Losing Someone

You almost certainly  at some point, euphemistically have spoken of “losing” someone.  The expression implies that you had possessed that person, even if that person also possessed you. Especially when the loss is recent, the metaphor is quite apt. It implies that we very much would want to have that person again. But of course, repossessing them sometimes is impossible.  At one extreme, speaking un-euphemistically, that person literally is dead.  At the other extreme, the possibility of finding that person theoretically exists. but presumes  that they want to be found. For instance, if the lost person permanently, irrevocably “canceled” you, there is no possibility of reuniting. In that case, perhaps the old poetic expression that” it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” might offer you some  conciliation.  If poetry is insufficient for you, what does current psychological research say about longing for someone lost.

Contemporary psychology treats longing not as a sentimental indulgence, but as a predictable, measurable, and often adaptive response to attachment disruption. Whether the loss is due to death, estrangement, or what we now describe as social cancellation, the same psychological machinery is activated. The form of the loss changes; the underlying processes do not.

From an attachment-theoretic perspective, longing is the cognitive-emotional residue of a bond that once regulated our sense of safety and meaning. Bowlby’s foundational work on attachment emphasized that humans do not simply grieve the absence of a person; they grieve the collapse of an attachment system that previously organized emotion, behavior, and expectation (Bowlby, 1980). In this view, longing is not pathological by default. It is the mind’s attempt to restore coherence after the sudden or ambiguous removal of a central figure.

Modern empirical work has refined this idea. Neuroimaging studies suggest that longing activates reward and motivation circuits similar to those involved in craving, particularly dopaminergic pathways associated with anticipation and pursuit (O’Connor et al., 2008). This helps explain why longing can feel both painful and compelling. The mind continues to “search” for the lost person, even when consciously we know the search is futile. In cases of death, this pursuit gradually extinguishes. In cases of social rupture—ghosting, estrangement, or cancellation—it often does not.

This distinction matters. Pauline Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss captures why some losses are harder to metabolize than others (Boss, 2016). When a person is physically absent but psychologically present—as in estrangement or cancellation—the loss resists closure. There is no funeral, no culturally sanctioned endpoint. Longing persists because the attachment system never receives definitive confirmation that reunion is impossible. In fact, intermittent cues—memories, social media traces, mutual acquaintances—may repeatedly reactivate hope, even when reunion is not desired by the other party.

What, then, of the old claim that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Research offers a qualified endorsement. Longitudinal studies on close relationships suggest that deep attachments, even when lost, are associated with greater long-term meaning-making and narrative coherence than a life characterized by emotional avoidance (Wrosch et al., 2007).

However, this benefit depends on one’s capacity to integrate the loss into a revised self-concept. When longing becomes fused with rumination—endless counterfactuals, imagined dialogues, or moral scorekeeping—it predicts poorer mental health outcomes, including depression and complicated grief (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008).

Importantly, current psychology does not advise the eradication of longing. Rather, it emphasizes transformation. Adaptive coping involves shifting from a reunion-oriented longing (“If only they would come back”) to a meaning-oriented longing (“What did this bond make possible in me?”). Research on post-loss growth indicates that individuals who can reframe longing as evidence of their capacity for attachment—rather than as proof of deprivation—fare better over time (Neimeyer, 2019).

In the context of modern social life, this has unsettling implications. Cancellation and abrupt relational severance exploit vulnerabilities in the attachment system while denying the rituals that help resolve loss. The longing that follows is not weakness; it is the predictable cost of having once been emotionally invested. Psychological health, then, does not lie in pretending the loss did not matter, but in refusing to let longing dictate the terms of one’s future agency.

So, you might ask one last time whether it is better to have loved and lost? The research, I conclude, is this: loving and losing expands the emotional range of a life, but only if longing is eventually integrated rather than endlessly rehearsed. Longing tells the truth about what mattered. Wisdom lies not in silencing it, but in deciding what we do with the truth once we hear it.

Since each person is unique, you never will be able to “find” a permanently ”lost” person, or any single person to replace them. However, there are ways to cope. One strategy is to think about what that person provided for you. And to think about it very concretely and segmentally. They may have been a person with whom you had a meal, a walk, a discussion, or a project. Any conjoint, lost, valued engagement is a possible candidate. Having done that, set about—as best you can—to find a collection of “compensatory” people. Each of them might fill one  or more of your lost interpersonal benefits. That’s one possible way to cope with an irretrievable loss.

Psychological research supports this intuitively pragmatic approach. When we decompose a lost relationship into its functional components, we reduce the tendency to globalize the loss into something total and irreplaceable. Studies on coping and adjustment consistently show that people fare better when they shift from person-focused rumination (“only they could do this”) to function-focused substitution (“this need can be met in multiple ways”) (Wrosch et al., 2007). This is not denial of uniqueness; it is acknowledgment of psychological pluralism. One person cannot be replaced, but many of the relational goods they provided can be distributed across multiple relationships.

From an attachment standpoint, this strategy works because attachment systems are more flexible than our grief initially suggests. While a specific bond may be irretrievable, the underlying needs for connection, validation, shared activity, and meaning remain viable and responsive to new inputs (Bowlby, 1980). Importantly, this does not require emotional amnesia. Longing may persist, but it becomes less monopolizing when daily life once again contains moments of shared engagement.

This is particularly relevant in cases of ambiguous or socially imposed loss, such as permanent estrangement or cancellation. In such situations, the mind often waits—implicitly—for moral repair or reconciliation that never comes. Segmenting what was lost allows agency to re-enter the picture. Rather than waiting to be “found” again, one begins actively rebuilding a workable interpersonal ecology (Boss, 2016). The question subtly changes from Why did this happen to me? to What kind of relational life can I now construct, given what I know I value?

In that sense, coping with loss is less about closure than about reorganization. The goal is not to stop caring, nor to retroactively judge the love as a mistake, but to let the evidence of that love guide future decisions. Longing, then, becomes informational rather than paralyzing. It tells us what mattered—and therefore what is worth seeking again, albeit in altered form.

References

Boss, P. (2016). The context and process of theory development: The story of ambiguous loss. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 8(3), 269–286. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12152

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss: Sadness and depression. Basic Books.

Neimeyer, R. A. (2019). Meaning reconstruction in bereavement: Development of a research program. Death Studies, 43(2), 79–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2018.1456620

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00088.x

O’Connor, M. F., Wellisch, D. K., Stanton, A. L., Eisenberger, N. I., Irwin, M. R., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008). Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain’s reward center. NeuroImage, 42(2), 969–972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.04.256

Wrosch, C., Bauer, I., Miller, G. E., & Lupien, S. (2007). Regret intensity, diurnal cortisol secretion, and physical health in older individuals: Evidence for directional effects and protective factors. Psychology and Aging, 22(2), 319–330. https://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.22.2.319