Breaking Up Doesn’t Have to be Hard to Do

Breaking up is never exactly easy, especially if you’ve been together for a long time or you really thought you had a future ahead of you. However, it doesn’t have to be the horrendous cliche as portrayed in so many chick flicks and daytime dramas, leaving you a crying ice cream eating wreck or a bitter ex completely blinded by bitterness either.

Here are some simple tips to help you make your breakup as easy and drama-free as it can possibly be:

Do It Right

The first and most important step to ensuring that you have a good break up is by taking responsibility and doing it right in the first place. Don’t be tempted to take the coward’s way out and end a relationship by text, email or Facebook, and if you know that it’s over, don’t be tempted to draw it out with trial separations or maybes. Obviously, a trial separation can be good if you’re unsure of your future together, but otherwise be direct, honest, open and make it final. Get help with divorce from a counselor, and ideally a lawyer, as soon as possible if you’re married and try to keep things amicable. The more grown up you behave from the beginning, the easier your break up will be over the long-term.

Cry it Out

You’ve just broken up with someone who probably meant a great deal to you, at least for a while; perhaps it was someone you even loved. So, although you don’t want to fall into a pit of despair of becoming that cliched girl who spends her nights crying into her pillow over a failed romance if you feel sad and you want to cry, do it! Let your grief flow freely in those first few days post-break up, and you’ll undoubtedly feel a whole lot better for it and get back on track sooner than those stoic types who try to keep it all in!

Don’t Try to Get Him Back

If you are the dumpee rather than the dumper, it is very important that you don’t try to get him back by any means necessary. Spending your time coming up with schemes to draw him back in when he’s made his feelings clear will only prolong the pain and cause you to lose more of your life to a lost cause.

If you can’t get the thought of getting your ex back out of your mind, Ex Back Permanently recommends you don’t contact him for at least a month so your mind clears up and you are not making decisions out of neediness or desperation.

When you have a breakup, it’s oh so tempting to post every detail of the whole sordid affair on Facebook. Don’t do this. Sure, you’ll probably get a lot of sympathy, but you might also end up looking like a crazy person or even more likely, wallowing in self-pity longer than is really healthy.

Unfriend Him

Once you’ve broken up, it can be tempting to remain friends with your ex on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. This is usually a bad idea, at least in the early days of your breakup because one or both of you may be tempted to keep tabs on the other via Facebook, leading to a whole host of negative emotions like jealousy, regret and anger. You might think that you’re a grown up and you should be able to stay friends with an ex after you’ve called it quits, and maybe you can, but probably not on the likes of Facebook which have caused so may post-breakup problems for so many people over the years. While you’re unfriending him, you might want to delete his number from your cell phone to avoid any embarrassing drunken incidents too!

Hang Out with Friends

In the immediate aftermath of a breakup, a lot of people tend to turn to the bottle or other vices to block out the pain and get through another lonely day or night. When you feel the urge to do, for example, drink alone, don’t do it. Give in and you’ll either be spending the next few weeks/months with a permanent hangover or making a fool of yourself drunk calling your ex and making your problems a million times worse. What you should do instead, is make more time for your good friends, make lots of plans to keep yourself busy and call up a good buddy whenever things get too much for you to handle healthily alone. This will ensure that you get over your breakup more quickly and without too many negative consequences in the end!

Start Working Out

There are few things that can give you a real boost after breaking up with a spouse more than working on yourself and taking up a new exercise regime is a great place to start with that. Not only do you get to take all of your anger, aggression and pain and pour it into learning a new skill like yoga, kickboxing or Zumba, but you’ll also be releasing happy-making endorphins, improving your body and building your self-esteem, which will help you to feel better, especially when you’re ready to start dating again.

Find Yourself

As well as taking up a new exercise regime, you may find that taking the time to really look at and reevaluate your life, working out what you really want and perhaps taking on a new challenge, whether it’s a new job, hobby or even  a challenge like the one Cheryl Strayed chronicled in Wild, can take your mind off your breakup, give you a new perspective life. It will also ensure that you don’t spend too much time wallowing in self-pity.

Have Some Fun with Someone New

This certainly isn’t for everyone, but for a lot of people experiencing breakup, getting right back on the horse and going on a few dates with new, interesting people can be a great way to put some distance between themselves and their exes and enjoy being single. Obviously, if you do this, you should make sure that anyone you date knows that you aren’t looking for anything serious (unless you are) – the last thing you want to do is use someone or end up giving them the wrong impression – but it can really help you to realize that there really are plenty more fish in the sea, and many of them are more suited to you that your last catch.

Take Things Slow

If you do get back on the dating horse and you’re lucky enough to meet someone wonderful within a short space of time, it’s important that post-breakup, you take things slow. It’s all too easy to dive in head-first in a bid to completely banish the pain you’re still feeling from the last relationship, but to do so would be unfair to both you and your new beau and by taking things slow, you can really work out if this new pairing is likely to go the distance, or whether you’d be better off bailing out right now.

Read Trashy Romance Novels

Again, this doesn’t work for everyone, and it can make some women feel worse, but a lot of heartbroken ladies get a lot of comfort and a renewed hope for the future by reading romance novels where the hero is dashing and brave, and the heroine has a happy ending.

Don’t Blame Yourself

When you’ve split up with a spouse, it’s easy to keep running through the entirety of the relationship in your head, thinking about what you did wrong and how things might be different now if you’d have acted differently then. Don’t torture yourself this way! Accept that the relationship wasn’t right and that you both had your part to play in that; see what lessons you can learn from your breakup, and then move on. Give yourself a break, stop ruminating and start the healing process.

Try Meditation

If you’re having trouble moving on and getting rid of those negative post-breakup thoughts is proving tougher than you thought it would, you could try enrolling in a mindfulness meditation class, which will teach you how to focus on the present and cultivate a more positive way of looking at the world. As a bonus, you’ll also learn how to be less stressed i your day to day life, and who knows, you might meet some new friends to take your mind off your situation too!

See a Therapist

If you’re having a really hard time processing the grief that you feel over the loss of your relationship and no matter what you do, it doesn’t seem to get any better, it might be worth seeking the help of a professional therapist.Having someone totally neutral who you can discuss your feelings with, in a frank and upfront manner can really make a huge difference and help you to mend your broken heart.

Everyone is different and what works to make a breakup easier for one person may not work for another, but hopefully there are enough good suggestions here that you will at least be able to use some of them to help your breakup be as easy as it can possibly be.