If you are thinking about breaking up with someone you still love, it may be a good sign that you have an honest view of yourself and your life. So often, people are unable to end the relationship with someone even when there is not love, or even when what is called love has been distorted and abused; when everything indicates an end is overdue, but the reluctance to let go and to be alone, is too intimidating for two people to confront, so, instead, they continue to degrade themselves further by staying together.
Relationships, with a person or thing in our lives, can both hinder and bolster our mental health. And it is possible, even when there is tremendous love between two people, that some ulterior element makes it necessary for one person to break away.
Sometimes it’s an incompatibility in what we want to do and where we want to go. Sometimes it’s just the fact that we need more time to grow by ourselves and simply cannot do so in the safety of our love’s arms.
Yes, it could be a sign of both a healthy relationship and a healthy friendship that you want to end things with someone you love. What it probably means is that some element in either yourself or the dynamic of the relationship necessitates a breaking apart in order to address; that somehow, in spite of, maybe, the romantic, personal, and emotional bond you have, something inside you, or between you, can only be addressed if you end the relationship.
The breakup itself is a thing of unavoidable trauma. Watching yourself inflict such a wound on yourself and on someone you love is an event itself that takes a long time to recover from. But like the torsions and tears that mark all new beginnings, it simply has to happen.
It’s important to be resolute, but to let yourself also fall victim to the horrible shock, and allow that weight to wreak the havoc it needs to.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this, it is the devastation that people stay in relationships for decades avoiding. You can comfort your partner for a short while, but ultimately, you have to accept that you have suddenly become not the source of safety but the very pinnacle of heartbreak, and you must allow this to be the case, for some time, if not for ever.
As dramatic as it may sound, few things take the honesty and courage enduring this takes, because the wound is so internal and so pervasive. It is an unrelenting shock. It’s only poultice is the cliche everyone offers (it is all they can offer): Time.
Through heartbreak, take deep breaths, let it hurt, but when you have moments (and they will be small and brief at first), allow yourself to rise, assert yourself, laugh, and love once more.
It’s a great sphere that you have to trudge around, but step by step you will do so.
When it comes to the advice of friends and family, I find myself very weary. Too often, those around us seek to correct their own mistakes and shortcomings with what they prescribe us, and we notice the discrepancy between their advice and actions.
It’s best always to trust yourself, and your best instinct.
That does not necessarily mean the first impulse or loudest voice within yourself; rather, it’s the quiet, stern, loving voice that sits and sounds itself consistently beneath the chaos of all the other things you feel as you wrestle with breaking up.
Facing Pain After You End a Relationship
Facing the hurt after you break up with someone is part of the process and is owed to the breakup itself if everything you’ve sacrificed in leaving your ex and surrendering your future together is going to be worth it.
The pain has to come out. And the more you try, consciously or unconsciously, to work around it, the more it compounds and builds.
Common ways of avoiding the feelings of breakups are: trying to replace the person by thrusting yourself into a new relationship, trying to skip ahead to renewing a friendship with your ex, and trying to altogether avoid the reality of the breakup (suppressing it).
It is a reminder of the twofold power of love, and the deep ties you create when you open yourself up to someone, how much it hurts when it’s over. It does not mean we should shelter ourselves, our hearts, but it is worth understanding.
Moving Forward After You Break Up With Someone
I think it’s a good idea, after the necessary space and time are given to the break up, to rekindle openness in yourself. Most likely, this will happen naturally, and you may begin to develop feelings for someone else and remember, in doing so, that we are capable of loving many many people.
The difficulty in splitting from a relationship where there is still love is not in the fallacy that that person is, or may be, the ‘one’. Love in life is not about finding the one, it’s about finding some-one that you feel happy with, and deciding to stick with that person and with the relationship.
As you heal from the loss of your partner, the openness may create a space in you that would allow you to rekindle your bond as friends, or even eventually get back together, and foster a new relationship founded on the same love. But none of that is possible without the circumnavigation of leaving and distancing, enduring the small death of the relationship in its former state.
