Let me start with the end – advice: if you find yourself at a break in a relationship (regardless of whether you are the one breaking up or they are), just think of your ex as a “bastard” (or a “bitch”, if appropriate). Yea yea, we both know they aren’t. In fact, they are probably a great person, but thinking this just makes life easier. For now anyway. You get over them real quick, life becomes fun again, and you are able to move on and perhaps repair the relationship in the future through becoming actual platonic friends first…
And now for some context: recently, I went through a breakup. Although I am not sure if it is indeed a proper breakup as we still talk quite a bit and both really like and, arguably, love each other, but, at the time, for the first time in my life, I felt heartbroken. Or may be this was not the first time… or may be I wasn’t that heartbroken. But, regardless of how romantic one might frame it, the gist of it is: I felt like shit and was missing and loving this girl more than ever before. After this tumultuous time, however, after my girl and I spoke about it, there turned out to be a lot of similarities in how we dealt with the circumstances of “the other” breaking up with you, which, amazingly, we managed to do to each other. Go figure – only I can end up in a relationship with a beautiful girl with both of us feeling like the other is the one who ended the relationship.
Anyway, enough sap. Let’s get to the practical side. First of all, let me preface that, while many people subscribe to the idea that you should take care of the other person and thus think for them (i.e. disappear from their life even if you do not wish to), for me the jury is still out. I want to think of girls I date as my equals and thus I will not make decisions for them: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I just try to be direct and honest. Or at least as much as possible.
So, when my long-distance relationship was moving nowhere fast, I told my girl that we needed to think this through. Now I stressed that we were not in a monogamous relationship, but that, somehow, didn’t necessarily make things easier. We were both bothered. So I pushed her away and then, after about a year of loving me, she flipped and started dating another guy. I was shocked: how? Mind you, I was her first man and I am positive that she loved me (and probably loves me still). How did she do it? Turned out it was easy: just think of me as a bastard.
Now, after I found out that she was seeing another guy, at that time I realized how much she meant to me and her indifference and coldness was incredibly painful. But, be that as it may, as soon as I said in my mind “what a bitch”, all of a sudden, things were ok. And when we, fast, resumed contact, somehow we stabilized out, and it was all fine…
So, moral of the story: if you are getting hurt – defence through consciously temporarily discrediting the individual who is hurting you works wonders for the mind.