Heartbreak is likened to experiencing withdrawal symptoms from quitting a drug. Each time we called that person, got a text from them or spent quality time with them, we received a dose of dopamine. Happiness. The feeling of appreciation. The feeling that we are worthy and loved. That person becomes a part of your daily routine - you’re excited to hear how their day went, you’re excited to FaceTime them and just sit in silence, basking in their company. They almost become one of your limbs, a part of you. You can’t imagine a life without them. You don’t want to think of a life without them.
But you both break up, and just like that, the daily dopamine dose is gone. Snatched. It’s like taking toys away from a baby. It’s quitting heroin cold-turkey. No more quick rushes of happiness, love, appreciation, admiration or worthiness. Sure, you always found these things elsewhere, or in other people, but it’s not quite the same as when it’s from someone you love so romantically.
I always found myself itching for a sense of closure. Just one last time. One last talk. One last date. One last kiss. Anything, please, just one dose. One last goodbye. It’s part of the denial phase of grief: not being able to accept it’s actually over. Just let me see you one last time, please. Only later did I realise that closure only really comes from within yourself, not with them. Their actions should be your closure. What are you doing going over to his house? Stay at home. Cry. Do whatever, just don’t go over.
I’ve always said to people that heartbreak is up there with the worst feelings you could ever experience in life. Heartbreak is true grief, except you’re grieving someone who is actually alive. How can you learn to live a life without someone, when they are all you’ve known for a while? Grief is just love with nowhere to go.
I don’t want to touch too much on my own personal experiences, but I am learning some things about heartbreak. I’d like to share my lessons - they might help someone. Just to clarify, these are lessons I’ve learnt as someone who has been broken up with, not someone who did the breaking up. Such lessons may vary depending on the role of the person in the break-up, but this is the perspective from someone who was in love and involuntarily separated. I think this is quite important to note because there can be so many reasons for a break-up.
1. Go no-contact straight away.
This is something I regret not doing. Trying to stay friends or just generally staying in contact as soon as you both break up is not a good idea. There’s no transition period, and there needs to be one. A break, a time for reflection, a time for rest. I’m not saying that exes can’t be friends, I actually think they can, however, it can’t work straight away. I know this from experience - if you still text and call after a break-up, you’re not going to heal. In fact, it probably doesn’t feel like a break-up. It’d feel like you’re still together but without the label. You’re still getting those doses of dopamine.
Going no-contact straight after a break-up is advised because in that time, you learn to live without them and you learn to experience life independently again. If you found you and your ex had a great friendship and you still want to salvage that, then time apart is imperative. Break up, don’t contact each other for a few months or however long, then as soon as you’re both over the romantic side of the other person and you have healed then sure, get back in contact and be friends.
Once you can accept that you won’t feel jealousy or a sense of possessiveness from seeing your ex with someone else, you’re probably over them. Only at this point is it probably a good idea to get back in contact. But you NEED that time apart. It’s the most difficult part, because you feel hurt and experience all the withdrawal symptoms and you adjust to a new life, but it’s an absolute necessity if you want to get back on track with life and heal your wounds.
Not doing this is one of my biggest regrets, because I know that if I had just done it, I would have gotten over it a lot quicker. You end up more hurt if you don’t give yourself that transition period.
2. Let yourself feel all your emotions
When a break-up is fresh, you will feel awful. It feels like your world has come crashing down and that your heart has been ripped out of your chest. That’s normal. It’s okay to be sad, but let yourself really feel the sadness. It helps to take some time off your daily routine and just wallow in bed for a while. If you try to distract yourself immediately and keep things bottled up, these feelings will eventually come out in one way or another, and it doesn’t allow for full healing. Let it come out, we’re all human and we all feel things. If you lose someone you really care about, who gave you such intense love, how could you expect yourself to feel okay straight after that? You’re not going to be okay, and that’s fine.
A lot of the time straight after a breakup, one of the people will start dating a new person, and it’s likely that the other party is not.
Let’s say Tom was dating Anna, but Tom broke up with Anna for whatever reason. Anna is awfully hurt because Tom was the love of her life, but 2 weeks after the break-up, Tom is dating new girl Kate. Anna finds out that Tom is dating a new girl so soon after their break-up, and she feels devastated because it seems as though Tom was able to move on quickly so Anna can’t have ever meant too much to him. Now, there can be many reasons for Tom to be dating Kate so soon. He could have fallen out of love with Anna a while ago, while they were still dating, and found it easier to move on because he had essentially already gotten over her in that time. This would seem plausible. However, there can be another reason which isn’t often spoken about: Tom might be just trying to fill that void that Anna has left open in his life since they broke up. Although Tom did the breaking up, he will feel a deep absence. It hits hard to go from talking to someone every single day and being so intimate to having nothing from them at all. Tom feels that deeply, so dating Kate is a way of filling that void. He might not even be that much into Kate, but he still receives love and affection from her, and the brain can’t distinguish the rush from either Anna or Kate. He still gets that rush, and he feels loved. He no longer has to worry about suffering withdrawal symptoms, because Kate is there to provide what he has been used to from Anna. It doesn’t necessarily mean he has feelings for Kate, or even that he has lost feelings for Anna, it’s just a cushion on his fear of being alone and confronting Anna’s absence.
Tom filling this void with Kate provides a lot of comfort for him, but it’s often short-term. Moving on so soon after a break-up like this can be seen as a way of Tom not allowing himself to feel all his emotions. Yes, he did the breaking up, but feelings don’t just disappear. He of course still feels a lot for Anna, but dating Kate means he doesn’t have to think about Anna so much, and he gets an ego-boost from having someone there to love him. What Tom doesn’t realise is that by doing this, he is burying his feelings and avoiding confrontation, and he will find out sooner or later that his unhealed wounds will surface as emotional baggage or unresolved issues in his next real relationship.
Whilst Tom is avoiding standing vis-à-vis with how he feels, Anna is feeling it all. Anna is experiencing all the stages of heartbreak. She finds herself crying most nights, missing him, looking back on old pictures and videos of them both. But what Anna also does is go through it all. She lets herself cry and she soon picks herself up, starts journalling, practices meditation and affirmations of self-love, goes out with her friends. She fills her void through herself, not through another person who can‘t give what she truly wanted from Tom.
Anna is the one who feels worse, yes, since she was the one who was broken up with, but she understands that it has to get worse before it gets better. She understands that it’s necessary to be upset from losing a loved one and she knows it takes time. In that time, she heals properly. Tom doesn't heal. Tom carries his hurt through Kate. Anna is the real winner here.
There’s nothing wrong with finding someone new after a break-up, but I believe there still needs to be some sort of period that is taken to get over the ex. That’s why I emphasise letting yourself feel all your emotions, instead of trying to fill up that absence with someone new. Really let yourself be sad at the start and fully heal before even thinking of talking to someone new. It wouldn’t be fair on the new person anyway if you’re talking to them but still not over your ex.
3. distractions help, but not all the time
After you’ve wallowed for a while, it helps a lot to go out with your friends and have fun with them, play on the PS5, watch films or do work. These are all distractions, and they do help. They help with realising that there is more to life than your ex, and that you can find happiness and joy in other things but them. Being around people who love you is a huge one - they remind you of your worth and just generally make you feel better.
Yet, trying to distract yourself all the time probably does more harm than good. It follows on from my last point, about letting yourself feel all your emotions. If you try and push all your sadness away by doing other things, there isn’t much time for you to sit and rationalise what you’re actually feeling.
I’m guilty of this - I would spend my whole day distracting myself with task after task, but then when it got to nighttime and I didn’t really have anything to do, that’s when all my emotions would come out, and because I had blanketed them with distractions throughout the day, the emotions were intense and very hard to deal with.
Recognise that you feel sad and that it’s okay to feel sad, do distract yourself, but not to the point where you burn yourself out and never take some time to actually process what you’re feeling.
4. Get rid of all reminders of them
As soon as I got broken up with, I removed everything that reminded me of them on my phone. I moved all our pictures and videos to Google Drive (I didn’t have the heart to permanently delete them) so that I only had access to them there, and I deleted our chat from my phone. Deleting the chat took a lot in me, because it’s where everything started, and it’s where he said some really special things to me, but I knew that if I had kept it on my phone, I would go over the chat whenever I felt sad, and it would make me sadder.
I also strongly advise removing your ex from all your social media, not in a bitter way, but because it’ll help you. It’ll help because you don’t get to see them pop up in your feed, and you don’t have to feel your heart sink a little whenever they post a story. You don’t have the chance to stalk their profile at any given time, and you don’t have the possibility that they’re going to message you just constantly floating around in your head.
It’s out of sight, out of mind. The more you don’t see the reminders of them, the quicker you’ll heal. This also means getting rid of objects that remind you of them, perhaps photos or gifts they got you. I don’t have the heart to throw anything anyway, so I just hid things away in a box or cupboard so that I couldn’t see them.
5. Let go of all hope
Don’t have any hope that you’re going to get back together. Remove that possibility completely. Don’t have hope that they’re going to come back, that they’re going to message you. Get rid of it all. You can’t heal fully if you keep thinking they’re going to call you one day, or that you run into them somewhere and somehow rekindle what you had. You have to keep going as if you know that you won’t ever talk to them again. Sure, this might not be the case, and maybe you two both end up friends or maybe even back together down the line, but if you hold on to this potential then there is no way you’re going to get over them. It would mean you’re constantly waiting for something, for something that you don’t know will even appear, and that is not healthy. You have to act like they are gone forever. This way, even if they do try and come back, you might be at a point where you don’t even want them in your life anymore at all because you’ve gotten used to them essentially being dead to you.
6. They are not special. They are just a person.
It’s really common for people to over romanticise the person they were with. When you think about them, there’s an image in your head of this almost perfect person that they were. Nostalgia is a liar - it forces us to focus on the good times, the fun memories, but never really the arguments, the bad things they’ve said, or their flaws. It’s nothing to beat yourself up about, it’s natural at first. But once you remove the rose-tinted glasses, and actually have some time away from them, it soon comes to light just how … regular they are.
Oftentimes you never even thought they were genuinely special, but actually, it was your own love that made them seem that way. They are just a person, the same way you are just a person. They are not special because no one is actually special. It’s not a bad thing, it is just a realisation. It’s not bad to just be a regular person. It is all that we all are. Once you come to this realisation, it becomes easier to see their bad sides rather than this idealised version of them in your head.
7. Some people are just moments in life, and that’s okay.
Sometimes, people enter your life for a moment, and then they leave. That’s okay. It’s okay because nothing really lasts forever. You can look back on all your good memories and just accept them for what they are. A shift in perspective helps - instead of seeing it as something sad because it ended, it might help to look back and smile at what it was. Yes, it’s over, and you’re upset that it’s over, but at least you can say you had a really good time, and you were happy in that moment. That moment might’ve been a long moment of a few years or a short moment of a few months, but it was still a moment, and you’re entitled to feel however sad or happy about it.
If you go through life and accept that nothing really does last and that people and feelings are temporary, then you can only feel sad or disappointed up to a certain point. It will hurt every time you lose someone, of course it will, but you must keep in mind that sometimes this is just what happens in life, and that life will go on regardless.
8. You broke up for a reason
There can be many reasons for a break-up. It could be circumstantial, something not in either of your control, or compatibility related, but either way, you both broke up for a reason. If they broke up with you, out of their own choice, that is them telling you they’re okay with losing you. Whilst you are there pining over their loss and crying over the good memories, it’s not certain that they’re doing the same thing over losing you, and more likely than not, they aren’t.
This isn’t one-size-fits-all, because every break-up is unique, but if you are reading this, you’re probably the one that got broken up with. You have to accept that they chose to do this. Why would you want to be with someone who made it clear that they wanted you out of their life? it’s so easy to make excuses for them, to say “Oh, they just weren’t ready” and they made a mistake, but no mistakes are intentional. Accept that you deserve someone who thinks the absolute world of you, that you deserve to be loved the same way you give out love. Accept that it was probably a blessing in disguise, that the break-up was a good thing because it meant you can find someone that will give you the world, and that your ex just wasn’t that person, no matter how badly you wanted it to be them.
9. Use the healing process to your advantage
I’m currently reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, and the main message is that when things fall apart, you use that feeling of hurt and vulnerability to your advantage, or as Chodron says, ‘we use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep’. I’ve only just started the book, so I have to read on to fully grasp the message, but I think just that concept in itself is quite powerful. You could either let the heartbreak destroy you, or you could use it to build yourself up and come out stronger. You could choose war or peace.
Use it as an opportunity to learn about what it was that hurt you the most, and how you can resolve that. It sounds really over-said, but genuinely just use the heartbreak to find yourself, and to love yourself. I discovered quickly that I clearly did not have a good sense of myself, because of the way I allowed myself to be treated. If I knew my worth, I would’ve stood my ground more. During heartbreak, I knew there were things to work on, and it’s so hard to actually work on these things during the relationship - it’s only really when you’re out of it that you get a chance to. I definitely had my own unresolved personal issues that I probably wasn’t so aware of when I stepped into the relationship. Not loving myself enough was the biggest one. I didn’t love myself enough to see what I deserved, and that I was giving more than I was ever taking. You have to remind yourself that anyone is lucky to have you and that you’re not just a throwaway. You have so much love to give, so it has to go to the right person. The sooner you realise your worth, the less hurt you will be any time someone disappoints you. You will learn to navigate your next relationship easier and how to stand up for yourself.
Having said all this, it’s important to note that healing isn’t linear. I know this better than anyone, you will have good days and you will have bad days. You will have days when you wake up and think “Oh, I think I’m actually over them” and then find yourself crying later that night about how much you miss them. It’s normal, and you will backtrack. You might think you’re over them and then you get triggered. It’s okay. Healing takes time, and you will dip and peak. It’s all part of the process, so trust it.
10. Your mind is a powerful tool, use it
Nothing is more powerful than your own thoughts. I’m the last person to believe in anything spiritual or manifestation or things like that, but I tried this one thing and it did help. I think it’s part of the law of assumption - if you act like/assume something, then it’s likely to happen. It sounds quite wishy-washy, but in this case, if you go about your day and act like you are already over your ex, it’s less likely to hit you so bad. I tried this for a day once, and I genuinely felt fine. Every time the thought of him popped up in my head, I said to myself ‘I’m over it, I got over it months ago, he was just part of a fever dream’, and it truly helped me just get on with my day. I told my brain that it was something that happened ages ago and that I’m over it. I have yet to keep trying it, but it did work when I did. Give it a go.
Another thing I tried, is something I like to call thought-pushing. Whenever he popped up in my head, I would actively try and change my thoughts at that time. If I found myself starting to think about him, I would actively push this thought out by trying to think of something else. It meant I wasn’t dwelling on him, but it did have to be active, otherwise, he’d stay there in mind. It’s hard to do sometimes, especially when you see something that reminds you of them, but it does work sometimes.
11. As long as you gave it your all, there’s nothing more you could have done
This is a really important lesson. If you look back on your relationship, and know you did all that you possibly could, whether it was loving them in the right way, or actively working through your problems, then there is literally nothing more you could have done. You gave it your all, and they still left you. It’s heartbreaking, of course it is, but at that point, it was out of your control. There’s no point trying to fix them or trying to get them to change their mind about breaking up with you. You did all you could, you loved so deeply, and sometimes that just isn’t enough for some people. That’s okay.
12. You will get over it
If you’re going through heartbreak now, it’s really hard to believe these words. Trust me, I know. It’s impossible to believe that one day you’ll wake up and they won’t be at the forefront of your mind. Trust me, you will get over it.
It will take time - it depends on the relationship and it depends on you. It might take a few months, even a year, possibly even longer. Find comfort in the fact that at some point, they will no longer dominate your mind. You can’t predict when you’ll get over it, but just have faith that you will. If you reach a stage of pure acceptance that they are gone and they won’t ever be back, you’ll find your happiness again. You’ll meet new people, and you’ll meet someone who truly loves you who will not leave.
Imagine all the people you’ll meet as your life goes on, imagine all the things you will achieve. For as long as time progresses, you will. Everyone says time is the best healer, and it is true. Give yourself time to grieve and heal, find yourself, love yourself, and soon someone will fall at your feet, and you’ll thank your ex for breaking up with you.
Don’t let yourself be stuck in the grief. If you’re reading this, you’re probably young. I’m 21, and as I’m experiencing heartbreak, it feels like it’ll never get better. I find comfort in knowing that one day, I’ll be in my thirties, with a husband and maybe some kids (lol I mean i hope), and I’ll laugh about the heartbreak I had at 21 where I thought I’d be stuck there forever. I feel happy knowing that I have so much life to experience.
I won’t forget my ex, because he does have a piece of my heart, but maybe our hearts are divided into small sections for multiple people. Other people have pieces of my heart too, like my best friends, my parents, my brother. Our heart has space for loads of people.
I may never speak to my ex again, but I’ve learnt to be more than okay with that. I’ve also learnt to be okay with being young and naïve. Maybe as time goes by I’ll realise I probably didn’t love him as much as I thought I did. I’m very young, and love is a complex feeling. What do I know, really? I know that I would’ve done anything for him, and I remember being really regretful for showing that too much. What I’ve come to realise is that I should never be apologetic for showing so much love. It’s such a great and rare thing to love someone, and many people struggle to show it. So, the fact that I had no problem going above and beyond for someone actually gives me hope.
After my break-up, I swore I never wanted to fall in love again and that it was all just a scam of pure evil. I swore that everyone was just out to get me and that no one had genuine intentions when talking to me. I swore that because I’ve been hurt so many times, it’s all I’ll ever feel, and heartbreak had completely twisted my view of love.
But what makes me believe in love is how much I love. I know that it must be real because I know how deeply I loved someone else. There must be people out there who love the way that I do, and that’s probably the only thing that has given me hope for the future. That I will find someone who can love me the way that I love.
Please don’t give up on it. Falling in love is a privilege, and it’s so exciting. It’s what life is about, really. You’ll fall in love with many people in your lifetime, and each time you’ll think that they’re ’the one’. Here’s a little home truth: ‘the one’ doesn’t exist. There are many ’ones’ for you out there, and the person you end up with is a result of circumstance. If you hadn’t have met them, you would have met someone else and thought they were ‘the one’. The thing is, you’ll never know. In this universe, you might be with someone you met at university and you think they’re the love of your life. But the truth is, in another universe, you could have went to another university and found someone there and swore that they were the love of your life. The beauty of it is that you’d just never know. This should provide you with some comfort. There are plenty of fish in the sea, about 8 billion to be precise, what are the chances the person in your uni accommodation is the one? You’ll find someone else. Cry your tears of heartbreak now, but be happy knowing you’ll be okay one day, and you’ll meet someone new.
You’re hurt because you loved someone. Be kind to yourself. ❤️
Lots of love,
Aurora
Comentarios