The first few questions that came to my mind when I had my first ever breakup were:
“How am I even going to get over this?”
“Will I ever become a happy person again?”
“Forget about being happier, can I at least become stronger than who I’ve become now?”
I was completely lost, frustrated, and angry. In fact, I was so immersed in this painful nightmare that I never even thought that I could make it out emotionally and mentally intact.
And it’s not just the loss that’s very hard to deal with, but it’s also the lonely aftermath of separation; the endless questions, little details, unfinished arguments, and what ifs.
However, not only did I manage to get over that person I was irrationally addicted to at one point, but I’ve also managed to become a better version of myself thanks to the incredibly bad relationship(s) I’ve had.
It took a lot of introspection and finding the right questions to move towards a meaningful direction of not only just moving on but also moving forward without carrying baggage that would prevent me from being happy and sane in the future. That would also then help me in having standards that would later save me from a lot of trouble that has to do with relationships in general.
Knowing that I couldn’t be the only one who, at one point, thought that moving on was a downright impossible task to fulfill, I’ve decided to write nine tips that I wish I once had, to help you get over that person you’re trying so hard to mentally separate from.
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How to Get Over Someone You Love
1. Remind Yourself That Pain Is Only Temporary
The pain of heartbreak is one of the hardest sorts of misery anyone can come across. In truth, heartaches can be so painful that they can also hurt you physically. That’s why there are no quick fixes for dealing with separation; we have to do it the hard way because it is the only way.
The good news, however, is that with a combination of effort and letting time do its thing, your heartbreak will eventually fade.
This is easier said than done, I know.
When you’re overwhelmed with the pain of loss, it can be very hard to remind yourself that this thing your feeling right now is only temporary.
It feels so heavy that it could last forever.
But it won’t.
If you’re currently unable to get over someone you love, you’re going to have to actively remind yourself that the pain you feel will fade. Even if you don’t believe it 100%.
It’s easy to get caught up with the intensity of loss and get lost in the process. If you’re not self-aware, you can get paralyzed and stay in the same painful place by choosing not to believe that you can be elsewhere.
You need time to rewire your mind into thinking you’re functional as a single person again, so give it time. Don’t let heartbreak tell you that this is how it’s going to be from now on. Remind yourself that what you’re feeling now isn’t staying forever.
2. Introspect, But Not Too Much
There are times when you’ll have to just sit through the pain to beat it, and other times when you’ll have to distract yourself as the next wave of memories hit hard.
For the pain to be temporary, you have to do both.
You can’t just keep thinking about it and let the pain control your thoughts forever, and at the same time, you can’t run away from accepting what comes after loss for too long.
You first need to remember everything that has happened in your relationship and go through the events over and over again.
The memorable start to the relationship. The incredible intimacy. Every single argument. All the blissful makeups. Each hurtful disappointment. The final breakup, assuming you’ve had one.
And it’s okay if you can’t stop thinking about everything in the meantime. As a matter of fact, you should be thinking about your story over and over again; there’s no shame in that. Embrace these persistent flashbacks, for a while.
Because you have to see the connections that lead to where you are now, from a different perspective; the perspective of loss, not the hopeful one from before.
You need to understand your story to fully comprehend your mistakes, and possibly theirs. You need to know, then grieve, and then accept your circumstances to become stronger than your pain.
Otherwise, you’re going to either get stuck in the same dark place for a long time or even worse, make the same mistakes the next chance you get.
Don’t let loss takeover.
To get over someone you love, you need to be consciously aware that grief is not there to stay, and you will have to pinch yourself when you sink in too deep to show yourself that there’s more to your life than just the feeling of emptiness that you’re carrying.
This, of course, isn’t easy, but just reminding yourself that you could be indeed wasting so much valuable time going through what can’t be altered, over and over again, will give you a sense of proportion when it comes to introspection.
We have a short lifespan and lead lives that will end sooner than we expect; do you want to waste a huge chunk of yours over what can’t be changed?
Do you want to let go of time and opportunities that could have been used to meet other people or have new experiences that would make you happier?
Introspect, but not too much.
3. Vent, But Not Too Much
A very negative experience isn’t going to leave your mind unless you force it outside, every once in a while.
How you express your emotions when you lose someone is up to you; everyone has their own way of letting things out. But the most important thing is knowing that you have to let things out, it’s essential for your recovery.
One of the most efficient ways to get over someone you love is talking to someone else about it. Vent to a trusted friend, family member, or therapist. Anyone who you know will genuinely want you to do better without any judgment on their part.
Venting is extremely helpful as it gives your mind a new and different perspective for rationalizing your story. When you vent, it’s not just the other person who’s listening, it’s also you.
So instead of thinking inwardly over and over again, you can talk to listen to your own thoughts as they’re processed, for a change. The person listening to you can also offer advice or different perspectives that can help with you moving on.
The downside of venting, however, is that it works only to a certain degree and can easily get out of control, especially when we’re already extremely emotional and thus irrational.
To be quite honest with you, nobody really likes to listen to the same sad story forever, no matter how supportive they really are. And this has nothing to do with how much they care about you.
People have their own problems and don’t do well with negativity over an extremely long period of time, and this is something you’ll have to keep in mind, unfortunately.
I know this isn’t something you might want to hear, but understanding this will only help you become more aware as you’re venting. Even if you do become an emotional wreck, you’ll have to know who you can vent to and for how long.
Good friends and family members can help you, but they can’t make you get over someone you love. The only person who’s moving on here is you, so do not rely solely on venting to people to fix your problems. After all, this is only one tool of many that you will have to use.
So don’t be too proud to ask for help, but at the same time, try to keep yourself in check as time goes by.
4. Write Everything Down
Another way of expressing and dealing with distress and sadness is to write its causes down.
Since bottling up your thoughts can actually make things worse with all the overthinking that’s expected to happen, writing is one of the most accessible activities you can perform, especially when you don’t have someone always available to listen to you venting.
It’s easy, free, and therapeutic.
So whenever you feel that you can’t silence the thoughts that keep ticking inside your mind, take the time to write what it is you’re thinking about.
After you’re done writing, try to read what you’ve written so you can give yourself a chance to reflect on what you’ve been obsessing over.
And once you’re done with both reading and writing, the thoughts or memories that have been stuck in your head will consequently become less intense. This might not happen immediately, but it will definitely help in the long run.
5. Avoid Contacting & Stalking Them
You can not move on from someone if you keep seeing and talking to them.
Pretty obvious, right?
We both know that, but it’s still one of the hardest things to deal with, especially if you’ve been in a very long-term relationship with that person.
Getting over someone you love is like getting over any other addiction, you’re going to have to break a pattern that has been reinforced over a long period of time.
You’re going to crave their existence and you’ll be thinking how you’re going to live without them.
Sometimes, it’s questions like these that keep us from moving on. Questions that we already know their answers to deep down, but we don’t want to accept those answers, so we choose to keep asking these same questions repeatedly, hoping for an easier and more pleasant answer to pop up one day.
The sooner you start accepting reality and its harsh answers, the easier it is for you to avoid contacting and stalking them.
When you see things for the way they really are, you have no reason to wonder what they’re doing or who they’re seeing (gasps). You just accept the fact that what you’ve had wasn’t set to keep going forever; therefore, it doesn’t matter what their future looks like without you.
Of course, this is easier said than done.
But till then, you’re going to have to prevent yourself from stalking them. You have to stop initiating conversations if they don’t lead you to somewhere you actually want, and you’ll have to stop yourself from responding to their texts and calls when there’s no point to them.
The sooner you stop connecting to them, the sooner reality’s answers settle in your mind, making it easier for you to move on.
Moreover, it’s understandable if you mess up every once in a while. At first, you’ll probably slip up a couple of times, and that’s fine. But remember to course-correct, because a breakup isn’t an event that happens just once; it’s a process that you have to follow every day.
If you do mess up, don’t blame yourself. Don’t think that you’re restarting your letting go task all over again. You need to keep breaking out of a habit as consistently as possible for you to move on.
To get over someone you love, keep course-correcting till you don’t have to anymore.
6. Find New Purposes & Bigger Comfort-zones
Once you have something to look forward to and a goal to work on for a lifetime, then you’ll already have the most powerful tool to pretty much deal with any hardship that comes your way.
Because the purpose and its own meaning will make daily life more compelling to experience. When you have a lifestyle of making something for yourself on a daily basis, you’ll be too invested in goals that you’ll have less drive and time to worry about that one person who didn’t like you back.
So to get over someone you love, you’re going to have to find new purposes to add in your life.
If you don’t know what it is you have to do, then it’s time to step out of your comfort zone to look for these things you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t, for whatever reason.
Go do that one thing that has scared you since forever. Work on a skill you’ve always wanted to improve on. Pick up another thing you used to do but ditched because you were distracted by the relationship.
Maybe you’ve already had hobbies that you can focus on to get to the next level. Perhaps you’re already working on something that needs more time and energy to become even bigger and better at it.
Whatever it is, seek objectives that will slowly and steadily make your life much more substantial than a single person.
If you grow past your present state, you’ll eventually become larger than the pain of heartbreak and its causes, no matter how consuming it is.
7. Let the Hate Come & Go
So how do you know if you’ve successfully and completely moved on from a relationship?
In my opinion, it’s when you become completely indifferent towards that person you’ve once loved. It’s also realizing that you don’t even hate that person or how the relationship has played out. It all feels like a distant unfortunate event that’s part of the past.
Of course, you might feel bittersweet and miss who you were before or the relationship itself every once in a while, that’s normal. Unless the relationship has been an absolute nightmare right off the bat, there’s nothing wrong with missing that one special person every once in a while.
But for the most part, you know you’ve moved on when you’ve just stopped caring because you’ve accepted things for the way they are, not how you once wanted them to be.
And you might ask, “well, how do I get to that point?”
Ultimately, you feel indifference towards someone when you’ve experienced a certain negative emotion because of them time and time again.
When you’ve been disappointed for too many times, you become indifferent. If you experience pain because of someone many times over, you eventually become numb to that pain, as the mind and soul are forced to adapt to the same experiences and feelings.
To get over someone you love, you must accept hating them and/or the relationship for a while. You must let the anger take place temporarily, otherwise, you will get stuck in the ‘shock’ stage of grief for a very long time.
I mention this because sometimes people try to avoid letting the negative feeling take over their minds. They think to themselves “I’m not the kind of person to hate someone else,” or “hating someone doesn’t benefit anyone and only makes me resentful,” which makes perfect sense, but if you’ve found yourself too avoidant of your feelings towards your ex or past relationship for far too long, then maybe your constant trials of distractions is hurting you more than it has been helping.
Maybe, at that point, it’s time to just think about the mistakes you’ve made or how you were wronged. Perhaps after facing the inevitable resentment, it will fade to a point where you find objectivity in dealing with hardship; the kind of objectivity that helps you find peace in your conclusion.
But at the same time, you must be very self-aware when you’re letting these negative feelings run wild. You don’t want to let the hate take over and change you to become permanently bitter and resentful. You don’t want to carry baggage into your future relationships.
Because if you become resentful for too long, you’ll either get frozen in your process of moving on, slipping you into a nihilist mentality where you’ll be thinking that nothing good’s going to come out of any future relationship, or you might become too defensive and stubborn in future interactions that you kill off any opportunity for anything good to happen.
So hate that person if you must, but remember that the point of hate is to eventually let it go.
You want to process these negative feelings so that they completely fizzle out one day, making room for more positive thoughts and experiences to eventually take place.
8. Relearn How It Was Being Alone
When you’re forced to quit an addiction, you’re going to become desperate. When you get desperate, you’re more likely to do something you’d regret to just to distract yourself from whatever it is you’re going through at that moment.
Some people drink a lot to numb their pain temporarily. Others use drugs to have their brains completely absent from the present. And a lot of people stuff their faces with ice cream, which could be the least problematic way of handling breakups, rejections, and ghosting.
But some people don’t stop hurting just themselves to get distracted; some people extend their pain to others by getting themselves into complicated half relationships.
Hookups
A wise philosopher once said, “the best way to get over someone you love is to get under another.”
To be quite honest with you, I think this philosopher should get under a bus instead.
This is absolute bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand what a quickie with a stranger after a breakup can bring to the table. It’s easy to think that sex will give you validation; that you still got it, even after getting rusty with because of your time off of Game, having been in the same relationship for a long time.
However, this sort of validation is only for the short-term. If you’re trying to find something to help or validate you in these experiences, you’ll only get frustrated and feel even more lonely.
You don’t really heal anything by getting under (or on top of) someone else. Instead, with emotional instability, you risk easily getting into this relationship/friends with benefits grey area that can easily hurt you even more, and/or whoever is involved.
Rebounds
Since heartbreak makes people do rash decisions in hopes of blocking the emotional void they will certainly feel, one of these decisions is having a distraction in the form of a human being; a hookup or a whole rebound relationship.
When you’re distracted by someone for more than just one night, who in this case, tends to either be identical to your ex or the exact opposite, depending on the circumstances of the past relationship and what you’ve craved from it, you might find yourself rushing into a “relationship” heart first and mind later (if any at all).
You can easily lead yourself into thinking you’ve found the right person when in truth, you’re just desperately setting up them for a trap. Most likely, this situation can cause you to string along and hurt this other person who had nothing to do with your negative experience, making your desire to move on even more complicated and stressful.
So no, to get over someone you love, you don’t need a human distraction. In fact, you should consciously avoid romantic relationships till you’ve completely healed, moved on, and able to function alone without having someone else at all.
People who are capable of being alone can be the best at managing relationships because usually, people who are prone to getting into rebounds are the ones who are afraid of being alone.
They’re so afraid of solitude that they rather be with a person who isn’t suitable for them; it’s like they need someone to be someone.
Only you can deal with an emotional void through a healthy amount of solitude, self-love, and maybe therapy if needed.
9. Stop Looking for Closure
I know. Sounds counter-productive, right?
You don’t ever want to do that when things aren’t going your way.
You want to obsess over every single detail to figure out why things went the way they did and why you’re unable to have something or someone you’ve always wanted.
However, have you ever considered the possibility that sometimes knowing the reasons and details wouldn’t really help at all?
Most people, especially when they’re the ones dumped, think that their once significant other must have a clear answer for what exactly went wrong. They think that once they know that perfect explanation or answer, everything will make sense, and only then will they be able to heal.
But sometimes, you can’t have that. You might not even need that. You might think you do, but what and how things took place can be less important than the conclusion and the fact that… it has already taken place; you’re not together anymore.
Unless you’re trying to fix a past relationship, what difference would it make knowing every single detail or answer that led up to an end you’re already aware of?
What happens when people go the extra mile to force an answer out of their loved ones is that they get shut down badly and even more hurt in the process. Consequently, they regret trying so hard and wish they never had to put themselves in a more vulnerable situation.
Funny thing is when you give yourself time and space to heal, you give the closure a chance to come your way instead.
So don’t go out of your way or obsess over closures.
Let Time Do Its Thing
You’re obviously not going to perfectly execute each step without mistakes when you’re trying to get over someone you love. In reality, you’re going to most likely mess up way too many times while thinking you’re just not going to be able to pull your shit together, but it’s going to be fine.
Mess up all you want, but try to get it right every single time you try. It’s okay to be an emotional overthinking mess when you try to get over someone you love; you need to give yourself a chance to get used to being alone again.
And even though it doesn’t seem like it now, time is actually on your side; it will not only help you move on as you express your grief regularly, but it will also present you with the closure you need to be at peace with your past.