Dos And Don'ts After Your Boyfriend Breaks Up With You

You and your boyfriend broke up, and you and immediately labeled love as a disaster and your life as pointless. This is the very moment you need to get a grip on yourself. As much as your boyfriend might have meant the world to you, this is just one singular case of a relationship not having worked. Or at least for now, because you still don’t know if the future holds a chance for you to get back with your boyfriend. For the present moment though, you need to see it as it is. That you and your boyfriend broke up because it was inevitable. Something was definitely not working. Even if you didn’t want the break up, he did. And as much as you hate him right now, you can’t deny him the right of having his own reasons. You probably wanted to try harder and make it work somehow, but he wasn’t convinced. He felt that it would be a better move to end it altogether, and so he broke up. In which case you should ask yourself, “If my opinion doesn’t matter to him, should I still miss him and waste my life away waiting for him to return?” instead of thinking, “I wonder if he still does miss me.” At this point, the best thing to do is to accept that you broke up with him, and look towards gradually moving on from here, to the next, perhaps more beautiful chapter in your life. We’re looking at some new ways of achieving this result — no "shop till you drop" advice here — that help you get over your boyfriend for good!

The world is so brute today that we’re constantly feeling challenged to prove that we’re tough nuts to crack. So when your boyfriend says those harsh words of never wanting to lovingly hold your hands forever again, you feel the need to put up that impassive face even while your heart gets crushed into dust. Don’t fight your natural tendencies. If you feel sad, be sad. Don’t force yourself to show that you’re not affected by any of it. There’s no glory in such fake greatness. If you want to cry, lock yourself in a room with lots of tissue and a huge tub of your favorite ice cream. Let yourself feel whatever emotions you’re feeling from the inside out. Relationships are a whirlwind ride, right from the first date to the first kiss to the last fight, and you’ll be missing out on a lot if you leave any of the stage out. The fact that you broke up doesn’t change the fact that you did once love him, and losing someone you love always hurts. Better admit it. Not allowing yourself to fully go through this experience of the break up often makes you miss out on what you want to do next. It is easy to put on a fake smile and go about life pretending that the fact that you broke up recently has nothing on you, but soon you’ll drain yourself of the energy of being fake, and then take all the wrong decisions (like sending a drunk text, begging him to come back), just because you didn’t take enough time to think it through. Take as long as you need to get over the pain, but it is wise to also give yourself a certain deadline or else you’ll end up with months of unproductivity and pounds of weight at the end of it all.

One common feeling we go through right after we broke up is think that we’ll never find love again because, A) True and long lasting love is unattainable, and B) We are inadequate and will never be able to make it work, because we’ve failed once (or twice or thrice, whatever). Not true at all! It’s a lousy mistake to associate true love only with a boyfriend or girlfriend. If you look around, love is to be found everywhere. You just need to keep your eyes and heart open to see and feel it. Your friends, for example. After every break up with every boyfriend, this is the bunch that takes you out, get you drunk and don’t even let you pay for it! After every new successful date, when you commit to a relationship, you take these friends for granted, cutting on the number of Saturday night outs in favor of romantic dinners with your boyfriend. Yet, when you need them again, they’re there. Even when you need to send screenshots to your bestie because you couldn’t decipher what your boyfriend wanted to say to you! If this doesn’t define true love, no amount of lovey dovey promises made to you by your boyfriend ever will. Stick with them at this hour of despair. They are the best people that will help you heal out of your ‘I’m not worthy of love’ mindset. Allow them to take you out again and point out to you every passing guy that checks you out to remind you you’re still attractive. Same goes with your family. If you’re close to your mom, dad or a sibling or cousin, get talking to them often. We take things like these for granted, but a small dinner your family where your mom makes your favorite pie, has immense capabilities of opening your eyes to a new definition of love.

Before you broke up with your boyfriend, you were possibly spending every passing hour either doing something related to him, or thinking and planning of doing it. Relationships do that to you. But that’s not your situation right now. You broke up, and you’re looking to move on in the best possible way. Now is the time to rekindle all those hobbies that you couldn’t find time for, juggling between work or school, and all the things that we normally do in a relationship. The idea is simple. Doing what you love makes you happy. And in this moment of depression and anxiety, you need as many reasons as you can gather to be happy. Unfortunately, the happiness we get with spending thousands of bucks shopping or swiping away on Tinder, fades too fast. Only when you engage in things that fulfill you from deep inside, gives you the long lasting happiness you need right now. Being caught in the sad phase for way too long could end up in a text you’d later regret sending, or spending endless hours wondering, “Does he miss me?” You don’t want to give in to your temptation of sending that text or devising ways of “How to make him miss me and want me back” and plotting to get him to come back, because you’ll only reach a full circle of denial and heartbreak. Find ways to be happy. The sorrow will fall far back behind.

Right about now, your boyfriend must be worse than any villain this world has ever known because he broke up with you. And that entitles you to shower him with the choicest expletives. Yes, but only inside your head. Here’s the thing: being respectful towards your boyfriend even though he broke up with you, is not about being nice to him. It is about being nice, in general. It is not about your boyfriend at all; it is about you. You’re training to be a respectful person here, even when your boyfriend has given you all the reasons to be otherwise. It is a commitment towards being a well-refined individual even when provoked to be otherwise. He broke up with you; it was his choice. He could have chosen better — to make it work — but he broke up instead. He chose to be the lesser person, but you can choose to be the greater person simply by showing him or anyone else that a break up doesn’t change you for the worse. If you both have decided not to be in touch at all, stick to that decision with full commitment. Resist the urge to text him asking, “Do you miss me sometimes?” Or ranting to friends about how you broke up, who broke up with whom, and why you broke up, all while pointing at all his flaws and misdoings. It’s never a foolproof way of getting him to come back, nor does it reflect well on you.

There is more to life than a boyfriend, this statement can’t be stressed enough on. You need to be accepting of the fact that both being in a relationship and being out of it have their own advantages and disadvantages. You might have been very happy with your boyfriend. But he was probably not. You wanted the relationship to last forever, but he did not. He broke up with you, but you still want him to come back. You’re both moving in the opposite directions and you need to see how that is not a healthy exchange of affairs. Whether your boyfriend broke up for the right reasons or not, it is not your responsibility to force him to see he’s wrong. Because one break up doesn’t end the world and the possibilities it brings. If you stay too hung up on this one break up, you might shut the doors on a new, possibly better relationship that might be on its way to you. Whether you like the reason or not, you broke up with one. That reason might not be manifesting in your life right now, because you’re heavy with the pain and sadness that comes with a break up, but if you believe that every event is a result of a positive reason and leads to a positive outcome, this break up will turn into the best decision he has ever made for you. All you need is that positive outlook.

The feeling of inadequacy and lovelessness that creeps into your heart right after a break up makes you want to fill the void immediately. You seek validation in the form of finding a quick fix for the night or a fast date that will immediately make you feel desirable again. Not only can this behavior be dangerous, but it will also not help achieve your target goal. A shallow encounter with someone you don’t even know will never replace something special that you had and have now lost. Soon you’ll realize that and miss your boyfriend even more. And all the months of trying to get over him will go down the drain and you’ll waste no time shooting that “I miss you, do you miss me?” text. You'll want him to come back into your life more than ever. And when he denies, you’ll want to find yourself more rebounds. As you can see, this is an endless loop. Another thing about getting into a fling immediately after you broke up is that you’re making this decision out of weakness and desperation, not from a place of readiness. You need to take ample time off sorting your head out, thinking and understanding what you really want at this point in your life. If all the deliberation leads you into deciding that you’re ready for a relationship, then go forth and date! The world is full of eligible bachelors who’re probably far better than your boyfriend (but you obviously you didn’t have the chance to see that until now). But chances are also high that you might want to enjoy being single for a while.

This is the biggest urge you’ll have to fight post break up. You’ll find it so hard to accept that he broke up with you that you’ll want to attach your presence to him trying to get him to come back. But, this is not how he’s ever going to understand, so you might as well not do it. Instead, if you stalk him, either on social media or physically (like ending up at his office!) you will make him believe that he was right when he broke up with you. That is not the kind of impression you want to leave on anyone. You want him to eventually get to a place where he thinks, instead of you, “Does she still miss me?” But more importantly, it will make you sink into the lowest levels of self-pity and self-loathing when you see him living his life, being faced with the rude awakening that not having you in his life doesn’t make a difference at all! Of course it doesn’t! He broke up with you; he made that decision. But no, that’s not the entire truth. Even though he broke up, it might not necessarily mean that he’s completely unaffected by it all. He was in a relationship too, after all. But the difference between him and you is that he seems to be genuinely making an effort at moving on and is succeeding at it. And you can too, if you get over the ‘who broke up with whom and why they broke up and how they could have tried harder’ mindset. Irrespective of the fact that your boyfriend was the one who broke up, you need to understand that it now affects your life too. Until you choose to turn the direction of your life to a more positive one, you cannot win at this. And one of the first steps to that would be to stop monitoring his every move post break up.

If you had to leave with one lesson from here, it is that you don’t need a boyfriend to complete your life. Boyfriends are fun, sure, but so are girlfriends! Hit them up for a ladies’ night out or an all girls’ backpacking trip, and you’ll change your mind about how this break up is the worst thing in your life ever. If you have an urge to text your (ex)boyfriend, text your friends instead. Get on those group chats you’ve been missing out on for so long because you had a boyfriend to maintain. This is not to say that relationships are all bad, that would be a ridiculous thing to say. But if he broke up and you think wallowing in the sorrow is all that is left for you to do, you’re so wrong! Also, it is high time you stop looking at it as ‘he broke up with me’, and instead change your perspective to thinking ‘I broke up with him too’. Accept it as your decision too, that will make moving on so much easier. Your life as you see it now, rejected by someone and possibly worthless, is just a phase of ending one journey only so you can start a fresh one. And for what it’s worth, every journey brings a new experience worth trying at least once!