Every time someone enters or leaves your life, they leave a mark. It’s impossible for them not to after you’ve let them into your circle, trusted them with your secrets and let them weave their way into your everyday life. However, the people who have the most profound impact on your life are the ones who you decide to become romantically involved with. The way these relationships take shape and the way they look might be different for all of us, but it’s impossible for someone who you trusted with the thing most important to us, our hearts, not to leave us damaged and bruised when they leave.Via Giphy
When my ex and I went our separate ways, I was forced to confront not only the role that they played in a breakup that was more difficult than it ever needed to be, but also my own shortcomings and failures. It’s more difficult than I expected it to be to have to come to terms both with the fact that my relationship wasn’t what I’d thought it was and that this person is never going to hold the same place in my life again. Via Giphy
It poured salt into the wound everytime I would get a text from them and trip over myself to answer, get a snap from them once a day rather than as soon as I sent one and seeing them with someone else who I couldn’t fathom holding the same place in their life that I held. I’ll never forget the feeling of having someone who I’d cared so deeply about end our relationship over text because they didn’t love me anymore, but what I’ve come to accept is that there’s nothing wrong with that.
Related: 5 Tips On Bouncing Back From a Breakup
When you let someone in to see everything about you, good or bad, it’s going to be damaging when they look at you and tell you that those dark parts are too dark for them or that you just don’t do it for them anymore, but that doesn’t have to break you. It doesn’t have to make you unwilling to let anyone else in or never open yourself up again. It *definitely* doesn’t have to irreparably damage your memories of them or your relationship.
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It won’t do you any good to squash down or hide your feelings about them, whether they’re positive or negative. There’s no point in pretending they don’t mean anything to you anymore when you know deep down that if they reached out to you right now and said they’d made a horrible mistake, you would consider taking them back in an instant.
Related: How To Not Let Your Breakup Break You
However, in the same way that it’s valid to still have these feelings for them, it’s also valid to not have them. Moving on and letting go from a chapter in our lives that we shared with someone important to us isn’t formulaic and it’s not going to be the same for all of us. Your friend might be able to get back on the horse and go out with new people after just a few days, but you might still be going in circles and listening to your sad playlist full of breakup songs for weeks or even months. That doesn’t mean either of you is going about it in the wrong way.
It’ll take time, but absolutely nothing is more freeing than the day that you wake up and don’t think of them and every little thing you do doesn’t bring back painful reminders. The only better feeling is the first time you see their face in old pictures and realizing that they just don’t do it for you anymore. Eventually they’ll lose their place as your gold standard, even if this takes longer than you’d initially like — but trust me, it’s worth it.
Take this process at your own pace, but moving on is important and healthy. If they don’t see how valuable you are anymore, then it’s time to remind yourself that you’re worth loving and worth fighting for. Allow yourself to move onto bigger and better things. Spend more time with your #GirlGang, join that club that you didn’t have time for before, download that dating app when you’re ready and truly be present in your life. College goes by too fast to spend the whole time crying in our dorms and not making memories.
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It might hurt when our relationships end, but eventually you’ll get to the point where the pain doesn’t taint our memories and our feelings, and we can truly be grateful for that person and all of the ways they helped us change and grow into better, stronger people. We learn something from every relationship –whether it’s platonic or romantic– and that learning doesn’t just come from what happened before the breakup. If you want love and if you want something worth having, you might to have to go through the pain of losing it, but I can safely say that I’d rather have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Take your time, mourn the loss, then channel your inner Elle Woods and go take the world by storm.
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