If you still have strong feelings for someone after a breakup will maintaining zero contact shut the door on any possibility of a reconciliation in the future?

Answer 1

• Having no contact is not a plan for an eventual reconciliation; it's for your benefit in terms of moving on with your life. Keeping an ex in your life does not mean their current feelings will ever change or go back to what they were. There are no guarantees. As long as you keep in touch with an ex that you still have strong feelings for, you are putting your life on hold--you're daydreaming about your shared past, you're planning on how to get them back, you're not meeting other people who may be interested in dating you. You're putting the focus of your life on someone who chose not to be in a relationship with you. Don't you deserve more than that?
• Having conditional no contact with a clear understanding that you may re-examine the relationship if a certain behavior or situation changes could lead to a reconciliation. That said no contact while leaving the other person hope for a someday happily ever after (even if your not sure you want to close the door) can be very very emotionally cruel as they have no way to understand your changing feelings over time and heal their own. Giving someone who is deeply in love with you false hope when leaving a relationship is one of the harshest, cruelest things that you can do to someone and can cause permanent scars. It is much easier to deal with a known ending of a relationship than with one where someone disappears to no contact with little or unclear explanation and a hint to "things being different one day".