Breakup Survival Techniques

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Poor loup! Breaking up, even under the best of circumstances, always, always sucks. Every person handles it differently. You sound like a very introspective person, so what worked for me may not work for you, but these are a few things that helped me with break-ups: call on your circle of RL friends for support. Go out with them to a ball game, a book store, a bar, whatever makes you happiest. Enjoy their company. Try–this can be hard–to realize that you don’t need a lover to have a good life. Try something new that you’ve always wanted to do. Give your ex-girlfriend some space. Make a clean break rather than dragging things out. I know it seems to you that she’s already moved on, but going out with her friends is probably her way of dealing with the sadness. I know it was mine.

Good luck!

22

Thanks to everyone who’s posted so far… surprisingly, although everyone’s sticking to the same theme, I’ve found something to learn from each post. I appreciate all of you showing sympathy and being willing to offer me comfort.
Last night was hard, and it’s still hard to get up every morning. My ex logged on to the board this morning and noticed my thread, but won’t post here or follow it with any particular interest… this at my request, because it’s my issue and I don’t want to think of her reading anything I put up here, it could get inappropriate very quickly.
Although I’m still in pain, I ate my first solid food in nine days this morning… one slice of bread doesn’t really sound like an achievement, but it’s a huge step because I wasn’t ill afterward (haven’t been able to keep any food down for aforementioned nine days). I do have the support of RL friends, for everyone who’s referred me to them, but not that many of them and I need more support than I am prepared to ask of them. I’ll keep this thread open, although it probably won’t be as maudlin as it started off… talking with said ex this morning made me realise that our conversations go around in circles and always come back to the same thing: the only chance that I’ll ever be able to spend time with her hinges on my finding other things to do.
I’m doing stuff… slowly, with limited finances, but I’m doing stuff. Lavalife.com isn’t really worth paying for, but it’s fun to check profiles and see if anyone will pay to be introduced to me…
and I plan to start tango lessons as soon as my next pay comes in, just because I meant to do that with her and I was the enthusiast. I think going out and doing something that she couldn’t care less about, and that really didn’t happen because I was spending time with her instead, might be a good step (input on this welcome).
Question: is it healthy to try to move on by focusing on meeting someone else? I know that if, anytime in the next six months or so, she so much as hinted that she was ready to give our relationship another try, I’d drop everything, but a loosely-affiliated lover might help me realise that I won’t be stuck in the rut I was in when I met my ex. Might also help me learn to keep things more relaxed in a relationship, as that was the mistake I made with her…
“To keep your herd of sheep in pasture, build no fences.”
Zen proverb

23

[qoute]and I plan to start tango lessons as soon as my next pay comes in, just because I meant to do that with her and I was the enthusiast.
[/quote]

Actually this sounds like a really great idea. I remember when i was in HS i had this best friend named dave.

Dave and i were wanna be rock stars, we had a band name and guitars and posed like we were on stage, and interviewed eachother like we were Rolling Stone…

the only problem was, we didn’t know how to play our guitars. :slight_smile:

So when Dave (aka fuckwad) got his licence and decided I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with him anymore, cuz now her was a big chick magnet and I was his doofus friend… I went in to a serious deep depression for a bit. He was my BEST friend, and I didn’t know what to do.

So i went to the grocery store, bought a cheapo mel bay chord book and sat aroudn the house for all of spring break and taught myself how to play guitar.

I started to feel better immediately, and the ultimate revenge came a couple of yeas later, when i was fronting a band and he started coming to our shows and making requests for songs.

They always say that the best revenge is living well, and its true. even if you aren’t looking for revenge, per se, its fun to look at a break up as an opportunity to explore interests that the ex wasn’t into or supportive of.

Chris

24

It can be healthy, but it can also be very very tricky.

lemme ammend that… “focusing” on meeting anybody else, is centainly NOT healthy for you right now. But spending an hour flirting on line or at a cafe once in a while is an fine idea.

Focus on you and your friends and all of the interests you alluded to.

Theres been a lot fo discussion about this around here over he years, and I talked about it a little bit in Eva’s thread, but the older i get, the more i believe that sublimating hurt feelings thru affairs and flings isn’t terribly healthy. The best thing you can do is actualy learn how to be happy alone, instead of looking for a way to substitute or replace that feeling you miss.

It sounds new agey and shit, but TRUST ME and the others here who have said the same thing. YOU WILL NEVER BE REALLY HAPPY until you are able to be happy single. If your soloution to your feelings of worthlesness and despair upon being dumped involves finding another chick to hook up with without REALLY figuring yourself out, you will never break this cycle and the place you are at now will become a periodic rest stop for you… break that cycle now.

Chris

25

thinking first and posting second is a good thing. I had this whole long argument written out and then I realised I was being stupid. Being single for a while is just plain smart, no matter how much it sucks, and I KNOW that. Bonus is that someone DID love me for a certain amount of time, and although it went sour for her after a bit I can avoid the stupid pitfall I hit this time around… only to fall into a more insidious one, surely, but a productive learning experience I guess…
Yet another tiny epiphany: before my ex, I thought “no one in the world can ever love me, I’m too f$&@ed up.” After the end of the relationship, I though “No one but her could ever love me, I’m f$&@ed up but she’s special and can understand somehow.” Proper thinking (not yet achieved 100%) “Gee, I’m f$&@ed up. Better see what I can do about that…”

But…

This is like quitting smoking (you’ll note I’m still a smoker). I know I want to not call her or bother her because the more space she gets right now the happier she’ll be. I know that if I don’t call her I’ll get over her faster. However, like smoking, just talking to her soothes me and takes some of the pain of not being able to talk to her often away. I’d rather cut back before I quit because withdrawal is hell. Finally, like smoking, I enjoy talking to her and don’t want to let go of that bad-for-me part of my life.
Flirting online, much as it makes me curious, doesn’t really seem likely. Lavalife and all other singles sites seem to charge money, and I can’t really be bothered to pay anyone to meet new people just yet… perhaps I’ll meet someone interesting in one of the activities I’m beginning to plan…

26

hell, flirt with other dopers!!!

its an artform around here. and the nice thing is we’re mostly laidback fun people and many of us are huge flirts.
(don’t tell Eva, but i have a little online crush on her)

You are obviously bright, a considerably better typist than I am, and seem to be getting the hang of what you need to do for you right now.

I knew you would. But i still think cold turkey is the smarter route.
Chris

27

Cold turkey: smart, probably. Remember that the withdrawal symptoms I’ve gotten just from being told that I’m not dating her have been interrupted sleep, inability to eat solid food and the occasional panic attack. I’m altogether happy to move my life along, but at the same time I want to be sure that my health isn’t destroyed by the time I’m over her. Taking it slow is in my best interest for my health, and I can’t cope with the additional shock of not being in touch with her at all.

Trying to work out whether I’m even a competent flirt or not… possibly one of the reasons I was single for so long… people never realised I was attracted to them. :confused: Still, that one’s a little out of the league of something I can learn on SDMB, at least as it applies to RL situations…

28

I’m not sure if the title change was your idea or a Mod thing, but when i clicked on MPSIMS and saw the new thread name… it brought a huge smile to my face.

Bravo.

thats the spirit.

Something i also try to remind myself of is that even when the world feels like its ending, i look back toother times it felt like it was ending, and most of them seem silly now. (Courtney from 6th grade, i still think about you, but I’m over you now)

You said you’re 20 right? I got seriously smacked down by some heartless wench when i was 20, and i was depresed for a couple of months. (ok like 6 months). I got smacked around pretty good earlier this year too, and i felt not a lot different from how you feel now, but i was old enough to recognize that its all gonna be good. And it will happen again.

but the good times, and the promise of actually finding “that certain someone”, is enough to keep going. I’m 26 and half of my old friends are getting married and the other half of us are looking at the engaged half and going “WHATTHEFUCK!?!?!”

The first half is composed mainly of couples that have been together since high school or college, the latter half is composed of mostly people who have loved and lost a LOT… and frankly if you get to a more even keel… the process of loving and losing, while it will always bite a little, is a lot of fun and very informative in its own right.

When you do find steadier footing, which you will, don’t go into it desperately and full of expectations, just have fun, try and meet a lot of different people. Don’t sleep around, but take out a personal online or in your local hipster weekly paper, or just respond to some. Talk to clasmates, or building or work mates or whatever. Keep reminding yourself “whats the WORST that could happen?” amd weith it against “Whats the BEST that could happen?” and take a shot.

Go out on a lot of dates. Find out what qualities you really like in a chick, don’t treat each date as if its your LAST HOPE for LOVE, just treat them as learning experiences and chances to fine tune your “game”.

Like i said, I’m 26 and I’m yet to find that “soul mate” despite thinking a couple of times that i had, but I have a lot of life ahead of me to live, and my needs and wants and goals are SOOOO phenomenally different from when I was twenty, that i couldn’t IMAGINE still being with any of the girls I dated back then. I suspect the same thing will be tru when i’m 32 or 33 and look back on being 26. Its a long life, dude. get out there and start enjoying it.

another point about the soulmate thing… if you are musically inclined at all, this metaphor may be really usefull, if not bear with me here…

I’ve always thought about people as having a fundamental frequency at which they operate. the friends we meet all have some sort of Harmonic relationship… dissonates 5ths, 7ths, they all have a slightly different feel to them as relationships.

Soulmates are people who seem to be resonating on EXACTLY our frequency… but the problems is if they are really really close but not EXACTLY the same, it can take some time to see it… and once they start getting out of phase its only going to get worse… and the longer the wavelength… the longer it’ll be before they come back…

but don’t think of it as a failure, think of yourslf a lucky to have shared a bit of somebody’s life for as long as you were in sync. Its a rare and wonderful thing. and if it wasn’t as hard to find and sustain and nurture and get over as it is… well then it wouldn’t really be as special, now would it?
Chris

29

when the fuck did i turn into a hallmark card exactly?

i need to go get a six pack and order Girls Gone Wild on Pay Per View now…

back later.

30

Title change was, in fact, my idea.
I like your frequency thingy… my feeling is that she and I were really close frequencies, but neither of us had the experience to handle the relationship correctly… we both still had hang-ups which did not allow the relationship to work. If I had met her 5 years from now, maybe she and I would have stood a better chance. Perhaps if I meet her again in 5 years… bzzt OW! Unhealthy thinking V-chip. Of course, I’m planning to somehow commemorate the anniversary of the day she and I met… flowers or something… things should be cooled off enough by that time that I won’t get into much trouble (except possibly with her new boyfriend, should she have one… HEY more progress that didn’t make my heart skip a single beat!).
I really think starting this thread was a good idea… I’d love to keep it going just to help me move on (and avoid any relapse) but I won’t saddle anyone with the sense that if they don’t post further things will get worse for me again. Thanks for everything, special thanks to Chris for the hundreds of server-hamsters you exhausted to make sure help got to me.
Any further posts, be they advice, thoughts, stories, etc are welcome… I’ll be printing this thread and saving it locally on my computer if it falls too far down the charts, because it might help me next time.

“We’re out of the woods now, folks.”
“You mean we’re easy targets.”
-Anonymous, Korean War

31

My 2c worth of advice is to make sure you’ve got both male and female close friends around you. The women will not buy it when you really feel like talking, but you say that you’re alright. They’ll help you honestly and frankly. The guys will know when the time is right to say, “Let’s go for a beer and talk about football”. Both of those things helped me in the past.

32

Loup I just tuned back in to check up and see how you are doing and it is great to see that you are starting to think the whole issue through and not just react to it.

So many people have given good advice here and advice I have used many times over the years.

As for soul mates - I had a soul mate that I met when I was 16 and we were still in love years later though we only had a handful of chances to meet up during that time (me being in Australia and him in Denmark was rather difficult).

The hardest decision I ever made was to cut off contact with him (it was a mutual decision). I found that over the years I had begun to rely on this person to always be there. If something went wrong it would be ok because “at least {insert name here}was always there in the background”. This reliance on someone else was not healthy and the decision - though tough - was one of the wisest I ever made. It gave me the opportunity me to become my own person and not rely on being an extension of someone else for my happiness.

Now - at 26 - I cherish the time we had and count myself lucky to have been one of the people in the world to have had that deep connection with someone but I no longer rely on those feelings to keep my happy. I make my own happiness and in that I have found so much more happiness in other people too.

It is important first and foremost to be happy INSIDE yourself and though it is trite it is true that you can’t make someone else happy until you can be happy with yourself.

Good luck on the epic quest - our hearts are with you.

33

Wyldelf, you’re probably as close to absolute truth as anyone can get about this. One of the reasons I’ve delayed breaking contact with her (even knowing this break of contact to be temporary, to allow me to clean up my emotional headspace) is because I’ve become reliant on her for support when I’m in pain, and experience has taught me that I need that kind of support. It’s not entirely healthy, but few of the things that go on in my head are “entirely healthy”.
What I’ve realised is that I do feel a need for acceptance more than support right now. I’ve got a few great friends IRL who have been nothing but supportive, and several more Dopers who have just been heroes over the past few days, but what I continue to want from her is validation that I’m attractive and a good human being. Two things have begun to happen to correct this: one, in spite of my derisive words about online dating services, matchdoctor.com is entirely free and actually garnered me a response within an hour of my posting my profile. I know that this unknown person that responded to me was attracted, or at least made curious, by my personal profile: meaning that although there are surely details I have to improve about myself, I’m not in a hopeless situation. I’m not really considering dating someone yet, it’s too soon by weeks if not months, but it’s nice to know that there will still be women out in the world when I’m ready for them, and that my ex is not the only person in the world who could find me attractive.
For all my flaws, I’ve also realised that she gave up a pretty good thing. She had reasons which I don’t understand but I’ve always respected her intelligence and if she’s still certain after a week that this is right for her then I have to accept it as the right thing.
Things are a lot clearer once you’ve broken a 9-day fast with a chicken burger. :slight_smile:

34

Update (not ready to let this thread lapse just yet…)

I’m emailing back and forth with this girl I met on a dating site… just to make me feel better, really, I mean she’s cute and all but she lives in Montana and I’ll probably never meet her… and right now, I don’t want to. Still, it’s giving me a needed boost to my confidence.

I haven’t called her. Not for 52 hours, 21 minutes. I’m trying to go until Friday, when I HAVE to see her to drop off the balance of her paycheque (clears Thursday).

Most of my problems right now are coming from wanting to tell her how fast I’m learning what went wrong, what I didn’t do that I can now and how much better a person I’m becoming. I know that it’s immaterial to her at the moment, but in a few weeks or months when she’s thinking about dating again I want her to know that I’m NOT the screwed up mess she dumped. I made mistakes and was too blinded by fear of losing her to see them. I know what I could do to make it work, it’s something I would have done anyway if I’d had the chance, but she dumped me so quickly after the hard time we had while she was sick that I didn’t have a chance to straighten myself out. I ran myself ragged for her and was really hurt when she got better and took off to be with her friends without spending time to me… I’m not her parent but I think she transferred that role onto me while she was ill. I stopped thinking straight right about then.

I still miss her horribly. I’ll live, but life’s not the same without her and never will be.

35

loup, I’ve been following the thread, but didn’t have much new to contribute until your last post. If you can possibly avoid it, try not to share a word of what you’re learning and thinking about right now with her. Write it all down, discuss it with friends, post it here, but don’t talk to her about it. You almost certainly have valid reasons to be angry about parts of the relationship and the breakup. You almost certainly did things wrong in the relationship and breakup. Discussing it the specifics won’t change the fact that right now she needs some space from you.

If you really want to be better the next time, you need to work through this without her. It’ll help you heal faster and it’ll preserve whatever small chance exists of you two getting back together in the future. The more you try to make her process the bad parts of the relationship and the breakup with you, the less chance she’ll ever see you any differently.

I know how hard it is not to talk to her about all this important stuff you’re figuring out, but please try as hard as you can. Make your self-discipline a source of pride. It should be, there’s not much harder than not calling someone you desperately want to call. (52 hours rules, by the way.)

Good luck – I really feel for you.

36

Do yourself a favor and ask a friend to run that errand for you… REALLY… there is no reason for you to see dum-dum right now…

By the way, that’s the second trick… I know some people will find this a little repulsive, but it’s worked well… start refering to her as “dum dum” when you speak of her… it’ll help you realize that this is a done deal…

And, in the event that you ever do get back together, you can always use it as a term of endearment…
Now, about life being “never the same”… WELL, thanks be to God… look where it got you!!! you’re a mess…

Pick up the peices and rebuild, because you’ve got a great life ahead of you – really – Hell, you’re only 20 years old and you’re talking like an old man…

Think of the Pheonix rishing from the ashes… and stop anchoring all of your experiences on her… this is about you loup – she was a player in your drama… but the point is that it’s your drama, your life…

your life is not defined by her… you are defined by you and no one else

Dum dum has her own life and drama… apparently the mix of the two was killing you. It’s painful right now, but that’s the pain of re-birth… if it were the pain of death you wouldn’t be here to talk about it…

37

**TalkingHead, ** if it wasn’t a question of a large amount of money I would happily send someone else, but there’s no one I trust with cash, especially as it’s her money which I only have through circumstance. If I was lending her money, I wouldn’t mind sending someone else with it, but I can reach her most easily (I work an odd set of hours and can stop off at her work to give it to her, no fuss).
And I really can’t start referring to her as dum-dum. Not even behind her back, which this isn’t (as I mentioned in OP, she’s a Doper, although she agreed not to post in this thread or take it too seriously, as I do vent here). Maybe Silly Girl…
But you’re right, the Phoenix is an image I use to get myself through many of my lesser depressions. Falling apart completely means I can put myself back together in new and better ways.
Giraffe, thanks for your vote of confidence and support. I know that talking to her right now about anything other than “I have money for you” or “Is (roommate) home?” would be destructive. Much as I want to bring her all my little bits of progress, saying “Look! I fixed this about myself! I’m a better person! Am I good enough for you now?” I know that it’s an impossible thing. In about six months, if I still work here, a little alarm will go off on my computer reminding me that it’s the day, a year later, that I met her. I’ll think about telling her how I’ve changed then… I really want to be friends with her before that, but maybe I’ll need that long… or maybe she will…

What I’ve realised is that I’m racing against time in a way to avoid further anguish. I need to be okay with not being with her, and if I can’t do that before she falls for someone else (should that come to pass…) then I’ll be right back where I started or worse. So I need to work on this.

As always, thanks to everyone for keeping me company on this thread… it’s really great to have feedback on how I’m dealing with things, and hopefully I’ll be able to avoid pitfalls like assuming it’s okay to see her on Friday and try to get her out to lunch or something (an idea I abandoned thanks to TalkingHead, although I’m still going to have to see her briefly).

38

loup you know I have been reading this thread to see how you are going and hoping everything is alright. I couldn’t help but hear alarm bells ringing when I read the above though.

Please try and remember that you need to build your life for you now, you can’t build yourself as a better person for someone else. You will never be good enough for [insert name here] until you are good enough for yourself, and that means letting go of the aim of one day getting back together because you will grasp that as a lifeline and not achieve anything for yourself. Some of the troubles I have seen written here seem to stem from a lack of self worth, confidence and ability to critically reason. Don’t fall into the trap of making excuses for yourself and your actions. Analyse everything you do and say for a while because often there are subliminal reasons for those actions. Really be truthful to yourself as to why you do things.

You are taking so many steps forward loup but there is no easy fix. It takes time so don’t set time limits on it.

Good luck loup - you are doing great!

39

Sorry, wyldelf, I thought the sarcasm was clear enough in the part you quoted. I don’t really feel like I’m making myself better just for her… but I don’t want her to remember me as the pathetic ball of misery that I was from a few days before the breakup until a few days after, or the exhausted and insecure person I was while I was taking care of her… the good times in our relationship were a while ago, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel before she put it out. I was ready to change and proposing solutions two days before she dumped me. She was too preoccupied on escaping to notice, or maybe it was just too little, too late.
What I’m afraid of, as I think I mentioned before, is being haunted with her memory and the feeling that it could have worked if I hadn’t been so hard to live with, which was a matter of me not bringing myself under control. No one wants to feel like they’re being punished lifelong for a single mistake, no matter how serious, and I feel like if I can’t show her a better side of myself I’ll miss any chance of her coming back to me. I can’t invite her back. I have to hope she thinks of me and misses me, and right now I don’t have much hope of that.

40

loupdebois,

I wish I had caught this thread sooner than now, but I get the gut feeling that you’re “breathing air on your own” now, which is really helpful for what I have to say. Apologies now if it seems like a re-hash of what has gone before.

I have been to hell before. It is not a great place, as you are discovering. But the greatest feeling I have ever discovered in my whole life was realizing that I had found the trap door out. No matter how it is that I get back into hell, that trap door exists. And I have the map.

I can’t give you my map. No one can. But just about everyone who has responded to your thread with love and compassion has given you hints as to creating your own.

First things first: you know you gotta cut that tie to the woman. She was not strong enough to stand up to what she saw in you. That’s her problem and her loss. You lost something, too, and you are our concern. I will be up front about this: I don’t know the first thing about clinical depression. But I can’t imagine that knowing that you are the strongest person you know for having survived what you have had to, would be any less helpful fo you than it has been for me.

You need to cut loose and learn what activities turn your crank. Take the dance lessons. Learn to play the guitar, or the snoozlehorn if it makes you happy. Find your own “happy” buttons and push them regularly.

Caveat: Vet every single thing you try for a down-side, and understand clearly the risks of developing a possible dependency on a particular happy button. (Obvious no-nos are drinking, ladies, or mind-altering drugs, but I’ll bet your mama would not be too happy to find you throwing yourself off buildings on a bungee cord on a regular basis either.)

Nothing creates a full life like a passion. Mine veers from people (ie my hobby is to figure what makes them tick) to history to needlework. Okay, I’m a bit weird. But I try to do everything I do with everything I have. I know the risks in each new thing (ie drumming for a dragonboat team means perma-sore throat :D) but I take the reasonable risks anyways.

And truly, if there are two things which heal a soul, then one is time, and the other (with a nod to Bad Hat) is a life well lived.

Don’t worry about getting back into the game. My discovery, after finding my trap door out of hell, and learning to really live, was that you meet people you really like. Your opportunities open up for you, and partially it is because you have learned the fine art of risk taking. It took me a few years to take that leap. I still got burned. I’ve been back to hell a couple of times since, too.

Every time you climb out of hell you are that much stronger.

And we are cheering for you.