How to Make Your Break-Up Easier

What distinguishes strong, attractive, accomplished people in any area of life from the rest? One of these things is their ability to accept losses with grace and dignity. Dating and romantic relationships are not an exception to this rule. It’s easy to enjoy love when it’s reciprocated and everything is great in your relationship with whoever you are dating, but too many people act in not so honorable ways to their partners and to themselves when things get rough in that relationship. It is of course understandable how someone who has problems with or loses a person who they love, care and had long-term plans to be with would be angry and frustrated after their lover unexpectedly leaves them or even worse – leaves them for someone else, but it is very important to your emotional health and to your proper recovery after the break-up to not make certain mistakes motivated by that anger. It might sound counter-intuitive to you now, but the sooner you learn how to forgive or at least how to rise above the break-up and any associated drama that better you will feel about yourself and about the whole thing.  Here is a short but important list of do’s and don’t’s for that difficult time in your life, shortly after you broke up with someone you really care about:

Break-up Don’t’s

Don’t disparage your ex to your friends or co-workers or her friends or co-workers.

Don’t blame him/her for the break up and don’t get into the details of why things didn’t work out when you talk about your relationship with anyone except perhaps your closes friends, if you really feel like you have to confide to them. It will not benefit you at all to say anything bad about your former partner, and it certainly won’t help you if your ex starts spreading bad rumors about you in reaction to what you say about them. You will sound especially silly if you were praising your partner throughout your entire relationship and you started criticizing him/her only now, when you are no longer together, as this will make you sound less than objective, to put it mildly.

Resist the urge to contact your ex and check if there is any chance in the world that you can get back together, if your ex was the one who broke up with you.

There is a reason why he/she left you, and if anyone decides to make a move in the direction off getting back together, it should be the same person who initiated the decision to not be together anymore; not you.

Don’t waste time “licking your wounds.”

Do not try to imagine how many things you could have done together and how great it would if you could spend the coming weekend, week, month or year with your ex. It’s not going to happen, so why even bother and allow your rich imagination go in that direction. There is no need to go through your stuff and look for gifts, pictures and other items that might remind you of your ex. Stay away from those things for a while, and when you feel better and less angry, gather all that stuff and put it in a separate box. There is no need to return them and there is no need to destroy them, as you might just enjoy having these things months or years later. After all, these things that you want to throw away now are part of your life and your history. Whether it ended badly or not, you had some great times with your partner, while the relationship lasted, and those memories will likely stay with you for much longer than any anger or sadness associated with the break-up.

Stop telling yourself that you are never going to meet anyone like him/her again.

The undeniable truth is that everyone is special in their own way, and even though you will not meet your ex’s twin in the future, you will likely meet quite a few more people that will move you emotionally in different but equally potent ways. Surely they are not going to make you feel exactly the same like your ex did, but they will be special in their own way.

Don’t hate your partner for hurting your feelings.

No matter what happened, the reason that you partner didn’t want to be with you any longer or did not remain faithful to you is not because he/she wanted to intentionally hurt you, but because of their own selfish reasons. They did not feel like you were a good match from their perspective. Whether it’s good news or bad news for you has no bearing on how they feel about it, so they don’t deserve to be hated, but they probably deserve your good faith effort to understand them.

Don’t keep talking about your break-up over and over.

Sharing news about your recent break-up and how you feel about it with the closest friends once and getting their perspective and support is very important, but there should be a limit to how many times you will tell the same story over and over. At some point continuing to analyze and overanalyze what happened and why it didn’t work out is going to be both pointless and depressing to you. Tell your break-up story a few times to the closest people to you, whose opinion you actually value and who you think could feel you better and then stop. It won’t make your day or your friend’s day to keep going over the same thing, and it certainly won’t restore your relationship.

Do’s

Stay busy and entertained.

This is a common but true advice. It’s the wrong time to be alone and feel sorry for yourself by sitting at home watching re-runs of old shows and eating ice-creams and cookies every evening. This is the time to connect with your friends, to perhaps share your problems ones and then let your social circle help you forget about your break-up and make it easier for you to move on by occupying your time and mind. Of course, this should be the right circle of friends – people who are positive and supportive and who “infect” you with strength and hope, rather than despair due to their own endless relationship and other problems. Being busy is not going to make the pain go away in an instant, but it is one factor that should help distract you and take your mind off your break-up at least to some extent.

Force Yourself to meet other people, even if you don’t really want to.

Some people believe that it’s important to fully recover after the break-up before meeting new people. However, the opposite is often true. Talking to others and going out on casual dates might just be one important element of taking your mind off of your recent break-up. You are likely not going to be able to madly fall in love with someone new right away, but  that’s ok. Being swept off your feet is not your goal at this point. Entertaining yourself and keeping your mind open to meeting and getting to know other people is what you will be trying to accomplish. This also doesn’t mean that you have to go on a “rebound” and have sex with random strangers or that you have to use others by misleading them into believing that you are more interested in them than you really are. You can make small steps that won’t hurt anyone but would be fun and helpful to you.

Use your recent relationship and the break-up as a valuable lesson.

Step aside and look at your recent relationship and the break-up as objectively as you can as an outsider. It’s not easy, but it’s worth the effort to try to apply logic and reason to what happened. Were there any mistakes on your part? Or… perhaps you weren’t a good match in the first place, but you refused to recognize it and waiting till your partner made a move? What else could you have done or could have avoided doing that would have made your relationship work out better? These are very important questions, as your answers will directly and necessarily affect your future romantic relationships. That important lesson that you learn might be laying right in front of you, but you have to make that move and take the time to learn it carefully.

Break-ups are tough and painful, and, of course, the more special your ex was to you, the more difficult it will be getting over them. But it is your right and your duty to yourself to get the most good out of the seeming negative situation so that you become stronger, wiser and more attractive to your future partners, that will be undoubtedly coming into your life.

And don’t forget to read more advice on dealing with and overcoming and painful break-up.