If You Get Dumped, It's Forever

If You Get Dumped, It's Forever. 

So you got dumped. Bummer.
What next? 

I'm not trying to minimize the pain of being on the wrong end of a painful breakup. It is a truly wretched feeling. When I got dumped for the first time I felt like a mouse on a glue trap: stuck in place, exhausted and frenzied all at the same time.

Worse, everyone could tell. Paul Simon said it pretty well: "Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you're blown apart. Everybody sees the window."

What, I wondered, over and over, had I done wrong? I wondered this especially at night. Sleepless, I would thrash about, trying to fathom how my perceptions of myself and my relationship could have been so different from her perceptions of me and of our relationship? 

    If you've ever felt like that, you'll know that the last thing you are likely to think about is what's coming next. Indeed, you want to go backward not forward. There is an urgent need to revisit every misfire, every argument, every misunderstanding and fight. You toss and turn your way through the frayed threads of your relationship as you try to understand how it unraveled. In a typical one-sided breakup the dumped person will be chock full of blame, anger, and an unappetizing mix of self-hatred and self-pity, punctuated by long sessions of gloomy music (think Pink Floyd and Nine Inch Nails). 

What you don't want to do is to move on. 

But move-on you should.

Not too fast, perhaps. There's no special need to rush through your sadness. But ultimately, in fits and starts, move on you must. 

And moving on means accepting this painful truth: You will not be getting back together with your ex. Not now, not soon, not ever.

This is true. Or so nearly true that you should consider it true.

No, no, you protest, some people do get back together. There's the famous case of this celebrity who got back together with that celebrity; and then what about that girl from the soccer team who got back together with that boy who plays lacrosse? 

Well, yes, such cases have been known. They are the exception to the rule, and they are not a model in any way for you. Here's why:
1) Most of them regret now or will regret soon that they got back together. In fact most breakups occur for very good reasons.  There is trouble in the relationship and getting back together is very unlikely to make you happier. In fact, there's a really good chance it will be worse the second time around.  Here's the reason. A breakup forever changes the power dynamic in a relationship. The dumper now has complete control and the dumpee tends to walk around on eggshells, fearful of provoking another breakup. This is not a happy way to be.

2) Okay, you're not convinced. In your deepest secret heart, you doubt the very sensible advice of your friends, who tell you that you're never getting back together with your ex, and that if you do it will end badly. Suppose that's how you feel. Defiantly irrational.
Okay, even so you should still declare to one and all who ask that you have absolutely no wish to get back together with your ex. And you should work your hardest to convince yourself that it's true, even if it isn't. Hopefully you will succeed and convince yourself that it really and truly is over, which it is. But even if you can't convince yourself, this is the right strategy because you are MORE likely to win back your ex if you behave as the relationship is dead to you.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean dead to you in any kind of tragic, teen-volunteer-hit-by-a-drunk-driver- on-way-to-homeless-shelter-sense. Goodness no. Instead, think of it as dead in the sense of a long and drawn out terminal illness that your grandmother might get, like congestive heart failure. 

This is the kind of death where everyone says, "she's in a better place now," and all of the deceased person's friends tell wistful, funny stories at the funeral.  This kind of death will allow you go ahead with your life as blithely and indifferently as possible. And, after a decent interval goes by--say a few weeks--that is the exact right mood and attitude you should cultivate after a breakup, even if you have to fake it. Blithe and indifferent.
After all, what's the alternative? Sad, miserable, and wretched? While you may have these feelings, understand that indulging in them for too long will make you seem hopelessly unattractive.

This unattractiveness will surely scare away other people from wanting to date you and cannot conceivably help you get back your ex.

Consider instead how you might seem if you appear to have emerged from the relationship unscarred and relatively happy (which is a synonym for attractive). People will want to date you. And while it is terribly unlikely that your ex will be one of these people, the odds are that sooner rather than later you will begin to feel normal again.