How to Get Over a Breakup

There’s an old saying that in order to get over someone, you have to get under someone new. I’d never thought about the saying much – until I found myself dating someone who was, in fact, trying to move on from his previous relationship. Our seven-hour first date was less than two months after his breakup. They’d dated over a year, he’d said, and the relationship came up over the course of natural conversation.

It wasn’t a red flag for me; instead, it felt smooth and reassuring, the result of an easy intimacy we’d tapped into right away. I had no reason to assume he was hung up on his ex.

All you have to do for it to fall apart is let your ex go through the 6 stages of a rebound relationship: Infatuation; Honeymoon; Reality and conflicts.

I used to know. I knew these girls better than I knew myself. I actually got to know some of them so well, I exhausted myself trying to get to know them any better. At all. How might they know of me? If they came across a photo of their boyfriend and me together and asked him who I was… then they would know. I was the ex and they were the girls that I could never be. He had chosen her and she was now with him — the him that I deserved, the him that I did everything for, and the him that suddenly wanted a committed relationship and everything that I was only good enough to experience the promise of but never the actuality.

And now, she was. I knew he was emotionally unavailable. I wanted him to suffer the way I had and regret what he lost. Yourself being at the top of that list. My biggest problem was that the extent to which I actually knew these girls was just as limited and superficial as I knew myself.