! Stuff hurts sometimes and almost everybody has one that got away! Your happiness in the present is the best way of telling that person you were in the past that everything is going to be OK. Because it is. You love your husband. He loves you. And that is now. Breathe in breathe out and live it.

Life changes and people change. You might not have been right for each other. I do think things happen for a reason. Try and live in the now not the what if.

No, it wasn't my choice to leave. I was just visiting though so I needed to come home.