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After a relationship ends, missing someone can feel straightforward at first. You remember their voice, the way they laughed, the messages that arrived at a familiar time, the places you went together, the private language that existed between you, and the small routines that once seemed ordinary because you assumed they would continue. You may find yourself thinking about them unexpectedly while driving, cooking, hearing a song, passing a restaurant, or noticing something you instinctively want to tell them. The conclusion seems obvious: I miss this person. Sometimes that is exactly what is happening. Attachment does not disappear simply because a relationship ends, and longing can remain long after we understand that separation was necessary. Yet there is another layer of loss that is easier to overlook. Sometimes we are not only grieving the person who is gone. We are grieving the person we were when they were part of our life.

Perhaps you were more spontaneous with them. Maybe that period of your life was filled with travel, new experiences, late-night conversations, ambition, friendship, or a sense that the future was still wide open. Perhaps they made you feel desirable, protected, adventurous, intellectually alive, needed, admired, playful, or hopeful. Maybe you liked yourself in their presence, not because they created your identity for you, but because the relationship gave particular parts of you more room to exist. When the relationship ended, those qualities seemed to disappear along with it. Years later, you may find yourself longing for the person without realizing that what you are also longing for is access to that former self.

Relationships influence identity more profoundly than everyday language often acknowledges. Close partners do not simply stand beside two completely separate selves. Over time, people develop shared routines, mutual friends, joint plans, inside jokes, habits, roles, memories, and assumptions about the future. Research on romantic breakup has found that relationships can become intertwined with the self-concept and that separation can be associated with changes in both the content and clarity of a person's sense of self. In three studies, Slotter, Gardner, and Finkel (2010) found that romantic breakups were associated with reduced self-concept clarity, and that this reduction was related to emotional distress following the breakup. This means that the question after losing a relationship is sometimes larger than How do I live without them? It may also become Who am I now that the version of myself connected to this relationship no longer has the same place to exist?

Understanding this distinction does not diminish love or turn grief into an intellectual exercise. You can genuinely miss another human being and simultaneously miss an earlier version of yourself. In fact, these forms of longing often become so intertwined that separating them can be difficult. Yet doing so can be deeply freeing, because while another person may no longer be available to you, many of the qualities, experiences, and desires you associate with that chapter of your life may not have disappeared. They may simply need a new place to belong.

What You Will Learn

• Why losing a relationship can affect your sense of identity as well as your attachment to another person.

• How autobiographical memories connect people, relationships, and earlier versions of ourselves.

• Why you can miss someone even when you know the relationship should not resume.

• How nostalgia can make you long for an entire chapter of life rather than only for one person.

• Why certain qualities of yourself may seem to disappear after a relationship ends.

• How to distinguish missing the person from missing what you felt, did, hoped for, or became around them.

• Why loneliness can sometimes be mistaken for evidence that a former relationship was right for you.

• How to reclaim valued parts of yourself without recreating a relationship that no longer belongs in your life.

A Relationship Becomes Part of the Story You Tell About Yourself

We often imagine identity as something private and self-contained: This is who I am, and relationships happen to me. In reality, identity develops partly through relationships, social roles, experiences, memories, values, and the stories we construct about our lives. A long-term partner may become woven into how you describe your twenties, your years living in a particular city, the period when you became a parent, the time you started a business, or the years when you discovered a new version of yourself. Even a relationship that lasted a relatively short time can become important if it occurred during a psychologically significant chapter.

Autobiographical memory plays an important role in maintaining this sense of personal continuity. Wilson and Ross (2003) reviewed evidence showing a bidirectional relationship between autobiographical memory and identity: our present view of ourselves influences how we remember earlier experiences, while memories of earlier selves also contribute to the person we understand ourselves to be today. We do not merely store events as neutral recordings. Memories are connected with interpretations about who we were, who we became, what mattered to us, and how one period of life connects with another.

This helps explain why memories involving a former partner can be so emotionally powerful. When you remember a weekend away together, you may not only remember the hotel, the conversation, and the person sitting across from you. You may also remember yourself as you existed in that moment. Perhaps you felt young, attractive, curious, optimistic, carefree, or deeply connected. When you long for that memory, the longing may contain several objects at once: the other person, the relationship, the circumstances of your life at the time, and the self you remember inhabiting.

This is why asking whether you miss the person or miss who you were with them can sometimes create a false either-or choice. Often, you miss both. The more useful task is understanding how much of the longing belongs to each part.

Breakups Can Disrupt More Than Attachment

When a relationship ends, the loss is rarely limited to access to one person. A shared structure can disappear at the same time. Weekend routines change. Friend groups reorganize. Holidays look different. Certain places no longer feel neutral. Future plans that once seemed almost factual suddenly become imaginary. Even small behaviors may no longer make sense: the show you watched together, the restaurant you always visited, the person you called after difficult meetings, or the ritual of sending a message when you arrived home.

Research directly supports the idea that breakups can disturb the self-concept. Slotter and colleagues (2010) found that people experienced changes in the content of their self-concepts as well as reductions in self-concept clarity after romantic separation. Reduced clarity, in turn, predicted greater post-breakup emotional distress. A recent systematic review examining romantic breakups in emerging adulthood similarly found evidence that breakups can affect identity and intimacy alongside broader psychological adjustment (Gómez-López et al., 2025).

Imagine a person whose relationship involved hiking every weekend. Over several years, they began thinking of themselves as outdoorsy, adventurous, and physically active. After the breakup, they stop hiking because their former partner organized most of the trips and their social group has changed. Months later, they notice that they do not feel like themselves anymore. They may interpret this emptiness entirely as evidence that they miss the relationship. Yet part of what disappeared was a valued way of living. The relationship provided the context in which an adventurous part of the self was expressed, but the quality itself did not necessarily belong to the former partner.

The same can happen emotionally. Perhaps you felt unusually playful with someone because the relationship contained humor and spontaneity. Afterward, you enter a more serious period of life and begin thinking, I haven't laughed like that since them. The statement may be true, but it does not automatically mean that person is the only possible source of that version of you. It may be revealing a neglected need for playfulness in your current life.

Sometimes You Miss the Version of Yourself Who Still Believed in a Particular Future

Relationships contain not only present experiences but imagined futures. People picture homes, trips, children, anniversaries, careers, shared traditions, retirement, or simply the assumption that this person will continue witnessing their life. Even relationships that are unstable can contain elaborate hopes about what might eventually become possible if the difficulties are resolved. When the relationship ends, those imagined futures disappear too.

This creates a form of grief that can easily be mistaken for longing exclusively for the person. You may think, I want them back, when part of what hurts is that the life you imagined while you were with them no longer exists as an available future. The imagined house will not be yours together. The trip will not happen in the way you pictured. The version of you who expected to celebrate certain milestones beside this person must revise the story.

Grief research has increasingly considered the relationship between attachment, identity, and autobiographical memory. Although bereavement after death is not identical to romantic breakup and the two should not be treated as interchangeable, work by Maccallum and Bryant (2013) is useful conceptually because their cognitive attachment model of prolonged grief integrates attachment relationships with identity and autobiographical memory. Research has also found associations between persistent grief and a sense of identity that remains strongly merged with the person who has been lost (Maccallum et al., 2022). These findings come from bereavement contexts, but they illuminate a broader psychological principle: losing an important relationship can disturb the way a person understands who they are and how their past connects with their future.

Sometimes what you are grieving most intensely is therefore not simply them. It is us in the future and me in that imagined future. Recognizing this can be painful, but it can also clarify what needs to be mourned. You may need to release a future rather than reopen a relationship.

The Person May Have Been a Mirror for Parts of You That You Valued

Close relationships often function as mirrors. This does not mean another person determines your worth, but their attention can make certain qualities more visible to you. Someone who loves your humor may draw out your playfulness. Someone intellectually curious may encourage you to think more deeply and explore new subjects. Someone adventurous may invite you into experiences you would not have initiated alone. Someone emotionally expressive may make it easier for you to access your own tenderness. Someone ambitious may awaken your competitive or creative side.

When the relationship ends, the mirror disappears. A quality you once experienced regularly may become less visible, and because it appeared so consistently in the relationship, you may mistakenly assume it belonged to the relationship rather than to you.

Consider someone who says, “I was so confident when I was with her.” What does that mean specifically? Perhaps their partner admired their ideas, and being listened to made them speak more freely. Perhaps the relationship occurred during a period when their career was flourishing. Perhaps they were traveling frequently, socializing more, dressing differently, and trying new things. The confidence may have been supported by the relationship, but many other conditions may have contributed.

Or consider someone who says, “He was the only person who brought out my soft side.” Again, perhaps the relationship created conditions in which tenderness felt safer. But softness is not property another person can take when they leave. The relationship may have helped reveal it.

A powerful part of post-relationship growth can therefore involve asking: What qualities of myself did this relationship allow me to experience more fully? Once you know the answer, the next question is not necessarily How do I get the person back? It may be How do I bring these parts of myself into my life now?

Nostalgia Can Make a Person Stand in for an Entire Era

Sometimes the person you miss has become a symbol for a whole period of life. Perhaps you were twenty-five when you were together and now you are forty. When you remember them, you also remember your first apartment, old friends, your parents being younger, a career you were just beginning, a body that felt different, fewer responsibilities, or a version of life in which many choices still seemed open. Your former partner becomes psychologically linked with that landscape.

Years later, a song associated with the relationship may evoke an unexpectedly powerful wave of emotion. It is easy to conclude that the emotion proves you are still deeply in love with the person. But ask what else arrived with the song. Did you remember the city where you lived? The friends you no longer see? The kind of person you were then? The feeling of having more time? The excitement of not knowing what your life would become?

Autobiographical memories help construct continuity between past and present selves, and current identity also shapes how earlier selves are remembered (Wilson & Ross, 2003). This means nostalgia is rarely a perfectly accurate replay of the past. We remember from where we are now. A difficult present can make an earlier period feel particularly luminous, while an earlier relationship may become the most convenient symbol for everything that seems missing today.

This does not make nostalgia false. The memories may contain genuine love and genuine happiness. The task is simply to widen the frame. Instead of asking only, Why do I still miss them?, ask, What else do I miss about myself and my life from that time? Sometimes the answer changes everything.

You Can Miss Someone Without Wanting the Relationship Back

One of the hardest emotional truths after separation is that longing does not automatically contain an instruction. You can miss another person intensely while still understanding that the relationship should remain over. You can remember beautiful moments without denying painful ones. You can love parts of who they were and recognize that the dynamic between you was unsustainable. You can wish they were sitting beside you tonight without wanting to return to the life you actually had together.

Attachment research helps explain why this is possible. Separation from an attachment figure can activate powerful emotional responses, and individual attachment patterns influence how people process and adapt to relational loss (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2022). Research on divorce also describes adjustment partly in terms of attachment reorganization and changes in self-concept clarity and personal narratives following separation (Fagundes, 2018). Emotional attachment therefore does not simply switch off when a person makes a rational judgment that a relationship was incompatible.

This distinction becomes especially important during lonely periods. Loneliness can make memory selective. You may remember being held and forget the recurring arguments. You remember the vacation and temporarily lose contact with the months of uncertainty surrounding it. You remember how relieved you felt after reconciliation without remembering the distress that made reconciliation feel so powerful. None of this requires accusing yourself of romanticizing the past. Memory naturally organizes experience selectively. But when longing becomes intense, it is useful to remember the relationship as a whole rather than treating the warmest memory as representative of every ordinary day.

Missing someone is an emotion. Returning is a decision. The first does not automatically determine the second.

Ask What You Miss in Concrete Terms

The phrase I miss them can contain so much emotional information that it becomes difficult to work with. One way to understand longing more clearly is to make it specific. What exactly do you miss when you say you miss the person? Is it their personality, values, humor, physical presence, conversation, affection, or way of seeing you? Do you miss a sense of companionship? Do you miss being desired? Do you miss having plans every weekend? Do you miss the social circle that surrounded the relationship? Do you miss being younger? Do you miss having someone to text throughout the day? Do you miss who you were professionally, socially, or emotionally during that period?

The distinction matters because different forms of longing require different responses. If you genuinely miss a particular person's character and companionship, grief may need to be allowed rather than solved. If you miss being socially active, your current life may need more friendship and engagement. If you miss feeling desirable, the deeper issue may involve your present relationship with your body or self-worth. If you miss adventure, perhaps adventure has disappeared from your life in general. If you miss being cared for, you may be grieving support rather than only romance.

The goal is not to reduce love to a list of needs. A human being is not interchangeable with whichever function they fulfilled. Nobody else can recreate an exact relationship because every bond is unique. Yet specificity helps separate what truly belongs to the person from what may be rebuildable elsewhere.

Sometimes you discover, I miss them, specifically, and there is nothing I need to do except grieve. At other times, you discover, I miss who I was around them, and perhaps that person is not as lost as I thought.

Did You Like Who You Were in the Relationship?

Another useful question is not simply whether you loved the person but whether you liked yourself within the relationship. These are not always the same thing. You may have loved someone deeply while becoming anxious, suspicious, withdrawn, dependent, resentful, or chronically uncertain around them. Conversely, you may remember a former relationship with affection partly because you recognize qualities in yourself from that period that you genuinely value.

Research shows that romantic relationships can alter the self in complex ways. Recent work by Hughes and colleagues (2025), for example, examined perceptions of self-loss within romantic relationships and found that people higher in attachment avoidance were more likely to experience relationship-linked self-change as a loss, even when external indicators did not necessarily show the same degree of self-loss. The study is useful partly because it demonstrates that the experience of identity within relationships is subjective and psychologically consequential. Feeling as though you are expanding, shrinking, disappearing, or becoming more yourself cannot always be inferred from the outside.

Think about how you behaved in the relationship you now miss. Did you express your needs? Did you maintain friendships? Were you curious and engaged with life? Did you feel respected? Did you spend most of your emotional energy interpreting the other person's behavior? Did you become more generous without abandoning yourself, or did you become responsible for everything? Did you feel playful, creative, and open, or primarily anxious about keeping the relationship intact?

Longing can make us focus almost entirely on the other person's qualities. Sometimes remembering our own behavior within the relationship provides a more accurate picture of what returning would actually mean.

What If You Miss a Version of Yourself That No Longer Fits?

Not every former self needs to be recovered. Sometimes what we miss belongs naturally to an earlier phase of life. Perhaps you miss the spontaneity you had before becoming a parent. You may not realistically be able to reproduce the same freedom now. Perhaps you miss the person who could stay awake talking until four in the morning and still function the next day. Your body and responsibilities may have changed. Perhaps you miss the version of yourself who believed passionately in a particular dream that you no longer want.

Personal development inevitably involves leaving some identities behind. Growth is not always a process of recovering the “real you” buried underneath responsibility. Sometimes there are several real versions of you, each appropriate to different periods of life.

The goal, therefore, is not to recreate your former self exactly. It is to identify what that earlier self represented. Maybe the twenty-five-year-old version of you cannot return, but curiosity can. Maybe your old lifestyle is no longer possible, but playfulness is. Perhaps you do not want the relationship back, but you want intimacy, exploration, sensuality, intellectual stimulation, or courage to become important again.

This approach respects both continuity and change. You are not trying to become your former self. You are asking which qualities from that chapter still deserve a place in the person you are becoming now.

Sometimes the Relationship Was the Structure Holding a Part of Your Life Together

People often discover after a breakup that activities they assumed were personal interests were partly relational practices. Perhaps you loved cooking elaborate meals because the two of you cooked together. Perhaps you attended concerts because your partner introduced you to new music. Maybe you traveled because they were the planner, exercised because it was a shared routine, or socialized because their friends became your friends.

When the relationship disappears, these activities may stop too, and the resulting life can feel diminished. This can reinforce the belief that the other person was uniquely responsible for your happiness. In reality, the relationship may have been a structure supporting forms of engagement that could potentially exist again in different ways.

This does not mean forcing yourself to keep every activity after a breakup. Some places and routines genuinely belong to a chapter you may prefer to close. But it can be useful to notice what disappeared unnecessarily. Did you stop going to galleries because your former partner was the one who suggested them even though you genuinely loved going? Did you stop traveling because you are uncomfortable traveling alone? Did you lose contact with an entire hobby because it became emotionally associated with them?

Reclaiming an activity can feel strange at first because memory is attached to it. Gradually, however, new experiences create additional associations. The restaurant is no longer exclusively “where we used to go.” The city becomes a place where you have newer memories. The hobby begins belonging to you differently.

This is one of the quiet ways identity is rebuilt after relational loss: not by erasing the former chapter, but by adding new chapters around it.

Loneliness Can Make the Old Self Look More Complete Than It Was

When the present feels empty, the past often looks unusually coherent. You remember yourself as happier, more confident, more social, or more alive when you were with the person. Sometimes this comparison is accurate. Perhaps the relationship truly coincided with an unusually meaningful chapter. Yet sometimes the past looks complete because memory compresses complicated years into a collection of emotionally significant scenes.

The present is experienced in real time, including boredom, errands, uncertainty, ordinary Tuesday evenings, unanswered questions, and unfinished growth. The past is remembered selectively. The comparison is therefore not always fair. You may be comparing today's ordinary reality with yesterday's highlight reel.

This becomes especially important after a major transition. A person newly single may think, I was so much happier with them, while comparing the loneliness of the first months after a breakup with the best periods of a five-year relationship. A more balanced comparison would include the whole relationship, including the ordinary days and the difficulties that contributed to its ending.

The purpose is not to diminish what was beautiful. It is to allow memory to remain emotionally meaningful without letting it become evidence that the present can never become equally meaningful in another form.

Rebuilding Identity Does Not Mean Pretending the Relationship Did Not Matter

Some approaches to moving on encourage psychological separation so aggressively that people feel they must erase the relationship, remove every memory, or become indifferent in order to prove they have healed. Yet an important relationship can remain part of your life story without controlling your present.

In grief research, autobiographical memories involving significant relationships can remain deeply connected to identity, and difficulty reorganizing identity around loss has been associated with more persistent grief in certain contexts (Maccallum & Bryant, 2008; Maccallum & Bryant, 2013). Although romantic separation differs from bereavement, the broader point is valuable: adaptation does not require deleting the relationship from the story of who you are. It involves integrating the relationship into a larger identity that can continue developing.

You may always associate a particular song with someone. You may continue recognizing ways they influenced your tastes, ambitions, emotional language, or understanding of love. You may carry lessons from the relationship into future relationships. None of this means you remain psychologically trapped in the past. People influence one another. Important relationships leave traces.

Healing is not proving that the person meant nothing. It is reaching a point where what they meant can coexist with who you are becoming without them.

Reclaim the Qualities, Not Necessarily the Relationship

If you realize that part of what you miss is who you were during the relationship, the next step is not to dismiss the longing but to use it as information. Ask yourself what that former self possessed that your current life needs more of. Maybe you were adventurous. How might adventure exist now? Perhaps you were socially connected. Which relationships need more attention? Maybe you felt creative. What happened to that creativity? Perhaps you were affectionate and emotionally open. Are there safe relationships in your current life where those qualities could be expressed?

The answers should be concrete because identity is rebuilt through lived behavior rather than abstract intention. If you miss the person who traveled, begin planning experiences that do not depend on recreating the old relationship. If you miss being playful, create spaces where play is possible. If you miss intellectual connection, seek conversation, books, courses, groups, or projects that stimulate that part of you. If you miss being cared for, allow friendships and family relationships to become more reciprocal rather than assuming romantic reunion is the only way to experience support.

This can produce an important psychological shift. The former partner stops being imagined as the keeper of a lost version of you. They may have been an important witness to that version, perhaps even a catalyst for it, but they do not necessarily own it.

You begin to recognize that some of what you thought you lost with them can travel forward without them.

Do Not Use Self-Reclamation to Avoid Grief

There is one caution worth making. Understanding that you miss who you were with someone should not become a sophisticated way of denying that you also miss the actual person. Not every longing can be transformed into a self-development project. Sometimes someone mattered deeply, and their absence hurts because they are irreplaceable as an individual.

You do not have to explain away that grief. You can rebuild your social life and still miss their conversation. You can reclaim your adventurous side and still wish you could share an experience with them. You can become more confident and still feel sadness when you remember the way they once looked at you. Moving forward does not require reducing a human relationship to a set of psychological functions.

The distinction becomes useful when it creates more honesty, not less. Instead of the undifferentiated statement I miss them and therefore something is wrong with my life without them, you may eventually be able to say something more nuanced: I miss this person. I miss how understood I felt. I also miss the adventurous period of my life that surrounded the relationship. I miss the person I was then. Some of these losses must be grieved, and some parts can be rebuilt.

That is a much more workable truth.

Ask Whether You Want Them—or Want Relief From the Present

Longing often intensifies during periods when current life feels disappointing. You may be lonely, dissatisfied with work, disconnected from friends, tired, uncertain about your future, or struggling with confidence. Suddenly the former relationship becomes unusually vivid. You begin thinking about reaching out, interpreting the renewed longing as proof that the relationship remains uniquely important.

Before acting, it can be useful to ask whether something in your present life has recently changed. Did the longing intensify after a disappointing date? During a lonely weekend? After seeing friends reach milestones you expected to have reached? When work became stressful? Around an anniversary or birthday? The former partner may have become a symbol for a time when you felt less uncertain.

Again, this does not make the longing unreal. Emotions can be genuine and context-dependent at the same time. The question simply prevents present dissatisfaction from rewriting the meaning of the past. Sometimes what you want is the person. Sometimes you want relief from being alone tonight. Sometimes you want confirmation that you are still desirable. Sometimes you want to return to a period when life felt more promising.

Knowing which one is operating can prevent a temporary emotional state from making a permanent relational decision.

The Person You Were Is Not Trapped in the Past

Perhaps the most painful belief beneath this kind of nostalgia is that a valued version of yourself existed only because one particular person loved you. I was confident because they wanted me. I was funny because they laughed. I was adventurous because we traveled. I was hopeful because we had a future. I was softer because I felt safe with them.

Relationships absolutely influence us, and pretending otherwise would misunderstand how relational human beings are. Yet influence is not ownership. The other person may have helped create conditions in which certain qualities flourished, but those qualities became part of your lived experience. They are now part of what you know about yourself.

You know that you can love deeply because you did. You know that you can be adventurous because you were. You know that you can be playful, expressive, committed, affectionate, curious, courageous, or hopeful because those capacities have already existed in you.

The task after loss is not always to recover exactly who you were. Perhaps you will become someone different, incorporating parts of that earlier self alongside qualities developed through the loss itself. But you do not have to believe that everything valuable about that version of you departed with another person.

Conclusion: Sometimes Longing Is a Message From an Earlier Self

When you miss someone from the past, the easiest interpretation is often the most immediate one: I still want them. Sometimes that is true. But longing is capable of carrying several losses simultaneously. You may miss a person, the relationship you shared, the future you imagined, the community surrounding it, the stage of life in which it occurred, and the version of yourself who existed within all of those things. Because these losses are stored together in memory, one can easily stand in for the others.

Separating them does not make the relationship less meaningful. It allows you to understand its meaning more fully. Perhaps what you miss about them can only be grieved. Perhaps there were qualities in the relationship that you genuinely will not experience in exactly the same way again. But perhaps some of what feels lost is still available to you in another form: curiosity, adventure, tenderness, confidence, creativity, connection, playfulness, ambition, or hope.

The question Do I miss the person, or do I miss who I was with them? therefore does not always need one answer. You may miss both. The more important discovery is that these forms of longing do not require the same response. Missing the person may call for grief. Missing the life you had may call for rebuilding. Missing who you were may call for reconnection with qualities you have neglected. Missing an imagined future may call for mourning one story long enough to become curious about another.

A former partner can remain an important part of the story of who you became without being the only person through whom that self can exist.

Sometimes what feels like a desire to return is actually an invitation to retrieve something valuable from the past and carry it forward.

References

Fagundes, C. P. (2018). Attachment reorganization following divorce: Normative processes and individual differences. Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 120–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.03.008

Hughes, E. K., Emery, L. F., McGorray, E. L., Gardner, W. L., & Finkel, E. J. (2025). The delusion of the disappearing self? Attachment avoidance and the experience of externally invisible self-loss in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 128(5), 1142–1159. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000468

Maccallum, F., & Bryant, R. A. (2008). Self-defining memories in complicated grief. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(12), 1311–1315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2008.09.003

Maccallum, F., & Bryant, R. A. (2013). A cognitive attachment model of prolonged grief: Integrating attachments, memory, and identity. Clinical Psychology Review, 33(6), 713–727. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2013.05.001

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2022). An attachment perspective on loss and grief. Current Opinion in Psychology, 45, 101283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.11.003

Slotter, E. B., Gardner, W. L., & Finkel, E. J. (2010). Who am I without you? The influence of romantic breakup on the self-concept. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(2), 147–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167209352250

Wilson, A. E., & Ross, M. (2003). The identity function of autobiographical memory: Time is on our side. Memory, 11(2), 137–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/741938210