When a relationship comes to an end it is never easy, especially if you are not the one ending it. We become so used to someone being a part of our life, and it becomes so hard to let them go and leave the past behind. We keep remembering so many happy moments and we just hope they will come running back to us. And thus we are stuck in the past, closing the doors to our future happiness.
We think we can relive the good memories
When we have invested so much of ourselves emotionally we don’t want it to end. And we wonder why the breakup happened when we were so happy. Lying down in bed at night, we relive all the good moments and the things we did to make our partner happy.
But, we need to accept the fact that memories are just memories, and we cannot relive those moment and thus we need to move forward and make new memories. The best thing to do is to look at memories as sunk costs – a sunk cost is a cost you cannot recover. The same is true for good memories – no matter how perfect and great they were they belong to the past and cannot be recovered.
So, you have two choices – either you will get stuck in the past or move forward. Being stuck in the past cannot bring you happiness, just more pain. The longer you hang on to past memories, the further away you are from future happiness.
We believe our ex was PERFECT for us
We are so quick to forget all the bad things from our relationship once we break up. As if we become blind to everything what was wrong. Our brain plays with us making us idealize and believe our memories are perfect, when the actual experience was different.
And thus we mourn as we are certain our ex was the perfect fit, and simply won’t let go and hope we will continue our relationship. We tend to ignore and reject all potential great new partners as we are certain our ex will come around and eventually come back. Justifying the fact they are worth the wait by remembering only the best moments is just making things work.
Are we so blind that we have forgotten all the things that annoyed us, all the arguments that we had because we wanted different things? We have to understand that once someone decides to break up, they have already moved on. They understood the relationship is not what they wanted and they would like to experience different things and explore their other sides.
We have an image in our head of what we think they are like, but the truth is, after the breakup, they won’t be that same person we idealized in our head. The more time we spend apart, the more they will feel like a stranger to us. So there is no point in wanting them to come back – they are just not the same person they were.
Breakups are hard, that’s the fact. And if we loved our partner so much, the idea of going through life without them is hard to sink in. But, if someone doesn’t want to be with us, it means they are not the perfect match for us, no matter what we believe. It is perfectly fine to be sad for a while, it takes time to get over someone. But obsessing with past memories for too long is not healthy for us. We cannot create our happiness by constantly looking back, but by looking forward to the future.
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