The Best (And Worst) Ways To Handle A Breakup

Cutting off ties with someone you love or had an intimate relationship with is difficult; trust me, I know. But honestly, it’s crucial to the healing aspect of a break-up. If you continue to reach out to your ex after being broken up, it’ll only further the attachment that you have, and it doesn’t allow you to take the time you need to heal on your own. Although it’s incredibly difficult, cutting off all ties with your ex is honestly the best thing that you can do post-breakup. Going no contact is so incredibly difficult to do, but it’s also so crucial to the healing process. While it may suck for a few days, it gets easier over time. Delete their number and take time to work on yourself and heal. Letting go is hard, but always remember that you aren’t alone.

Continuing to follow your ex after breaking up makes moving on so incredibly hard. It seems impossible to stop stalking their social media page to see if they’ve posted anything new. Constantly seeing updates of their life makes it so hard to let go, which is why it’s so important to remove them from all forms of social media (yes, even BeReal). Blocking their number is a good idea too, that way there’s no risk of drunk texting them (I wish someone told me this a few months ago)!

While I know that it’s so incredibly tempting to hibernate in bed for 5-7 business days watching Grey’s Anatomy and crying all day, this is honestly not the best approach to a breakup. This makes it harder to move on with your life, and harder to transition back into your normal lifestyle. In my opinion, surrounding yourself with friends and people you love, along with distracting yourself with hobbies, is an amazing way to get over a breakup. It may be difficult and saddening at first, but it’s a good way to distract your mind from the breakup. While it’s okay to give yourself some time to cry and be upset, make sure that you’re spending time with people who support you and can be there for you during this difficult time.

Never blame yourself after a breakup. Sometimes, relationships simply just don’t work out, and this is crucial to acknowledge. People change over time, and the person you met when you first started dating might not be the same person that they were when you broke up. Some people just aren’t meant for each other, and you shouldn’t be beating yourself up over a breakup. While some may not believe in this, I am a firm believer in the phrase “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be”, and this phrase has helped me over and over again with getting over heartbreaks. Blaming yourself for a breakup honestly just destroys your mental health and self-esteem, because you’ll be spending all of your time thinking about what you could’ve done differently or where things went wrong. In my personal experience, the best way to heal from a breakup when you may have been in the wrong is to just accept that maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Some relationships simply just don’t work out.

In all honesty, this may be one of the hardest parts of a breakup. Deleting photos of your ex is so difficult to do, but it makes it easier to let go. I’m sure we’ve all gone through a breakup where we’re just reminiscing and looking back at photos, but this just brings up bad memories and makes it harder to accept that the relationship is over. My biggest advice is to wait until you’re ready to delete photos; let the wound heal a little bit. When I was going through a tough breakup, it honestly took me a while to delete photos, but it felt like a weight was lifted off of my chest when I did go through and delete everything. Don’t delete photos until you’re ready to. What I did was I deleted the photos, but I let them stay in my recently deleted knowing that they’d eventually get permanently deleted in 30 days. I let myself take thirty days to mourn the loss of that relationship, and I just let the pictures get deleted by themselves. This was a great way for me to have time to cope with the relationship being over and with our memories getting deleted.

Controversially, I think that this is a really easy way to get over an ex, but it just isn’t the right way to do it. Hopping from another person fresh out of a breakup just negatively impacts your ability to heal. It’s crucial to take some time to yourself, so you’re able to better yourself and be able to heal after freshly getting out of a relationship. I find it way too easy to just hang out with another guy after going through a breakup, but this just makes it difficult to accept being alone. I had a really hard time coping with being alone and not having a guy to rely on after my ex and I broke up (which led to me continuing to hang out with him for months after breaking up because I couldn’t accept the fact that I needed to take some time without a man in my life. Tip: DON’T DO THIS!). Remind yourself that it’s okay to be alone. It’s okay to not be in a relationship. It’s okay to be thriving single. It’s okay to take some time to yourself before you dip your feet into something new again. It’s okay to need to need to heal.

While this point may only be relevant to a certain audience, I think it’s important to mention. Being friends with benefits with your ex is the worst. Possible. Thing. You. Can. Do. Coming from someone who was friends with benefits with her ex for five months post-breakup, continuing to hang out with your ex after ending the relationship makes it infinitely times harder to get over them and it just deepens the attachment that you have for them. While it may seem easy to sleep in their bed and share “I love yous” after being broken up, this just continues the cycle and is not a good way to go upon a breakup. It makes it impossible to let go (I would know!!!) and seems like such an easy alternative to going through the devastating heartbreak that is inevitable after a breakup, but the consequences it has are insane. It also can bring up a fear of hanging out with other people. When you’re so used to having an intimate relationship with one person for an extended period, it’s difficult to hang out with other people, and it’s even more difficult to hang out with other people when you continue the cycle of being with your ex after breaking up. While I’m sure you won’t find any negatives to it in the moment, this makes it harder to let go and move on with your life.