Asklemmy

For my part i am often unsure.

You'll find no sage here. When it comes to questions of how to think, I'd recommend people to read philosophy.

We're talking about a person as a social role; a person as an idea vs a person as a reality. When I say 'Man/Woman', 'Lover', 'Partner', 'Boyfriend/Girlfriend', 'attractive', 'sex', certain thoughts come to mind, without context you likely have forms/images in your mind you would give to these words, idealized forms, possibly even multiple distinct forms for the same word, which are likely rooted in popular culture or lived experience.

Are you thinking more about the person, or the idealized form you associate with the context that person had in your life?

Can you remove the person from the role and still value them as a person?

If your ex were to love another, would you be able to have a genuinely positive reaction towards this?

"Love" is a word we should be careful with when referring to a former lover, thinking in those terms might cause confusion even if we're attempting to mean it in the general sense. We often concieve of "love" as having some sort of profound meaning, but even if we're not rejecting that line of reasoning outright, it is important we should distance ourselves from it in this case and answer the more basic question: Is this person, as they are, important to me? And maybe equally: Am I still of any importance to them? Because any real relationship is mutual.

That might be the limit of what I have to say on the matter, for the most part my study has been on the dialectics of relationships, not so much on how to think about them after the fact.