How to Survive a Breakup When You're the One Who Ended It

Sometimes you may not want to break up with someone, but you feel you have to. He has not changed although you have given ultimatums. She cheated and you can't let it go. Although you love your significant other you are not in love. For some good reason you have to cut ties with your lover and move on with your life. Just because you are breaking up does not mean it will be easy.

Allow yourself up to three days to be self-indulgent. Cry over the pictures and the vacation mementoes, stay in bed and don't eat (or eat too much) and don't go to work. Then get up, wipe your tears, fix your hair and get on with your life. You will more than likely feel sad for several months and the people close to you may not understand it. After all, you have been in a bad relationship and perhaps you have been talking about ending it for a long time. Certainly your friends and family have been wishing you would end the relationship, either because of concern for you or so they wouldn't have to hear about it anymore. They may not understand that you are grieving for what might have been.

After the three days are up, set aside an hour to grieve each day. All you can do during this hour is feel bad. You can complain to your diary, break things, cry, even go to the places you used to go and cry there. For this allotted hour all you can do with your time is grieve for your breakup. Ideally you will find that an hour is too much time to spend on a relationship that has ended and you will move on to doing something else.

Put away all the mementoes of your relationship. Box up what you can and replace larger items. You don't want the sight of something significant to set you off on a good day. Also, you will have to go through a thought process of deciding to take them out and look at them, and you may have enough time if they are stored away to make the decision not to.

Remember that this is not a race to hook up with someone else first. Your former partner is feeling wounded and may run into the arms of someone highly inappropriate. So that you don't find out about their new flame before you're ready, don't drive by the house or look for them in bars and definitely don't ask their friends how they are doing.

Resist the tearful phone calls and emails asking to get back together. You will feel sorry for this person, who is essentially asking you to help them get over you. But if you get back together after too short an amount of time, it will hurt that much more when you have to break it off again. If the other person was going to change his or her ways they would have done it before, without your having to break up with them first. After several months or even a year you can see if he or she has changed and if you still want them back, get into a dating relationship slowly.

Have fun. Seriously. Treat yourself to all the activities you couldn't do before because you were involved in too much energy sapping drama. Take up ice skating or mountain climbing; hell, take up finger painting if it makes you happy. You will meet new people and reconnect with old friends who may have been driven to cool their friendship because of your drama. And you may find you're better off without your former lover, after all.