1) While moving on is important in time, letting yourself really feel all you’re feeling now is just as important. As we’ve said, guys can often feel pressures to be more stiff-upper-lippy than girls, or to pretend like a breakup doesn’t bother you. But most people, of all genders, even when a breakup is wanted, have feelings of sadness, anger, insecurity or disappointment about a breakup. It’s up to you who you share your feelings with, but make sure you’re at least giving yourself time and space alone to just experience those feelings and let them have their own flow.
2) Express yourself. Expressing how we feel is part of dealing with how we feel and moving forward. Any of us can use creative ways to express our feelings, such as through journaling, a creative art like photography or music, through physical activities, what have you. You know you best, and know your best places to let it all out: use them.
3) Plenty of us, after a breakup, may pine or obsess over a lost partner with photographs or mementos of the relationship. But at a certain point – depending on how you’re doing, and if you feel like those things are doing you good or not – it’s time to put that stuff away. You don’t have to ritually destroy them (and may regret it later if you do), but putting them all in a box, and then somewhere well out of sight, can help a lot.
4) Reclaim the things you enjoy and had less time for during your relationship. Obviously, the more relationships we have, the less time we usually have for ourselves, and intimate relationships can take up a lot of time and energy. Doing the things we love and have previously had less time for helps heal our hearts and also remind us of who we are, by ourselves, not just who we are in a relationship.
5) Find some solid support. For sure, not all of your friends may have the emotional maturity or life experience to understand how you’re feeling. Some may even be really bad choices to share with: a person who teases you about being sad, or who just disses your ex endlessly isn’t likely to be a good support. But do reach out to people you think may be supportive. That might be a teacher or a coach, one of your parents or a sibling, or a friend of any gender. If you’re having a supremely tough time with a breakup, finding a counselor to help you through it can also be a good step, whether that’s the counselor at school or a counseling professional through your healthcare services. And if you feel like you’ve got none of these resources, you can seek out some safe spaces online to be real with how you feel, like our message boards.
6) Deal with your breakup in ways which are emotionally healthy for you and your ex. It’s common to feel angry or bitter after a breakup, but some people act on those feelings in ways that aren’t healthy, and which range from masochistic to downright dangerous. To be clear, ceasing to do all the things you enjoy doing, or which you need to do – going to school or work, eating, sleeping, bathing -- is not healthy. Self-harm through things like cutting, drinking or doing drugs, high-risk sexual behavior or suicide attempts are not healthy. Refusing to give your ex space and time – such as by texting or emailing them over and over again – or allowing an ex to refuse to give you space and time is not healthy. Hopefully it’s obvious, but blackmailing, manipulating, stalking, harassing, or physically or sexually attacking an ex in any way are not only unhealthy, but abusive and criminal.
7) If you and/or an ex want to try and sustain a platonic friendship, be sure you both are giving yourself some space and time first, and also set and maintain healthy boundaries. As well, check in with your or their motivations for a friendship: often enough, some people want to “stay friends” not to actually be friends, but because they are either having a tough time letting go, or because they hope a friendship may help get the romantic relationship back. The same goes double for breaking up, then walking right back into a friends-with-benefits scenario. If neither person has had time to deal with the breakup, you can be very sure that someone is going to get hurt and feel very confused by casual sex – though sex with a recent ex is hardly casual – when a relationship is supposed to be over.
8) Try and avoid rebounding by giving yourself time to be single after a relationship. Sure, now and then we rebound anyway, or a new relationship just happens. Sometimes, a new relationship may even be why the old one ended. But most of us need some time to grieve and reflect after a breakup: if we don’t have time to feel our feelings, as well as time to learn the lessons of our last relationships and the breakup, our next one might not be any better than the last. Too, after a breakup, we so often feel so lonely, having been used to having a partner, that relationship choices made hot on the heels of a breakup don’t tend to be our best.
9) Remember that a breakup is not likely about how much you suck, or how unwanted or undesirable you are. When relationships don’t work, it’s rarely about one person, which shouldn’t be surprising since relationships are necessarily about more than one person. Rather, relationships that end, fall apart or just don’t work tend to be about how any two people find that their personalities, lifestyles, goals, communication styles, and any number or kind of needs and wants don’t mesh or play nicely together. As well, breakups are even more common or frequent with younger people than with older folks because younger people are still growing and changing so much that a partnership that feels perfect one month can feel like a poor fit the next. Even the most awesome people in the world cannot have a great love relationship with just anyone: we can be as great as we want to be, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be great together with everyone. It’s helpful to try not to look at breakups as failures, even though it can sure feel that way. Moving on or away from something that isn’t working for one or both people isn’t a failure, it’s a movement towards both learning and finding what does work for them.
10) … and when it’s time, be open to other relationships again. It can be so easy, especially when a relationship is over, to only remember the good stuff or for our good times to seem even better than they actually were. If you’re getting over one of our first loves, it might feel like you’ll never have those feelings again, or never have them so hugely. You might also feel scared to try getting involved intimately again. All of those feelings are normal, but chances are, you will likely have those feelings again, and while we always risk hurt or heartbreak when we get close to others, those are the risks we take to have the good stuff. A broken heart can hurt like hell, to be sure, but broken hearts do heal in time.
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