For every broken heart out there, this one is for you…
At the beginning stages of a breakup, almost everyone wants to be with their ex, no matter how cruel or terrible this person was. Here are eight reasons why you shouldn’t go back there…
You Broke Up For a Reason
Research has proven time and again that when it comes to your ex, your brain tends to put on rose-tinted glasses, warping reality to accommodate what you want to remember. However, every relationship has its bad times, and yours had enough bad times that were so severe that it led to the breakup. Every time you start to get misty over what happened between you and your ex, remind yourself that you split up for a reason.
Those Underlying Issues Won’t Just Disappear
Emotional baggage weighs down each of us. Thankfully, the suitcase becomes lighter as time goes on; older memories are whitewashed by new ones. The problem is, when you do decide to get back together with an ex, your baggage seems to start gaining weight… and quickly.
Whether someone cheated or you two just naturally drifted apart over time, something huge drove you apart. Maybe it wasn’t such a major issue as that but a combination of little things. You may have different views on marriage or children, one of you may not want to live together, someone may be bad with money management or lack basic life skills.
The fact of the matter is those issues don’t just disappear overnight. If you two get back together a week or a month after the initial split, your love will still come with the same problems as before. You can’t make someone change. They have to want to do it themselves. Maybe the breakup will be a big enough impetus to push them to turn their lives around, but that could take months if not years. You can’t sit around holding your breath on the off-chance that your ex may suddenly wake up one day and want to get married or have kids.
The Trust You Had Has Been Shattered
Trust is integral in a relationship. Think about it: this man or woman destroyed your heart. Now that they’ve done it once, what’s stopping them from doing it again? Absolutely nothing. You now have to wake up each day and attempt to forge a normal, happy, healthy, functioning relationship knowing that at any time, your ex could put you back in the same hellish position that they had before. Sure, it won’t hurt as much the second time, but do you really want to wait around and find out?
Love is 50% mental, 50% physical and you’ve already made up your mind.
Love is not just physical; it’s not just about the chemistry. You have to decide to be in love in order to stay in love. It’s easy to do when everything else is just right, but much harder when things aren’t going so well. Breaking up is a big deal, especially when you once were in love with the person you broke up with. However, you made that difficult decision to end the relationship and now it’s time to stick with it. You can’t change your mind as easily as you’d like — not for long anyway.
Remove those rose-tinted glasses
When we are distanced from someone we care about, we will begin to miss that person. Throw romantic love into the mix and we are soon bathing in a feeling of light obsession, a feeling often confused with love. This feeling, thankfully, goes away once we are around that person more regularly.
However, missing someone while he or she is away leads to creating fantasies about the person, which are, more often than not, nowhere close to the reality of things. Once we spend time with our ex, we become disillusioned and revert back to not wanting to have anything to do with them; it’s our mind playing tricks on us.
You can either move forward or backward, not both — that’s called standing still.
If you want a new, different, better life, don’t go looking for it in your past. You weren’t the person you wanted to be back then, and won’t be that person now if you start living in your past, rather than thinking about your future. Moving backwards will only increase the time it will take you to move forward.
Someone Perfect For You is Out There
Don’t settle. It can be scary to make that first step to try finding love again, especially new love. Some people are content to stick to the old and familiar—their ex—suffering through an endless loop of on-again/off-again togetherness. Don’t be like that. Although it’s not easy, you have to be brave. How will you know if there’s someone even better for you if you never make an attempt to find out? Your future husband or wife could be dating a stream of losers and wondering where someone like you is right now.
You Deserve Better Than A Patchwork Relationship
At the beginning stages of a breakup, almost everyone wants to be with their ex, no matter how cruel or terrible this person was. In the days, weeks, and months to follow, many people will wise up and realise that they’re better off without their ex. Some though will still pine, their lives in a state of limbo as they’re forced to forge a new life without their ex but they fail to date anyone long-term since their heart belongs to someone else.
What those people are holding onto is the old relationship. They want those happy times back. However, those times are gone and never coming back.
Even if you and your ex reunite, with all of the points mentioned above, there’s no way that you can ever go back to those early carefree days when you two were madly in love and the only thing that mattered was each other. There’s too much water under the bridge, and you’ll never be able to forget that, not entirely.
Instead, the relationship will be a shell of what the old one was, with less trust and less vulnerability. You deserve better than a patchwork relationship. You deserve someone new who will love you wholeheartedly, someone whom you can trust and rely on. Someone who isn’t, and never will be, your ex.
