I remember after I was dumped by my first love, I was devastated. My friends took me out to a nightclub and I partied to take my mind off it. After that I spoke to trusted friends. Regardless, the pain lasted a long time.

After my marriage broke up, I think I withdrew for a long time. I needed to heal. It took me about a year before I could even think about dating and then I was really going through the motions for a while. I used to chat online a lot at that time and I just focused in on my responsibilities to my kids and my studies.

I think my philosophy has been just to give things time and to keep moving forward. It’s all you can do. I don’t like the idea of jumping into another relationship too quickly. That just feels like it would be asking for trouble.

@Earthbound_Misfit I totally agree with you on not jumping into a relationship right away. Unfortunately, my friends and relatives could not give up on the bad relationship. They pined away and looked upon it like it was the fantasy that they had to wait for, as if it was going to come back to them.

I’ve gone insane since university in 2000. I’m finally getting over because I realized that I doged a bullet and moved on.

Ya. I’m still not over it. It was upsetting. I was truly hurt by the situation and I feel that I have been less trusting of people. I’m scared I’ll get too close to someone and they will do what he did. I felt terrible and I don’t want to feel that way again.
I do my things for PT and I listen to music and just generally busy myself. It sounds harder than it really is.

Being busy seems to be one of the things that really helps. You simply don’t give yourself time to sit there and pine.

What made the crucial difference to me was reaching a moment where I saw the whole situation differently, where it made sense and where I stopped relating to it as something horrible that should be a different way, and started relating to it as something that was actually quite right and good from that different point of view, which entirely dispelled the upset and turned it into something positive. Basically realizing I was attached to an understanding of the broken relationship, realizing that was about someone with whom the relationship I wanted wasn’t working and so wasn’t really the relationship I wanted, and that the relationship I wanted always had been and was still something different from the actual relationship, and that the future of that wanted relationship was most possible on a different path with someone else

Those shifts came suddenly after some periods of upset. In one case it was looking at the moon. In another case it was after waking from a dream and reflecting in the middle of the night. In another it was in an ancient spiritual ritual made new.

The break-up was surreal, compounded by Dad suddenly dying a week later. A few dates with other people helped me realise that I could eventually move past it. Focusing on work and extra-curricular activities aided in rebuilding self-worth and killing time.

About two years later, a light bulb went on. You can love someone, but not be in love. Had we ever married, we both would have been miserable for as long as the marriage lasted. While we probably had mutual respect for each other, our personalities, goals and interests were so different. Perhaps that was the initial attraction that sustained the relationship for as long as it lasted.

Therapy seems to help some after a break-up. Time for introspection seems to be the best healing method.

I wasn’t exactly dumped, I had left two years before to go to school out of state. One visit back home we both decided to end it. A few weeks later I found out he was dating someone else, and I crashed into the gutter. I was out of control anxious. I couldn’t eat, I cried a lot, I would shake out of the blue, it was really really bad.

I remember finally going to a therapist and telling her I didn’t want to feel better. I really really wanted the anxiety to stop, and the nausea to stop, but I didn’t want to be going out and having fun. In retrospect I see now that I understood on some level I needed to mourn. She prescribed me Xanax and it helped a great deal. My stomach was more normal so I could keep my physical strength, and I still psychologically had to go through dealing with the break up.

Some people wanted me to be better faster, but they were not helpful at all. The people who had been through it themselves, and understood it can take months, were the most helpful. They were the ones who gave me hope it would end someday. That the pain would go away eventually, because they gave me a realistic time frame.

Resolve to give yourself 6 months to recover. It will get better, but it takes time!

Get off your but and find someone else who appreciates you and wants to be around you.

When I was in San Francisco back in the 80’s I got dumped a few times. It was always very painful but I soon forgot about it when I joined a dating club called “Great Expectations”. I had a ball checking out so many women. It wasn’t cheap as I would take them to plays and dinner but worth every penny. Women club members would also ask me out but I’d still pay. The last women that I dated at Great Expectations was the best women and I married her. After 26 years of marriage we are like newly weds and yet bonded forever together with mature romantic love.

I was dumped hard when I was 19, and I still feel it’s sting. It did help many, many years later when I came to grips with the probability that it would have ended in divorce anyway.
I’m still in love with her, but I know I’m better off.

I’ve only been broken up with once.

I didn’t handle it well. I was used to relationships that I didn’t get invested in, and by the time I was finally ready for a relationship that was real for me, he didn’t return my affection. I expected too much, I suppose, and we were too young for the kind of relationship we had. I was used to boys who loved me more than I loved them, because that was all I’d ever had, and I got the opposite. I loved him with everything I held back from the others, and he didn’t love me back.

It destroyed me. I spent far too long dwelling on it, and letting him lead me on. Letting him sleep over, even though I knew he didn’t care like I did. This isn’t to say he didn’t care, just that he was not in any place to be what I needed. I made a lot of mistakes, using sex as a way to like myself better being one of them. I tried drinking. I spiraled right up until the point where I realized that he didn’t love me. He didn’t treat me the way I deserved, and that said a whole lot more about him than it did about me.

I told myself over and over “You are not a mistake. You are not anyone’s mistake to make.” I told myself until I believed it. And then…I did more things I shouldn’t have, because somehow, to me, loving myself again meant making him feel the way I did, and that was wrong. When he said he loved me, I said I hated him. When he asked to come over, I let him, only so I could make him feel guilty, or start a fight. I ruined the friendship that we’d had since we were small children.

I was horrible. And then I moved on. I got over it. I grew up. I learned, and so did he. We fought, and fought, and we cried. We shook our relationship to the ground, and we rebuilt it.

And now, years later, everything is beautiful and better than ever before.