100 People Tell Us About Their Worst Breakup | Keep It 100 | Cut
Many breakups, especially those from long-term relationships, involve walking away from a good thing. There are still many positive aspects to a relationship that ends, it's just that those good things start being outweighed by the bad things. Or even harder, a realization that there are bad things to come, and so you make a pre-emptive breakup. One of the hardest parts of breaking up is remembering this ratio, the underlying logic of the decision, and not fixating on all the wonderful parts of the person you're walking away from.
Another difficult aspect is re-imagining the short- and medium- term future without that person. We form expectations about how events will play out, how we'll exist in an unknown future. Once you've been with a partner for a long enough time, your shared existence in that future becomes an unspoken assumption: We'll go together to my friends' birthday party; I'll have someone to talk to when work gets rough; running errands will be fun because he'll be there with me. Immediately after a breakup I think about the big things, the way the large arcs of my life have been bent and changed. But it's these smaller moments that surprise and sting for longer.
And finally, it's difficult to recalibrate your sense of self as someone who "doesn't have a partner." Your identity becomes tied up in the partnership. You train yourself to think of their happiness along with yours, to plan events that you'll both enjoy, to think what they'd say before you make decisions. The process of unlearning that is arduous, and becomes a constant reminder of what you've lost. Similar to the reimagining of the future, this pops up in all sorts of small ways that hurt each time, as you slowly break the habit. Ultimately, though, this is the reason you broke up in the first place: because you wanted to be an individual more than you wanted to be a pair. It just takes awhile for your identity to catch up.
I remember thinking, “So how do I continue living without him from now on, how do I make sure that it feels normal?”
It was almost as if I didn’t know life without him. It didn’t even last a year, so I often felt stupid for feeling that way. I was young. I was 16 yet I didn’t know what was the RIGHT next step to take.
I immediately removed myself from everything and everyone. I wasn’t going on social media and talking to people. I wasn’t posting much. I wasn’t hanging out with friends apart from school. I didn’t want people to mention him. A rush of anxiety hit me every time someone talked about him. I’d just feel like running away, but I couldn’t even tell them not to do so. That’s why I just avoided people.
I was STUCK for more than a year. I didn’t feel like myself. I even started going to the gym to escape that emptiness, but it was temporary. Like everyone says, keep yourself busy and it gets easier. It didn’t work out for me.
After a year of trying, I decided to face my feelings. It took me another year! I didn’t stop until I got to the point where life was “back to normal” without him in the picture.
He contacted me several times in two years, but when I look back, I think I was too focused on numbing my pain and trying so hard not to feel stuck. It didn’t even matter to me that he’d reach out and apologized. It didn’t make a difference. But at times, I wondered why I would have to go through it alone and why I didn’t have anybody by my side. So I just missed him. I would stop myself from reaching out.
He was the first guy I was serious about. So when things began to fall apart, I knew it was time to move on. I just didn’t know how.
It felt like I was on this desert all alone and I had to “move” and go somewhere to find people. Not even sure if it makes sense.
I think the hardest thing about breaking up is actually living a life without them in the picture AND making that life normal. It is trying NOT to feel stuck. It is realizing that the healing is personal and being OKAY with it.
