How to move on from an ex gf who hurt you? Ah man, breakups, to say they suck would be an understatement, but it gets much harder when your ex-girlfriend hurt you shortly before the breakup. Or maybe right after. Both men and women can say and do extremely inconsiderate things when emotions are at a peak negative state… It’s difficult to recover from certain things when your ex-girlfriend practically tried to stab your heart one last time and tried to twist the knife before leaving. So, let’s talk about how to move on when your ex hurt you badly.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I talk about moving on from breakups for guys. If you had a breakup, then there’s a high chance that you may have had a rather painful breakup that was likely accompanied by a lot of drama. I think we often make the mistake of believing that our relationship was worse than the average relationship, but statistically speaking, more than 50% of all relationships ended with drama. The exact number might actually be more in the 70% range. So if you had a pretty bad breakup where you and your ex-girlfriend had a lot of fighting going on in the last few months, don’t feel like you are in the worst possible scenario. Bad breakups aren’t nice to experience, but at least you can find some comfort in knowing that you’re not alone in the experience. 

But, I’m sure this will only be a small relief given the fact that your girlfriend hurt you in bad ways, probably because of the drama. Relationships can end pretty messy and unfortunately, I think women can be more vicious in the last months of a breakup because men are generally more idealistic and hopeful about relationships, whereas women are quite determined to leave men when they feel they are no longer getting their emotional needs met. 

Also, generally, if we for example look at same sex couples, women have higher abuse and divorce rates when they date each other, whereas, for example, two men do not report the same problems. So women seem to have a stronger pattern of relationships ending in bad ways, so perhaps women are more confrontational and critical in general than men. Certainly it’s supported by other marriage studies on marriages between a man and a woman. So maybe your breakup didn’t end in the best way.

Maybe your ex-girlfriend became cold, cruel, mean, or aggressive shortly before the breakup? Or maybe she has done certain things that were designed to agitate you or get a reaction out of you, such as, for example, trying to make you jealous with other men? Did she pick fights with you on purpose, or perhaps she acted disrespectful towards you by insinuating that you weren’t a man who could be relied on?

There are all kinds of ways your ex-girlfriend could make you feel bad. Like you felt let down because she was trying to win a fight against you, when she saw you more as an enemy rather than a partner to fight together, to… Well, not to fight against each other, but rather, to fight for the relationship. These kinds of behaviors where an ex-girlfriend tries to have the last laugh, or the last win to make you feel worse than you made her feel worse is really painful, not only because her behavior of intentionally trying to hurt you is disappointing by itself, but women know where to twist the knife to really make it hurt. 

There’s actually an extremely funny comedy bit by Dane Cook, where he talks about women winning 99.9999% of all fights. In the bit, he talks about how women act like ninjas. That they plant little detonators in our brains, but they don’t explode yet. They just planted them there, so they can trigger them later on with that small comment about our father, to target our daddy issues, or things like that. The idea, which is really funny in the bit, is to hurt us right where it hurts the most, and… well…

Your ex-girlfriend always knows what matters to you the most. Your relationship with your father or your mom. Your insecurities about work. Your desire to be a good family-man, etc… Women know how to push a man’s buttons when they want to. So if you had a drama-filled breakup, I’m sure your ex-girlfriend did or said something that hurt you like crazy, and that wound is probably still lingering right now. You probably can’t forget what she had done, and for some of you, it may even be worse than verbal ninja tactic abuse, but rather, she may have been cheating on you or done other awful things. 

One of the difficult things after a breakup is that we always crave closure. We try to make sense of everything that happened, and in a best-case scenario, we try to make peace with our ex-girlfriend. At the very least, if the relationship would find a happy conclusion where you both choose love, rather than war, then perhaps you could meet each other again in a few years from now, and perhaps the dream of a happy ending may still come true in the future. But this kind of closure rarely happens after a breakup. And this lack of closure, the way how your ex-girlfriend may have hurt you, and the knowledge that she did it intentionally, meaning she wanted to hurt you, is the hardest pill to swallow. 

After a relationship, more than anything we want to believe that it wasn’t all for nothing. That despite the problems in the end, our love was bigger than the hate. It’s this desire for closure that stops you from moving on from your ex-girlfriend. The worse that the breakup was, and the more your ex-girlfriend has hurt you and hates you, the more you wish to fix what you believe shouldn’t be broken in such a fundamental way.

This is why couples who had really bad breakups are more likely to get back together, because everything was extremely emotional at the end of the relationship. This isn’t to give you hope that you can get back together and try to fix what was wrong. I’m merely making the point that the more passionate both of you were at the end of the relationship, and with passion, I mean negatively passionate, the stronger the feelings are that you have for each other. And this goes in many different directions. There can be a lot of love, a lot of hate, a lot of resentment, a lot of grief and a lot of regrets.

So if your ex-girlfriend hurt you a lot, you’re naturally more likely to struggle with a lot of especially negative feelings about your ex, and you desperately want to resolve these feelings so you can finally feel better. With a bad breakup, it is crucial to accept that you cannot fix the bad things that happened between the two of you. They will forever remain with you, and fixing them shouldn’t be your goal. Even if you might get back together, the goal after a breakup is always to learn from your mistakes and start fresh with better insights on how to be a good partner, how to communicate more clearly, how to maintain healthy boundaries and stand up for yourself when your girlfriend doesn’t treat you properly. So if you are struggling with the breakup and you’re trying to figure out how to move on right now, then the best thing you can do is not to look backward and try to think about what you did wrong or what she did wrong. You only want to do this to the degree that you learn to understand where both of you went wrong.

But as soon as you have identified what caused the problems in the relationship, your goal has to be to transform all of this knowledge into positive momentum so that you can change yourself into a better version of yourself. If you don’t want to be hurt like you were in the last relationship, then you have to learn from the mistakes and then move your life in a new trajectory where you become the kind of man who doesn’t attract the type of woman where these problems occur. Likewise, you have to become the type of man who doesn’t follow behavior patterns that make your girlfriend emotionally withdraw until she reaches the point where she wants to push your buttons just to get a reaction out of you.

The only way forward after a bad relationship is to improve yourself and become more attractive as a man, so that you’re able to attract a better woman, and preferably you also have to become more conscious about the type of woman that you want to date. Sometimes, you are able to identify very early that the woman that you’re dating will be the type of woman who will punish you for your behavior in a relationship when she isn’t happy with you. 

And don’t take things personally when your ex-girlfriend went out of her way to hurt you. That might be more a reflection on her behavior, than your flaws in the relationship. It’s just not necessary to put someone down after a breakup. 

The bottom line is that you are now free to find a happier relationship, and while it may take time to get over the way that you’ve been hurt, and perhaps it will also take some time to feel hopeful about a relationship with another woman again, the time will come when you will no longer hurt, and not just that, you will feel excited about the thought of being in another relationship with a woman, and the idea of being more conscious about your relationship and making sure you will not repeat the same pattern with your new girlfriend will be something that you’ll look forward to, not something that you will be afraid of.

So don’t give up hope yet. The pain of how your ex-girlfriend hurt you is going to fade with time, and eventually, a great woman will replace all the pain with a lot of love. In the meantime, stay focused on yourself and remain positive that you can start a better life, and a better relationship in the future.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.