When you miss her but you know you shouldn’t because she wasn’t the right one for you. Or maybe, she was toxic and there’s no way to sugarcoat that she was a bad girlfriend. And yet, despite knowing that you should move on from the relationship, and consider yourself lucky that you can start something new, and maybe find a better girl in the future, you just can’t let go of her. Even if she didn’t treat you right, or disrespected you, you still love her. You can’t help yourself. So, how do you deal with a breakup when theoretically you have some objective evidence that it was for the best, but your emotions get the best of you? Let’s talk about it.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. Believe me when I tell you, I’ve been there… Missing an ex-girlfriend that you definitely shouldn’t be missing. I once dated a very narcissistic woman who cheated on me and a lot of bad things went down back then, and despite all of it, I couldn’t help but miss her like crazy.
Love does crazy things to a man’s heart. Actually, I think in theory, men can thrive being single, so breakups SHOULDN’T hurt us as much as they often do. To us guys, we are usually quite okay to be on our own and be single. Even when I was young, insecure, and still struggled a lot with codependency and really wasn’t “good” at being a happy single, I would nevertheless enjoy hustling, working hard, becoming more competent and so on in my 20s. I mean, I was on my own and I had a great time back then, but I really craved to BE with a girl. It’s just that I didn’t know how.
But, let’s be real… The solo hustle and achieving your goals is awesome, but when you start to really enjoy the company of a girlfriend, then all the hustling, the hard work makes so much more sense, because you get to share it with a woman who really appreciates the man you have developed yourself into with so much hard work.
So of course, you can’t help but feel shattered and lost when you break up with a girl — even if she did a lot of things that would make most of your friends say “Bro, you really shouldn’t miss her. She wasn’t good for you”…
It can’t be helped. When we men finally settle in a relationship and become comfortable with a grand masterplan as a couple, we tend to really, really commit and get serious about the relationship. I think most men who want a long-term relationship, and maybe even want to have kids and marriage, they tend to have very clear visions of what they want out of their relationship. And the closer we feel to our girlfriend, the more we want to make that vision a reality. Letting go of a woman is never easy — even if there were a lot of bumps in the road. And a big part of that has to do with the fact that we didn’t really want to accept that there were obstacles throughout the relationship. We tell ourselves that the relationship wasn’t really that bad, and in the end, the only thing that matters are the grand plans that we had.
I think one of the hardest things to learn in life as a man is to say no to the relationships that aren’t good for you. Whether that’s in work, business, friendships, or love, we cannot sugarcoat that our relationship has or had massive problems. You have to be honest with yourself, or you’ll cling to some of the worst experiences in life, when there are so much better things that could happen to you.
I have a friend, he just recently got screwed over by a business relationship — and I could see a lot of red flags for a while but he kept on telling himself that the relationship didn’t have a lot of inconsistencies going on. And then a day ago, he sent me a long voice message about how everything blew up in his face, because the woman he was talking to apparently had a deeply rooted hate for men and she called him a misogynist and all kinds of other things. While I didn’t expect that in particular, I saw the problems for months already that this relationship probably wouldn’t work out.
But in any type of relationship, when you’re the one who’s experiencing it firsthand, you can never see what your relationship is really like. You tend to ignore the warning signs. Or you tell yourself that they aren’t so bad. But the reality is, in relationships, things are never really that bad. The problem is that lots of small things add up. Everything is always only a little bump along the road here or there, until you have that one really big crash that shows you what that relationship was like all along without you fully realizing it.
After a breakup with a woman, if you know that you shouldn’t miss her because she was the type of woman who would slowly but surely create more problems, until the point where you had that one big crash where it all collapsed way too quickly, then you have to be real with yourself. If you miss an ex-girlfriend but you know you shouldn’t because she’s not good for you, you have to make yourself aware of the fact that you can never make a relationship work where you understand that there is a fundamental disconnect between the way that you choose to love, and the way your ex-girlfriend chooses to love.
If there’s one thing that I learned in life, it’s that there are only two types of people: People who change, and people who don’t. And very often, the ones who don’t change are in the majority. So when you had an ex-girlfriend who gave you a good reason to not miss her, don’t fool yourself that there’s any path to a good resolution. Sometimes we miss an ex-girlfriend because we want to tell ourselves that it wasn’t all that bad. That we can still make it work. That somehow we can save all of that time and emotional investment. And look, sometimes women change. But unless your ex-girlfriend shows you that she realized she wasn’t showing up from her best side in the relationship, then you shouldn’t mourn losing her.
I mean, of course, it’s normal, okay, and understandable to grieve the loss of a relationship. Even a relationship with a woman who made you unhappy far too often, still made you happy many times. If you need to spend some weeks going through separation anxiety, and even reminisce about the good parts of the relationship, then that is fine. But always remind yourself about the bad things in your relationship so you make it easier for yourself to move on.
In terms of the negatives with an ex-girlfriend, never forget two things:
- The frequency of bad things that happened in the relationship in general
- The biggest massive dealbreaker type of red flags
When your ex had either of these and you can describe them and write them down on paper, then you know that you should move forward with your life so that you can seek something more satisfying for your life. Ultimately, when you have been burned by a bad relationship, then the only way is to accept that you made a mistake, or that you dated the wrong woman, and move on with your life. No matter how much you try to convince yourself that missing her is okay, the facts will always remain the same: The relationship wasn’t good for you and it’s time to move on from it.
This type of relationship that wasn’t good for you is probably the only type of relationship where I would say that it is OK to date relatively soon after the breakup. Not right away, but perhaps after 3-6 months. It’s good to meet new women and to see that there are better alternatives out there. Sometimes, the best medicine to heal from a relationship that wasn’t good for us, is to be in a better relationship. That’s not to encourage all of you to date right away though. But there is some merit in being in a fulfilled relationship with a great woman to see that the last one was not good for us.
Either way, whether you might try to date relatively soon after your breakup or not, you should at the very least distance yourself from your ex-girlfriend and explore new things to compromise your life of, because sometimes, all it takes to no longer miss an ex-girlfriend who wasn’t good for us, is to get a little bit of space, to see that other life experiences are so much better without her, and eventually, the love for her will fade.
So I encourage you to find something to do for yourself within the next 30 days that has nothing to do with your ex-girlfriend. Try something new. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just get busy with something that shows you that there are many great things in life. Hobbies. Business. Hard work. Solving problems. Dating other women. And so much more. Sometimes, it only takes a few weeks or one or two months for you to realize that you wasted a lot of time and energy on a woman who only made your life miserable or even a living nightmare.
The sooner you come to terms with this, and no longer are stuck in cognitive dissonance mode, the sooner you will move on. And the sooner, you also won’t find random moments where you think back to the good times, because of course, when life inevitably isn’t always perfect, you’ll focus on the good parts. But no, become aware of what fundamentally didn’t work, and don’t convince yourself that it’s worth looking back on those times. So look forward with positivity and start new things that actually make your life better, not worse.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
