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Wierd question, but how do you fully move on from a breakup ?
It's been 5 months since i broke up with my gf of 2 years and i still find myself agonizing about it every once in a while.
We broke up on good terms, it was an amazing relationship and honestly we were just not in the same place in life. (Figuratively and geographically). I want to be able to look back at that time in my life fondly, but also move onto something new without feeling much baggage. Time has healed a bit and i have generally been looking forward, but it feels all too slow.
More experienced people int he sub, how have you dealt with this before ?
If you're not texting her or stalking her social media you're far ahead of the game. (If you are doing those things, time to stop.)
The only real answer here is twofold： Time. Or, if you want to drastically shorten the time period required for the numbness or apathy to kick in： Meeting another woman/girl.
This is the intuitive, frustrating, simple, and complete answer.
How much time depends on your own disposition, and it could be a considerable amount. Alternately, if said former flame does/says something that pulls back the veil, as it were, and reveals to you (via somehow) some unsavory reality you may have been previously blind to, this can douse the embers pretty thoroughly.
Yeah, the hard part is that it was an amiable breakup. Over our entire 2 years relationship, we never fought once, so it hard for me to go full cold turkey.
We have avoided chatting to help both of us move on. But, we have exchanged chats once or twice in the last 6 months, one of which was a rather embarrassing rant on my part. (Nothing I'd regretful or hateful though)
We decided not to block each other on social media, but I also don't obsess over it or interact with her through social media and vice versa.
Ah man, I'd hope not. The entire relationship was built on us being 2 people without a poker face. We've broken up, but I'd suck to have 2 happy years of my life yanked away by something truly evil. I mean, a big part of why I even fell for her was because she'd win a 'nicest person on planet earth' award if there was one, and I was the cynical devil's advocate to keep her collateral guilt in check,
Yeah, that's what I'm tending towards. I've met a few people, but it lacks the same enthusiasm as the last time.
There is a 'me' problem at the bottom of it all. I was the one who initiated the breakup, in part due to commitment issues, unwillingness to do long-distance and a mid-life crisis.
So I am in this conundrum where casual intimacy just never feels as rewarding as a real relationship, but my life circumstances keep me from being able to reciprocate the expectations that come with a real relationship.
Yep yep yep yep. It's never easy huh.
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Yeah you're just going to have to deal with it. I was fucked up from my major break up for around 1.5-2 years (depending on who you ask). But it does get better eventually.
Probably every {Time Period Unique to the Person and Relationship}, things get half as bad until you live with it.
Not to freak you out but it's now been 12 years and I still had a dream/nightmare about her last week. It'd been forever since that'd happened though.
12 years? Jesus.
Have you had any sort of contact with her during that time?
Not really, we hooked up again maybe a year after the breakup but haven't talked since then and aren't friends on social media.
To be very clear I'm still 100% functional and happy - I've been married with 2 kids for quite a while. Just very strange having my subconscious toss me a random gut-punch on a Saturday.
I know what you're saying. One can 'move on' in all ways that count but the brain still has this person's image indelibly carved in it such that it pops back up, unbidden, on occasion.
In my case, I'm still a bit hung up on my high school girlfriend who broke up with me the first semester of college (different colleges, mind). That wrecked me for like a year and then later, just as I was patching things up with her (friendshipwise, at least) she died in an unlucky accident.
I'm on good terms with my second ex, although it took years to come back around. But I made a concerted effort to work on that since, well, I didn't want to leave us on a negative note in case something like the above happened.
With the current Ex, its frustrating because I kinda want to skip ahead to the part where we at least 'tolerate' each other again. But I don't even know if that's in the cards this time.
Still aiming to get to the 'married with kids' stage at some point.
Dude, that sucks. I'm sorry to hear it!
Yeah, long enough ago that it doesn't bother me daily, but I still have her face seared into my memory and I know the world is slightly worse off than it could have been.
Suffering through that event really impacted my perspective on maintaining relationships even through hardships. Namely: I generally refuse to give up on friendships that I've come to value.
Another thing I get the feeling you may also experience is that this is the sort of conversation that isn't possible to have in almost any context.
With friends, they may listen for a bit, but eventually, it's mopey and "too heavy". You don't want to pay a therapist for the privilege of discussing it. At least I learned that a long time ago...
I hope this doesn't translate to anything dysfunctional. I try to hold onto relationships as long as possible too, in general. For exes, it's almost comically absurd how you can go from the most intense intimacy imaginable to being strangers. But I've also tried to get more comfortable about letting relationships go when the other person has radically changed. I used to take it as a personal affront when there was a slow growing apart.
The way it seems to manifest is that I am aware of how I become strongly attached to my relationships, so I put up pretty significant barriers to letting other people get close to me, and thus only those very few who manage to penetrate said layers end up being part of my 'close' circle of friends.
Which, I have to say, has generally served me well in avoiding too much emotional distress. The last ex just managed to get through those barriers and did so in a way that led me to actually think I had finally found somebody worth trusting and keeping long term, then cut it off in a way that almost seemed designed to be maximally distressing to me. Just shattered my trust for no good reason.
So it reinforced my possible unhealthy tendency to distrust people's intentions. I've worked through a lot of it but I have a hard time visualizing a situation where I trust someone else that deeply ever again.
I occasionally laugh at the ridiculousness of having some random person out there walking around knowing most of your deepest, darkest secrets, possibly enough to nuke your entire life if they chose, and you are explicitly NOT on speaking terms with this person, and yet there's the general expectation that they won't do it.
Similar with me. I think I'm able to recognize when a relationship becomes actively toxic and cut it off (and as mentioned above, I rarely let someone in close enough for it to get to that point), but I much prefer to just kind of render an appropriate amount of distance as the situation requires, whilst not severing the link.
This tends to get MOST tricky with family members, where I still feel some obligation to render aid and comfort.
I HAVE managed to mostly purge my innate tendency to try to help people even when they reject good faith attempts at assistance.
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The best thing I've found to do was distract yourself, try to do fun, mind absorbing things, and try not to go to places that remind you of the relationship or breakup.
I've found that eventually you HAVE to go to the places that remind you of the relationship, if only to help overwrite the memory.
Trying to avoid them constantly is a major hassle.
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I'm about 1.5 years out of a breakup and the emotional wound has scarred over, but it is still tender. And the circumstances were worse than you describe.
1st: mentally speaking this is almost exactly the same as experiencing drug addiction withdrawals. The only way out is through. Likewise, you have to cut off contact completely to allow it to happen. Can't be feeding the addiction.
2nd: There's no set timeline. The feelings tend to come in waves. Eventually you'll be able to go an hour without thinking of her. Then a day. Then you'll have a week where you feel "normal," but will still have off days. Weekends are still often hard for me. The intensity of the waves will fade if you let them.
3rd: The tactics most people recommend to move on fast don't work. Don't jump into a new relationship, or casual sex, or distract yourself with video games or TV or other frivolities. Spend time on things that are constructive and BENEFIT YOU somehow. You want to come out the other end of it better than you are now.
4th: If you find you have strong feelings of any kind remaining 6+ months on, write them into a letter. You probably shouldn't send the letter, but sometimes that helps with absolution. I sent the letter to my ex almost 1 year into the breakup to get the last vestiges of my feelings out. I can't know if she read it, but being able to let the emotions flow was in fact cathartic, and it still comforts me later.
The one thing I'm not sure about is what to do when she moves on. If you have any channels of contact with her you'll figure it out eventually, and it will likely trigger some primal feelings and set you back in healing. Maybe just start mentally absorbing the idea now, visualize her happy with someone else. And eventually, visualize yourself happy with someone else.
Longer term, maybe there's a friendship to be resurrected down the road, but you can't make that a goal now.
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