5 Inevitable Things That Happen When Your Long-Term Relationship Ends

Okay, so you’ve been with your guy or girl for what seems like an eternity. You know their place like the back of your hand, know every song in their playlist, know exactly when they’re mad without saying anything, know how to shut them up in an instant, memorized the scent of their neck like your favorite summer melody, memorized their face like it was yours too. But then, as the cliché goes; nothing lasts forever. One day you wake up, and bam — they’re gone. But this isn’t the first time your mind is messing up with you, they’ve been gone for already a year but you still wake up feeling unreal. Don’t worry; you’re not alone.

1. You start to hide away from your own world.


Being in a relationship for so many years means being in a same place for a very long time, getting used to their presence along with all the stuff and things surrounding the both of you. One example is your own home: you’d start hating the couch on which you used to goof around with your significant other. You’d start to shun away from your own bed, and with the couch you now hate you’d probably opt for the floor. You’d start looking for all the reasons to go out and just avoid the damn place. If you can rent and just go home on weekends, why not splurge all your hard earned cash, if that means you can escape all the ghosts haunting you in the comforts of your own house? Don’t worry, that’s a normal thought for someone going through all this mess.

2. You become totally unstable emotionally. (Very sudden mood swings guaranteed.)

For the first days, weeks, months (or, okay, years) after the break up, the struggle to find happiness again is REAL. You will go out and about, and you will go back to where you were before you met this person. You’d go back to your hobbies and old self. But then as soon as you’re gradually accepting that maybe, the possibility to forget is real, that’s when things will go plain sailing down. In the middle of a conversation with your friends in your favorite bar, their face will suddenly appear like a ghost. Creepy and frustrating, yes. But emotionally crushing, two hands up. While surfing the net in the middle of the day, you suddenly look around to find an empty room. Tears will fall on the spot right then and there, no words needed. You’re on the train off to work, when suddenly you pass by the damn park where you two would usually walk around the weekends. You know what’s gonna happen next.

3. Getting into a new relationship will always be tricky.

Just when you think everything is starting to be okay, your emotions are finally cooling down, you start acting like a normal person again which means you’re starting to feel like a normal person should. One of these feelings is getting inside your head though: you’re starting to hit it off with this new person from work. You like them for who they are, and it’s a totally new stuff with this person. You decided to give the two of you a chance and it’s surprisingly okay. Until one day, they do something with their food that opened a gaping hole in your heart again. Maybe they start to twist the fork around their pasta like your long-term ex always did. Bam! All the memories are crashing down to you at top speed and you lost your appetite at once. Then after that tiny incident, you start comparing every little thing they do to how your ex usually does it, and that’s not on purpose. It’s like watching two different films at the same time. And that’s when you know that you’re still not okay.

4. You suddenly become the emotional coach/psychiatrist/therapist of your friends.

After the break up blues, after all the comfort food and drinks you’ve devoured, it’s time to give back. Or that’s just what your friends think. When your couple friends start having problems, you automatically become the first person they call at 2 o’clock in the morning. During coffee, it’s all about “what do you think..?” “When you two were together, did this always happen..?” “How did you do that..?” and the list goes on. Just because you went through a long hell of a ride doesn’t mean you know all the answers in the universe, which is what they don’t know. Sometimes, you don’t wanna talk about it. But when you’re with your crew, it’s like you’re a living example, an inspiration, a walking bible, and that makes you compelled to just talk it out.

5. You become stronger every time this happens.

After going through this train wreck, a lot of things will happen, and a lot of changes will take place, especially in the way you see things. You become wiser in the way you deal with people. Your sense of acceptance will become a foot deeper. You will gradually accept the fact that things really do happen for a reason. And that reason we will have to find out in time. In the mean time, all we are left is this life we’re given, and we just make the most of what’s left of us, maybe string it back to pieces and use it to continue living, with the understanding and things we accumulated in the hardest way possible.