Surviving a Breakup: Feeling like It's O.K. To Be Alone

The end of a relationship can bring pain in so many ways. We can hurt in places we didn't even know existed. Mostly, though, this pain stems from the fact that we had invested so much in the other. Losing the relationship, then, feels like losing a part of ourselves.

That's exactly what we have to do, then, to get our lives back on track in the aftermath of a breakup: recover that lost part. The reason why we can set ourselves up for such a fall is that we tend to believe that love is a commodity that exists out there. Love is seen as something that someone else can give or deny us, but we seldom stop to think that maybe it exists inside of us after all. So we're constantly searching around in the world to find something that we're already carrying.

That's why a breakup can do such damage to our sense of self-worth, too. The relationship we had with a partner might have been an experience that simply ran its course, but we see its ending as a disaster because we equated our own worth with the success of the partnership. The only way out of this vicious cycle that can continually bring us grief is to learn to shift our focus. We need to see ourselves, and not anyone else, as the source of our own happiness.

The pain that we feel after the fact can teach us how to do this. We have no choice but to move on; and in doing so, we just might discover that we're all right alone. Jumping into a relationship with the next person to come along with probably only hurt us again. But if we take the time to learn from our aloneness, we have a chance to feel that we're complete in ourselves. We don't need someone else in our lives to make us happy, because we'll know that we're the creators of our own happiness.

One of the best ways to get passed the grief and start living again is to remember the things we enjoyed doing before the relationship happened. Any partnership inevitably involves compromises, and there may be dreams or pursuits that we'd been obliged to put on the shelf for a while. Now is a good time to get back into doing those things, so we can feel a certain personal satisfaction that's not contingent upon anyone else. Of course, keeping occupied will take our minds off of that feeling of loss, too.

And of course, we don't have to be completely alone. There might be people with whom we'd not connected in ages, because the relationship was consuming so much time and energy. Now we have space to do some catching up. Before long, we may be so occupied with new/old friends and experiences that we're hardly thinking about what we lost. Maybe it won't feel like we've lost anything at all; we've simply moved on.