At one point or another, most of us have been there: we’ve been broken up with. We know what it’s like to feel torn apart at the seams, and we suddenly recognize what our old stuffed animal felt like back in 1989 after we chewed him apart a little too much. Maybe it feels as if life will never be the same since that person who played such an important role will now be out of the picture. Maybe we feel hopeless-- will I ever find someone to love me as much as he or she did?
Oftentimes when someone breaks up with us they shoot off a barrage of excuses. “I just want to be young and party unattached” or “I’m just not at a place in my life where I can have someone else relying on me.” Truth of the matter is that, yes, maybe your significant other is telling it straight. Or, if you know me, you know that I always refer back to the basic premise of my favorite book: maybe, just maybe, he’s just not that into you. A lot of the time we don’t know why exactly someone chose to end things with us, especially when we haven’t done something especially wrong or offensive. It doesn’t take an episode of cheating to make someone want to make a swift exit from the relationship. Sometimes it just happens, for whatever reason, and the person ending it doesn’t provide a proper explanation. It sucks but it happens. We all deal with this.
So maybe the person doesn’t give us a good explanation as to why they’re ending things. Perhaps the breakup leaves us wondering what we did wrong or how we could have salvaged the relationship. At one point or another, though, I hope that we all come to the same conclusion: it’s over, it will be over forever, and there’s not a heck of a lot that we can do to change it. I know it sounds pessimistic (and it actually is) but hey, that’s reality. Can’t spend our lives chasing something we really shouldn’t have. As my roommate explained, “In some situations you realize that you wasted just way too much energy on something to make it work when, in reality, it was no longer worth the fight but it takes a bad break up to make you realize it.”
So months later, when you finally get over it, something interesting inevitably happens: your ex comes crawling back. Now I’m not suggesting that it ALWAYS happens, but, a good chunk of the time when things ended expectantly, it does. Usually it’s when you least expect it, like you’re sitting at your desk at work on a Thursday at 4pm and-- oh hey-- one new email in your inbox. Your heart stops because, well, that name hasn’t appeared in your inbox in months!
Sometimes, in the worst of situations, it’s in public. An ex might approach you when other people are around, just so that you feel the need to be a polite and proper person and actually have a conversation. Or, unfortunately, sometimes an ex isn’t so kind. In the case of my roommate, her ex-boyfriend isn’t even attempting to put on a gentlemanly act. Rather, he’s resorted to the oh-so-mature behavior of public embarrassment, screaming at her across the room at parties and talking trash behind her back to all of her friends. Now, if he’s not embarrassing HIMSELF in public, I don’t know who is. Hello, YOU made the mistake, and now you’re taking it out on her, right after she’s gotten over you? I say let him keep shouting and making scenes. Pretty soon other people besides us will realize that he’s beating himself up for what he did and trying to place the blame on her!
As Bob Dylan sang, "I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind.You could have done better but I don't mind.You just kinda wasted my precious time." Sometimes, we just have to look back on things and realize that, yes, maybe we think we wasted some of our time, but everything usually works itself out well. We learned from our past relationships (I hope!) and, believe it or not, the person who wrongfully ended them (if that’s the case) usually learns their lesson as well, as evidenced by the ones who come crawling back. After all, isn’t it nice to realize that we’re living in the present while an ex who hurt us so much in the past is still living in it?
