From the desk of Harsh Strongman
Subj: How to deal with a breakup for guys
Breakups are a tough time for most men, marked with loneliness, sadness, and even feelings of despair (some even claim to have depression).
This is doubly true if it was a breakup with someone you love (when you still love them), and if it happened during lockdown in quarantine.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to get over a breakup fast with minimal pain and suffering.
Tips to Get Over a Breakup
1) Understand that your emotions are normal – and temporary
You’re a human, and humans have emotions. If you didn’t have emotions, you’d be a psychopath.
You’re going through a change in your life where you lost the company of someone you enjoyed having around, and that’s making you sad and upset. This is a normal, human response to separation.
You are not going through anything new or special – billions of people have gone through the same thing and they’ve all experienced the same emotions associated with separation: temporary sadness followed by normalcy.
The pain or sadness that you’re feeling is the physiological response to losing someone who you were attached to, and it will go away in some time.
A few weeks from now (or a month or two at best) you will feel much better, so don’t sweat it.
Do you remember when someone from your family died and how devastated you were? Sometime down the line (usually a month or two), you accepted it, made your peace with it, and moved on.
If you can move on from a death in the family, then you can move on from some girl you dated for a while.
2) Realize that she was not “one in a million” and that there are other better women out there
Some guys get themselves into the emotional black hole of the “she’s one in a million, she’s my soul mate” crap.
Firstly, “soulmates” don’t exist in real life. They only exist in movies and TV shows and comics and other imaginary worlds.
This is just a girl that you dated, got attached to and developed feelings for – and nothing more.
You can get feelings for any girl in the world, even the ones you don’t really like.
Even if soulmates did exist, the fact that you two broke up shows that she was not your soulmate.
Secondly, no matter how much you liked your girl, she was not that special. Do not over-idolize her.
She was not one in a million – she was just a girl you dated for some time. She was maybe one in a hundred, or one in two hundred at best.
There are billions of women out there. If you live in a big city, there are millions who live less than 3 hours from you. Women are not rare. You have not lost anything that you cannot replace.
If you go out today and talk to 100 young women at random, it’s virtually guaranteed that some of them are:
- Hotter than the girl you broke up with
- Younger than the girl you broke up with
- Smarter than the girl you broke up with
- More feminine than the girl you broke up with
- Able to cook better food than the girl you broke up with
- All of the above
No matter how hard the breakup is on you, realize that you did not lose something ultra rare and that there are many women out there who you will like better and would be more compatible with.
There’s enough fish in the sea, and the sea is all around you. So it’s okay if you lost one fish. Don’t catastrophize it.
3) Keep yourself busy
As mentioned earlier, you’re going to feel sad and lonely for some time and you just have to accept it.
However, the more free time you have, the more time and energy you’ll have to be upset and replay the same thoughts in your head over and over again.
If all you do throughout your day is sit at home and do nothing, your brain will try to keep itself busy by obsessively focusing on the past.
Always be building something – you must have other priorities in your life than just a woman.
Learn a skill, focus on your work, do a course – give yourself other things to focus on.
Distract yourself and give your brain other things to think about. Do it even if you’re not in the mood for it.
4) Go out, get some fresh air, meet some friends
Don’t stay in your room all day thinking about the girl. That makes things worse – a lack of physical freedom makes humans feel depressed.
So go out, get some sun.
Go for a walk.
Go to the gym.
Go buy some groceries.
Get yourself out of the house and go do something. If you’re feeling lonely, go and be around humans.
Go play a sport, meet with your friends, go out with more girls – whatever you do, the last thing you want to be doing is sitting around the house and keep regurgitating your emotions.
5) Realize that you might have dodged a bullet
If the relationship between you and her wasn’t working well, but you two stuck around long enough and got married anyway – what do you think would happen? A messy divorce.
You could have ended up having to deal with alimony, child support, and maintenance payments, false accusations of dowry and domestic violence, and other nonsense that you don’t have to deal with now.
Now you can peacefully look for a better and more compatible girl. If the relationship has already failed, then you are better off without her.
Further reading: How to protect yourself as a man in a divorce
6) Start seeing other girls
Go out with more girls and have some fun. Have some action dates (dates that don’t involve just sitting and talking – play a sport with her, not watch a movie with her) and have some fun.
Not only will you feel better, it will also help you find suitable replacement(s) for the girl you ended things with.
Unfollow her on social media websites. You should not be stalking her on social media.
It only delays getting over the breakup and does you no good. The past is gone. Do not chase it.
Also, do not be in touch with her on WhatsApp or other messaging apps. It’s harder to move on when you’re talking to them on the regular.
8) Don’t drink alcohol and don’t use drugs
Speaking of what not to do, do not drown your emotions with alcohol and other mind-altering substances.
They make you feel better temporarily, but the price is too high. These are addictive substances that cause tremendous amounts of damage to your body.
Besides, when the high ends, you will end up feeling worse.
Learn to handle your emotions like a man, do not look for shortcuts – because none exist.
Bonus: #9) Learn from your mistakes
While regret is a wasted emotion, you should always strive to learn from your mistakes so that you do not repeat them.
Figure out what went wrong in the relationship. Did you pick a bad girl and have to break up with her, or did you behave in a way that made her lose attraction for you, prompting her to break up with you?
If the girl was rotten, you now know what to look out for. The next time you get into a relationship, vet the girl better.
If you lost frame and started acting sappy, well, you just learnt the adage the hard way: People value things they can’t have.
If you were 100% there for her whenever she needed it, she got bored and sick of you because of how easy your time and attention were to get – because anything that’s so easy to obtain must not be worth much (she subconsciously wrote you off as a low-value man, leading her to losing any attraction she felt towards you).
Next time, don’t be so loose with your time and attention. If this was your problem, an excellent book to read that will help you is The Book of Pook.
Remember, she wants a challenge – a wild, free bird that she snags because of her ingenuity; nobody wants some needy bird that wants to fly into the cage of commitment and be a good pet.
Be a little unavailable and make her earn your time and attention.
So go and do likewise, gentlemen – and remember, the emotions are temporary; you’ll be fine sooner than later. Breakups are actually quite easy to deal with, you just need to wade through it for a bit.
– Harsh Strongman
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