Breakup season seems to be coming around again as I have noticed.  🙁  If not, relationship problems are.  But lately, I have been seeing sad status updates in Facebook as well as change in relationship statuses of my friends and their friends. Breaking up is always the last thing in the mind for us who are engaged into romantic relationships.  If you are serious enough about your relationship, you are always desperate to make your relationship work–by hook or by crook!  The keys to a working relationship are constant communication and compromise.  These are not the only tools you need to achieve the kind of relationship we want to have at the end of the day.  However, those two are the jumpstarts to whatever it takes to make the relationship work.

Sadly, there will come a time that you will realize that you are simply with the wrong person and that it will never work already no matter how hard you try due to a lot of irreconcilable differences.  When this happens, breaking the relationship up is the most likely thing to occur next.  THIS my friends, is the hardest thing to endure.  It is the time where we all wallow in sorrow and pain from our previous relationship–it is where all the wounds from that relationship start to sting and bother you.  It’s like a continuous pinching of the heart, your brains, tugging of your heartstrings and as Bella Swan puts it: “a big hole is created in your chest”.  And this hole on your chest, you must fill out.

Filling this “hole in your chest” out is not necessarily tantamount to finding someone new and desperately forcing that new person to be as significant as your ex was in your life.  This method may be effective for SOME people out there but I believe it has its own set of repercussions that will surely backfire at the end of the day.  The following are steps I recommend (based from experience of mine and of friends of course) for breakup survival:

1. Learn to accept your new status.  Welcome to the single world!  This may take a little time to accept because it entails a lot of reminiscing of the happy and sweet memories you had with your ex.  However, you must learn to accept that singlehood has its own perks too–primarily, having all the time in the world for yourself, your family and friends.  Sometimes, singlehood also gives leeway for concentration on your career like school or your office work.  It’s not bad at all.  Actually, I think being single makes your world larger and more borderless.  When you are in a relationship, a new set of heavy responsibilities and duties are imposed on you just to make the relationship work.  Sadly, the latter results to overburn and makes you neglect the fact that you have to give time and effort for yourself too.  Singlehood is not that bad at all, is it?
2. Take feelings normally and take time in releasing them. When you are fresh from a breakup, you turn into a vampire–feeling all sorts of feelings both bad and good (mostly bad for breakups).  Understanding that these feelings are very normal in the first place is very important.  There are some people who tend to think that feeling this way after breakups is insane so in action, they hide these feelings until they just burst a fit one day. Some are lucky to be strong enough to take the degree of negativity once these feelings burst and they manage to move on with their lives afterwards.  However, not everyone is like this.  When worse comes to worst, some people eventually commit suicide because they could not take the pain anymore.  So it is really essential to be aware that feeling all sorts of negative feelings is normal.  After all, you have invested all your potentials in a relationship and it would be such a pain in the heart to see all those investments lost!  But the good thing is, there are many avenues to release these feelings through nice ways.  Renew your skills in particular fields that capture your interest.  For instance, if you like writing like I do… you can always set up your own blog and write about whatever you are feeling.  It does not really matter if you have a lot of readers or not.  What matters is you were able to write what you are feeling–you were able to release.  If you play any musical instrument, go play.  It’s also a way of distracting yourself from thinking of it.  If you have the budget and you love shopping in bargains, do try retail therapy!  🙂
3. Stop dwelling on what went wrong. As the saying puts it, don’t cry over spilled milk.  For short, do your best to forget the things that you have done which contributed to the breakup.  If the cause of the breakup is kind of unclear to you but both of you decided to just break it off because it has not been working anymore, don’t fret!  Many breakups made by mankind do not really have specific root causes.  Many breakups actually happen when two people who used to be madly in love for each other start to drift apart due to many factors such as distance, time constraints and irreconcilable differences.  It is not really helpful if you’d still keep on thinking of what went wrong.  In fact, this would just make you regret things that you have done and it will boil down to self pity and self-hate which is not good at all.  After all, thinking of what went wrong won’t change things that much anymore.  Breakup has been already done and that’s it.  The best thing to do is to move on with life and focus on the new sets of goals that you have for the future now that your present has changed significantly.
4. Think of reasons why you broke up with your ex lover. Magnify your ex’s flaws. This is tantamount to thinking and reflecting on your ex lover’s flaws and not yours.  This way, the justification of your decision to break it off will be magnified and it will help heal your wounds.  It’s not just pampalubag-loob that I am talking about.  Every individual has a lot of flaws, believe it or not.  If you just think rationally and carefully, you won’t even get the pampalubag-loob kind of feeling when you think of your ex lover’s flaws.  Along with this, you can also think about your strengths.  After doing so, think and reflect about your ex lover’s flaws and use those flaws to justify why you actually DESERVE a better person.  A parallel example will be when a girl breaks up with her boyfriend who is a basketball player for a well-known university.  He may seem perfect for you, your friends and for other people but if he’s the kind of boy who does not know how to take care of a relationship and is flunking his grades every semester due to his lack of intellectual capabilities, then there’s no reason to still sulk in tears for this kind of boy.  You can always think that without his varsity status, he is nothing.
5. Be nice to yourself. Breakups are a mutual endeavor.  Do not put all the blame on you because you do not deserve such kind of a downer.  After all, nobody is perfect!  🙂
6. Control yourself from contacting your ex lover. And here, I mean ANY FORM OF CONTACT must be avoided!  Whether it is just a brief SMS or a simple IM in YM or Facebook–this must be AVOIDED!  For sure, extreme loneliness shall be felt after a breakup.  However, relying on your ex to take this feeling away is wrong! The best thing to do is to contact your girl/boy friends for it and have a good time with them.  Do things that you both enjoy together instead of talking about your breakup.  Remember that if you talk about it too much, your sadness will be just heightened.  Another thing is, your friends may be pissed off by you because you keep on dwelling on the topic–leaving an undynamic discussion among you which nobody wants to have.  Contacting an ex after a breakup has a lot of downsides.  First, it will give your ex an idea that you are after him/her and your reaching out might be misrepresented for a cheap way to initiate a reconciliation.  Second, it does not help you move on because him/her entertaining your initiation of communication will give you the impression that s/he might still be interested to reconciling (READ: FALSE HOPES!).  Lastly, it does not practice your independence. Being friends with an ex is not wrong–but this has its own right time.
7. Listen to the right kind of songs. I remember having a neighbor whose used to be living-in girlfriend ran away from him after a series of horrible fights together.  After this, he kept on playing Trisha Yearwood’s “How Do I Live” on loop for several weeks.  Yes, it was so loud that the whole block in the neighborhood could hear it during that time.  Did it help him move on and heal the wounds after?  No.  In fact, the moment he went out of home and interacted with his neighbors, he just stressed on how terrible he was feeling during those times. He also kept on linking his feelings with the lyrics of “How Do I Live”.  For short, he really thought he could not live with his ex lover away from him.  We have to admit this fact: human beings are very susceptible to the songs they listen to most of the time.  If you are someone who listens to schmaltzy love songs, there is such a high chance that you are a hopeless romantic.  Hopeless romantics who listen to rock and metal are very rare in this world, would you not agree?  I don’t recommend listening to songs like “Teardrops on My Guitar” by Taylor Swift or “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” by Whitney Houston after a breakup.  In lieu of this, I would recommend listening to party music.  Maybe “Party In The USA” by Miley Cyrus will do a nice party music or other songs you hear the most when you party with your friends.  I don’t like to recommend songs to listen to anymore because I have a very narrow selection of songs hehe.  Just look at the songs I mentioned–all weird and baduy.  😛

Doing these things will not instantly take away the ugly feelings caused by the breakup you have been through.  Breaking up sucks, we all know that.  But instead of focusing on the negative things, doing these along with other refreshments would be best.  If you just keep on focusing on making yourself better, you’ll eventually get fine.  It’s not the end of the world, certainly.  Who knows?  The better boyfriend or girlfriend must be just around the corner.  If not yet, there’s always your family and friends to cheer you up and your career to project the love and passion on.  🙂  No way but up! 🙂