You thought what you had was genuine and lasting. But unfortunately, it ended sooner, and what was left was the pain.
Did your partner cheat on you? Did you ever feel that your love was unreciprocated?
Being in a romantic relationship isn’t easy. People who had their hearts broken feel physical pain. You’re not alone.
Fortunately, this stage in your life isn’t forever. However, no one really knows when you’ll move on and heal.
Kindly read on for some expert tips on how you can get over your lost love.
Why You’re Hurting After the Breakup
Interpersonal relationships are the foundation of your life. Therefore, if you lose someone, you also lose a part of yourself.
This feeling is familiar, and you may even lose your sense of purpose and meaning in life. You feel you’re not the same person anymore.
However, wallowing in your feelings for a long time makes you cling to your past and try to get your loved one back.
Understandably, it’s painful and hard to accept that you should let go of your ex and even a part of you.
However, it would help if you did it. If you’re unsure how to move forward, read the following tips on how you can continue with your life.
1. Forget Your Breakup Timeline
There’s no finite timeframe for people to recover from a failed relationship. So don’t tell yourself you should find a new person next week.
Give time to recover from heartbreak. If you’re still angry when you pass your favorite date spot with your ex, tell yourself it’s okay to be mad.
2. Don’t Pressure Yourself
You allow yourself to grieve. Accept that you’re vulnerable, and don’t pressure yourself by putting a deadline on your grieving process.
Doing so can make you feel shameful. Instead, empower yourself by giving time and space for grieving.
Moreover, it would be best if you focused on your best qualities. If ever you feel undesirable or unlovable, list the 25 qualities you have that make you the perfect partner.
Don’t forget to read your list over and over. Then, internalize your best qualities before you even start dating again.
3. Your Negative Feelings Don’t Have to Follow Any Rules
You may wonder why you’re sad when your partner cheated on you. It’s the same feeling when you grieve the end of your relationship.
There are no rules on how you should or shouldn’t feel about your ex and your past relationship. Accept your feelings, and be sad, frustrated, or mad.
It’s okay if you still long for your ex. Allow yourself to feel every emotion to make healing and move on faster.
4. Spend Time Grieving
You may have planned a future together, but things didn’t go well. Grieving can take time, especially if you and your ex did many things together for years.
Moreover, it may take a hard time to forget about your betrayal.
Therefore, realize that grieving can take time because you also lose part of yourself.
Don’t repress your feelings. Instead, talk through the grief to work on moving on instead of holding on to the past.
5. Don’t Rush Feeling Better
Generally, spend a year grieving for every year you’ve been together. For example, go through birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries without your ex.
Mourn and do some things helpful to ease your emotional pain.
6. Stop Obsessing About the Lost Relationship
Don’t romanticize your lost relationship. Generally, letting go is hard, not because you lost your ex.
Moving on is challenging because you lose the fantasy of what could happen if you’re still together. So get out of the obsessive loop of the what-ifs and whys.
Don’t rewrite your history with your ex. You’d still be together if it’s your destiny.
7. Respect Your Ex and Your Relationship
It won’t help you heal from a broken heart if you keep bad-mouthing your ex. Instead, you should release yourself from the resentment and pain to be happy.
Consider your past relationship as complete instead of failure. For example, you could give and receive love, even if it didn’t last long. Therefore, you and your ex didn’t fail.
Your relationship served its purpose, but it’s time to move on and heal.
8. Acknowledge Your Life Can be Better
You should re-examine your life and find ways to reinvent yourself. You should focus on reshaping your life to be the kind of person you want to be.
You must move past your breakup and look forward. Strive hard not to replay the past to see where things went wrong mentally.
If you do so, you won’t get over your ex because you continue to live in the past. Instead, learning to focus your energies on the future will make healing and moving on faster.
The healing process takes time and space, giving enough distance to allow a new chapter to begin.
Now that you’re free, you can look forward to the future with a new meaning. Create a vision board to empower yourself to meet your goals.
Be excited about the future and not your past.
9. Don’t Jump into Another Relationship Quickly
Maximize the benefits of being single again. Connect with your friends to help you move on from your breakup.
Keep a positive mindset. You may list all the things in the past that make you feel good. It should help you let go.
As you try to do things alone, you should analyze how you can be a great person. Learn from your past relationship.
However, be careful of rebound. Do your best not to hurt other people by quickly jumping into a future relationship, even if you’re not ready.
10. Stay Away From Your Ex
Staying away from your ex may not be possible because you’re co-parenting or you have the same groups of friends.
However, it would help to have the slightest contact with your former lover. Therefore, you may block them from your social media.
You can also tell mutual friends not to share information. Finally, don’t stalk your ex on social media.
You may also unfollow familiar friends. You may even take a break from your social media accounts.
However, don’t hide from other people. It would be best to have the company of a family member and some close friends when you feel lonely.
It would help to choose the people you connect with because they should remind you how fabulous and unique you are.
Call a sibling or a trusted friend to make you smile. Have a support system to help you recover.
You don’t need to go through the hurt and pain alone. Seek and receive help.
11. Don’t Blame Yourself
Stop blaming yourself for the failure in your relationship. Instead, you should consider yourself with respect, love, and care.
View the breakup from the proper perspective to help assess your deal-breakers and needs in future love matches.
You may also keep a journal to help you better know yourself. Moreover, writing things down helps you move forward with clarity.
12. Push Yourself to Try New Things
You should try new activities and do things differently to help you overcome your past relationship. For instance, you may learn a new sport or enroll in a dance or cooking class.
Learning new skills also helps you make new friends and create new pastimes. Moreover, you prove that you can do things without your ex.
Embrace the pains and stretch your limits. Of course, it would be best to spend most of your time grieving, but structure your days to keep you busy.
Don’t forget to focus on self-care to boost your self-esteem. Get back to exercising or a new hobby to become a better person.
13. Accept Your Relationship Is Over
It would help to learn to accept that your relationship is over. But, unfortunately, you’re not going to have your ex back.
Therefore, be at peace with yourself and stop hoping that a miracle will happen. Instead, admit the truth and accept your ex doesn’t love you anymore.
Make your experience a turning point to heal yourself.
14. Get Rid of the Physical Reminders
You should remove all lingering reminders about your ex and past relationship. For instance, get rid of the pictures, knickknacks, and other random items that remind you of your heartbreak.
Ensure that you clear out your room or apartment of things that can remind you of your past relationship. Do so to have room for special memories and mementos of a future partner.
If you have your ex-lover on speed dial, replace them with your best friend, sibling, or mom.
This way, if you want to tell someone of the good or bad news, you connect with someone else other than your ex.
However, be cautious about throwing things away due to anger. For example, you may regret losing a photo when you’re already calm.
You may put your mementos in a box instead of throwing them away. Then, you can decide to give them out later.
15. Don’t do Drugs or Alcohol
If you’re under the influence, you’re only turning off your forward-thinking, logical, and rational brain.
These substances only amplify your anger and sadness. Unfortunately, you may make a decision you’ll regret later.
Remember that you need clarity to get over your heartbreak.
16. Realize When You’re Going in Circles
You get over your ex at your own pace; therefore, the breakup processing time is arbitrary.
Usually, if you’re more attached to your past relationship, you take longer to mourn your attachments.
Some people take years to move on and heal after a breakup because they go through a deep and honest mourning process.
If you’re getting over your ex, you should recognize when you’re just taking it slow or if you’re stuck.
For instance, if nothing changes and you have the same negative emotions and thoughts weekly, you can tell something isn’t right.
However, recognize that it’s natural to be going in circles. Generally, you feel a powerful emotion and then feel shame about it.
Then, you begin patronizing that emotion with ruminations and thoughts. You’re not helping yourself if you stick to it.
Learn to replace your unhelpful ruminations and thoughts with another activity, such as exercise. You may also focus on a passion or hobby to avoid getting stuck.
17. Start Dating When You’re Ready
No one can tell when you’re ready to date again. So it’s up to you if you feel you’re genuinely interested in meeting people.
It would be best if you went out on dates, and when they don’t work out, rest, then try again. You’ll notice your experience gets better when you keep trying.
Meeting other people doesn’t mean you’re not hurting anymore. At times, you may feel you’re sorely missing your ex.
However, if you’re on the road to healing, you’ll notice that you’re no longer preoccupied and consumed by your breakup.
18. Seek Therapy
It’s great to have your family and friends as your support group. However, they don’t have the proper training.
Therefore, you can consider asking for help from a trained mental health practitioner if you feel hopeless, depressed, or anxious.
A therapist can help you grow, cope, and move forward. In addition, a relationship expert can recognize patterns in your narratives and help you get back on track.
19. Ditch Your Idea of Closure
Your life isn’t a rom-com movie, but you may prefer a dramatic breakup. Unfortunately, however, many couples slowly drift apart.
After the breakup, you wonder why you need to suffer. You may fantasize that you can undo things and get back your ex.
However, accepting and realizing there’s no forever is healthier.
If your ex can’t articulate why you have to break up, you should realize that your past lover won’t explain to close your relationship correctly.
You should recognize that you deserve a partner who can commit to and love you. In addition, you deserve someone who appreciates you.
20. Be Thankful
Your fear dissipates if you’re grateful. Therefore, practicing gratitude can help relieve your anxiety and sadness.
Focus on gratitude and get rid of your expectations. This shift can help you remove the anger towards your ex. Instead, you begin to appreciate that the relationship happened.
Why Moving On After a Heartbreak Is Hard
Moving on after a breakup is heartbreaking if you care deeply about your ex. You may have a chance for closure and conversation.
However, the relationship ended, and you’re on your own. Moving on is hard because of these reasons:
- You lose hope.
You planned your life with your ex and had big dreams and a home. Now that the relationship is over, you grieve because you lost that hope.
- You spend sleepless nights thinking about the what-ifs.
You question yourself, could you have done something differently? Before you realize it, you’re in a downward spiral.
- You feel lonely.
Losing your ex is especially hard because you shared your feelings with them. Unfortunately, your support may not understand your real feelings.
- The relationship lacked closure.
You may have had a bad breakup. You and your ex were both angry and didn’t have a chance to talk soberly for closure.
- You had self-doubt.
If bad breakups have become a pattern, you may be in an unhealthy cycle of self-doubt and insecurity.
