It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken: The Smart Girl’s Breakup Buddy. Greg Behrendt
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it.” You go back over mistakes you made: “If only I’d been skinny, sexy, whatever” to “What about that time I set his car on fire…” (Uh, okay, some things may have been a factor.) So you sit around and devalue yourself. You think about what you could have said or should have done—or what you might say if he comes crawling back—instead of being present in the moment and working toward a new and better future. It’s called a breakup because it’s broken. It can’t be fixed, so you have to let it go, and only then will your pain begin to subside. The hard part about time is that it actually takes time. Sorry.
THE Best WORST NEWS
The best worst news is that you’re broken up. You’re in the thick of it. There’s no more dreading when or if it’s going to happen, or how badly you’re going to feel. You’re here, and like everything else in life, the reality is never quite as bad as you feared it would be. You didn’t die, the world didn’t end, food still tastes decent, and now you have time to reconnect with friends, catch up on your reading, and hog the bed all to yourself if nothing else.
The super sucky hard part is adjusting to this new reality and, of course, going through some real heartache. The thing about breakups and the pain that accompanies them is that they can’t just be undone or get better. Even the most mutual of splits usually hurts one party more than the other and can lead to an avalanche of emotions that takes some time to clear. But the flip side of breaking up—and here’s the Best News part—is that you are also breaking free from a relationship that wasn’t working. Freedom means no more agonizing, no more drama, and no more time wasted on someone who wasn’t appreciative of who you really are. Freedom means you can redesign your life and the sky’s the limit—you can take all the things you hoped for in your relationship, all your dreams about what love should be and feel and look like, and find a guy who will actually make them happen. During this time when you feel decimated and powerless, remember that you are still in control of at least one thing—yourself. And while you can’t make someone take back a breakup, you do get a say in what happens next. You get to decide whether to use this situation as a turning point, and be dignified in your grief, or let it overtake you and hold you back. So start now. Start today. Don’t be a victim of heartbreak, be a take-charge superstar! (Yeah, that’s kind of goofy, but you know what we mean.)
What I Did Wrong BY GREG
It happened slowly and it super sucked. She’d been hanging out with this guy from work—let’s call him DUDE. You know, going out and having a drink, that kind of thing. Just her and the Dude, who is really good-looking. A lot of people are handsome. And funny. A lot of people are handsome and funny. Totally cool. Then I caught them making out on our driveway and I thought, “This is suspicious.” But she was probably just helping him get something out of his mouth with her tongue. She was kind like that. Soon thereafter, she lost interest in sleeping with me and even moved into a hotel for a while. Still, she insisted I was her boyfriend, and I thought, “Great.” Then one day she calls me to say she’s buying a place in New York. “New York? But you live and work in Los Angeles!” “I know, but I hate it here.” “But I’m here.” “You could come to New York.” “And do what?” Silence. I hung up. When your girlfriend moves to a different city, there are really some cracks in the foundation of your relationship. It dawned on me I might be losing her. I had to concoct a plan, some way to get her not to move. Something dramatic. Isn’t that what they do in the movies? Drama? You know, stand on the lawn with a boom box, that kind of thing. Seriously, if I could have crashed through her hotel window on the end of a golden rope dressed like a pirate holding a boom box, I would have. The problem with being the guy with the boom box is that in the movie he’s the hero but in real life he gets carted away by the cops. Scratch the pirate getup. So I decided to break up with her as a way to get her back. How could this go wrong? I’ll break up with her, she’ll realize the huge mistake she’s making, and she’ll call off the move to New York. I mean, what’s in New York? It’s just a bunch of tall buildings and…that DUDE…Oh shit!
But here’s what’s worse: Even when I added it all up—The Driveway, The Hotel, New York, and Dude—I still had HOPE!! And why wouldn’t I? She was making out with Dude, living in a Hotel, and moving to New York. What’s not to be hopeful about? Who thinks that? A sane person looks at what’s going on, makes an assessment, and then moves in the direction that is the least painful. But when you’re hurting, you are not sane, and for whatever reason, often only interested in more pain. So I broke up with her. To which she said, “Great.” So I then asked her to take me back. Oh wow! Now I was giving her another chance to reject me on top of the rest, and guess what…I still wouldn’t let it go. Quite often I think back to this event and wonder why I didn’t just say to her, “Hey, it sucks, but you don’t seem to be into me, and since you won’t break up with me, I’m gonna do it.” And then walk away quietly with dignity instead of indulging in the behavior outlined in the pages to come. If you are where I was then right now, know that you can walk away with your dignity today. Trust me, please. You will wish you had.
How I Got Through It BY AMIIRA
At some point you realize that you’re not going to die from a broken heart—though you’ll surely contemplate the feasibility of it for a while. Believe me, you’ll get there at your own pace—hopefully, sooner rather than later. For me it took years of on again/off again before I finally was able to really understand that he just wasn’t that into me. It was years of big promises with no follow-through. Lots of pushing me away just to reel me back in the moment before I was out the door. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed by how little effort on his part it took for me to come back or stay. I was so desperate for him to love me, to want me, to fight for me that I was literally grateful for any mere scrap of effort. I’d made so many excuses for his inability to treat me well that even the smallest gesture was amplified in my head. After years of this, I finally got my head out of my ass and realized that aside from feeling insecure and fragile about the state of my relationship all the time, we also wanted entirely different things out of life! (Even the brightest of girls aren’t above pulling the wool over their own eyes in the name of hope.) Having a moment of clarity like that is worth your entire kingdom. The liberation of recognizing that you can stand up for yourself and demand action is incredible. And that’s what I did. I sat him down and told him that he was wasting my time. By not committing to either working on the issues we were having or to NOT working on them, he was keeping me in a kind of relationship purgatory, and I was over it. So I gave him the option—you can choose to work on it or choose to NOT work on it. No hard feelings. I proposed it as a choice because by this point I wasn’t angry, I just wanted to know. I needed an answer so that another few years of my life wouldn’t be wasted with empty promises. He said he couldn’t make a decision right then and asked for some time. I gave him four weeks (which was really quite generous, considering he had already given me the answer—but I was doing the best I could). So four weeks later I asked him again, and he said he still didn’t know. (Clearly, he had put about as much thought into this as every other aspect of our relationship.) Well, that’s an answer, right? Not caring enough to even think about it seems like an answer, doesn’t it? If you wanted to be with me, it would cross your mind to think about it. If you wanted to be with me, you’d do whatever it took to make it work. If you wanted to be with me, you’d know. You’d know. For years I thought “I don’t know” and “I don’t know if I can” were words that meant what they said. But from that moment on I knew…“I don’t know” means NO! “I don’t know” means I’m too cowardly to tell you the truth because I can’t deal with confrontation. “I don’t know” means please do the dirty work for me because I don’t want to hurt your feelings even more than I already have. Sure I was sad. I had married this person. Planned on spending my life with him. That moment sucked all the air out of my lungs and filled my head with white noise. But it was also the moment I knew that it was time to take care of me. We decided to split up, and in retrospect I think he had been hoping this moment would come for a long time. I think he had been trying to get me to break up with him forever by his actions—but my hope had blinded me.
Now,