After facing one too many break-ups my freshman year, I adopted a creed in an attempt to salve my hurt feelings. And when my friends experienced the end of their own relationships, I would repeat this credo with fist-pumping enthusiasm. I would wave away their tears and tell them all the malicious gossip I knew about their ex, and then finish the motivational speech with, “Don’t worry, you are so winning this break-up.” And for some reason, this notion of being the victor would cheer them up. “You’re right, I am winning,” they would agree, their sniffles finally ceasing. “His life is going to suck without me in it.”
For the next two years, I wholeheartedly believed that you could actually “win” a break-up. I would reassure myself, years after the fact, that I was still winning all of my break-ups. My logic was that I was happier with my life now than I had ever been with any of my exes. Ipso facto: WINNING! And if a break-up is a game of which I have been declared the winner, my ex must be the loser. He must be as miserable without me, as I am happy without him. He made a huge mistake breaking up with me, but, on the flipside, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. And this “winning” business wasn’t reserved for the times I was dumped. Even when I instigated the break-up, I still had to be the winner, if only to be confident that I had made the right decision. Poor guy, he’s never going to be the same. But I had to cut him loose, it was the best thing I could have done for myself.
“I am winning this break-up” is, in reality, a vindictive twist on a much wiser saying: “The best revenge is living well.” In a way, it is a selfish wish that every ex views me as “the best he ever had.” Or it is the romantic, but still selfish, desire that I am always “the one that got away.” But most of all, it is one of the few defenses we have at one of the most vulnerable points in our lives. What else are we supposed to tell ourselves when we are leaping into the unknown abyss that is singlehood? “Maybe it’ll all work out,” is not going to cut it.
But the truth is that everyone wins a break-up. Because a break-up is a transition out of a bad relationship. Even if you were completely happy in your relationship before you were dumped, the fact that your significant other felt otherwise means that you are better off without them. Actually, scratch that, NO ONE wins a break-up, but everyone survives it. What you can win at is life, which is completely separate from your break-up. As I said before, a break-up is a transition, which means as soon as you are out of the relationship, the break-up becomes the past. So essentially, “I’m winning a break-up” would be on par with saying, “I’m winning World War I.”
You might ask, “What’s the danger of thinking of a break-up in terms of winners and losers?” It undoubtedly makes you feel better about the whole ordeal. But the problem is that there is no clear end to the game that is “the break-up.” At what point can you stop measuring your happiness against your ex’s? At what point do you stop stalking your ex’s facebook to see if they are in a new relationship, or if they gained weight, or how many new friends they’re making? At what point do you get over your ex? If you keep trying to calculate who is winning the break-up, you will never see your life and your happiness as completely in your hands. As long as your ex’s successes and failures can affect the way you view your own successes and failures, you are living in the past. And the only way to ensure you don’t get stuck in this mental trap is to avoid thinking of the break-up as a game in the first place. It happens, you survive to see the other side, and then you live for yourself, not in spite of someone else.