When your ex is happy being single. Oh my God, when this happens, it’s SO painful. Seeing your ex-be happy can almost drive you insane. So, let’s talk about how to cope with your ex-girlfriend’s unexpected happiness after a breakup, while you’re still feeling heartbroken! 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.
Man, it is a hard pill to swallow when you can see your ex girlfriend being happy as a single. Now, let’s be real. Not every man struggles with breakups. Especially securely attached men probably are relatively fine, unless it was a very long-term relationship. But especially if you’re in the camp of the type of men who really are impacted by your breakup beyond just feeling a little bit sad for a few weeks, then you must be going through more pain than you ever imagined possible. I think there are few things in life that are as painful as struggling with a breakup, and seeing your ex-girlfriend act as if it’s nothing, or worse, she’s quite literally happy, satisfied, as if the breakup was the best thing that ever happened to her.
I actually think this isn’t just a breakup-specific scenario. When you are not coping with something as good as others, it really makes you feel isolated. And lonely. Sometimes it can even make you feel being treated unfairly. And it can even cause you to become bitter or angry. I remember, when I got stuck during covid, maybe about 7000 kilometers or so away from all my friends. I saw all of them continuing with their lives, while my life was literally over. I lost all my connections back then, gradually. And I was hurting like crazy seeing everybody be happy while my world was turned upside down. No home. No girlfriend. No job and business any longer. Just going on social media gave me anxiety and pain because I could see what I didn’t have, and what everybody else had.
That’s just like seeing your ex-girlfriend being happy after a breakup. She has so many things and you have nothing. Your world has stopped spinning. Hers not only continued spinning, it seems as if it’s spinning faster than before. It seems as if she’s full of life now. When your ex radiates happiness and smiles a lot after she left you, that’s the hardest pill to swallow for any man. Jesus, man, that hurts! Oh fuck, it’s unbearable. It makes you wonder if she’s right about being so happy.
Were you the one who was holding her back all this time? Were you the one who stopped her from smiling? And now that you’re gone, she can finally let out her true, happy nature? Are you that oppressive? That negative? That distasteful? There are a lot of things that a man can read into his ex-girlfriend being happy as a single woman. Certainly, the hardest part of it all may be that to you, being single and alone again is extremely painful. But to her, singleness is almost like a gift from the heavens.
Now, I have made countless posts already about the difficulty of moving on, being alone after the breakup, coping with anxiety, and so on. So, I want to talk about a different angle. That angle is… Guess what…? Your ex is probably not as happy as you think she is. You’re not as bad as you think you are. And all of the things you’re feeling, she’s also feeling in similar ways, and everything that you can observe is only relative to this moment right now.
Your ex girlfriend is likely doing just exactly the same things that you are doing, although perhaps on a more extreme level: She’s trying to put up a front that she is happy. That’s not to be said that she may not really be happy after the breakup. Women tend to crave autonomy and it’s one of the biggest reasons why they feel relieved after a breakup. But it begs the question: Is this a lasting happiness? No, not really. It’s just a veil of deception.
All of you know that same feeling. It’s called chasing a dopamine rush. I’m sure you are very familiar with the struggle of working hard, being disciplined, versus slacking off and playing games, or binging a few episodes of your favorite show. When you don’t feel good or lack confidence, you’re more likely to do something that’s easy. When you feel defeated, not good enough, question your ability to get something done, you’ll resort to binging your favorite TV show instead, or you will find some other way to procrastinate. Why? Because doing so gives you a dopamine rush. It makes you feel good and it is easy to get this dopamine.
When your ex-girlfriend seems to be extremely happy after the breakup, she will surely at the very least to a certain degree be chasing dopamine hits. Yes, she is surely feeling happy, but it’s not clear how much of this is short-lived dopamine, versus long-term happiness. That’s not to say that there won’t be ex-girlfriends who will genuinely be on the way to recovery and happiness, of course that is possible, but this is just to illustrate to you that it is easy to overestimate how happy your girlfriend is after the breakup.
It’s very tempting to compare yourself to your ex-girlfriend and see the contrast between you and her, and then feeling like something’s wrong with you because you feel that you are not where you’re supposed to be in life. After all, why can she just move on so easily, when you are still struggling, and having a smile on your face seems practically impossible? These kinds of thoughts can really mess you up.
Of course, you are feeling terrible, lonely, miss her and perhaps want to get back with her, but these are YOUR feelings. You don’t do yourself any favors if you compare yourself to your ex and what she may or may not be feeling. When you have a breakup with a woman, you should always stay inward-focused. No matter what your ex-girlfriend is feeling, it doesn’t change anything about how it feels inside of you.
You can only influence what’s within your own control, and what’s in your control is you, your thoughts and your actions. And by focusing on controlling these, you are able to change them for the better. By thinking a lot about how your ex-girlfriend could be so happy, you’re taking that power away from yourself. I know that you are struggling a lot with the thoughts of how your ex-girlfriend is enjoying her time without you, but if you truly want to feel better and overcome this pain, then you have to remove your attention from your ex-girlfriend and direct it toward yourself. I know this isn’t easy, but it’s important to do so.
The best thing you can do to help you achieve this is turn off any ways that you could see how happy your ex-girlfriend is. Seeing your ex-girlfriend moving on quickly is the most painful torture in the beginning of a breakup. But at least, it gets easier with time. So it would be a good idea to turn off any notifications, mute her social media profiles, and perhaps in general, stay off social media more than usual to not see posts from mutual friends where she appears to be happily hanging out with them.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be social. Quite the opposite. You should spend more time with your friends, make new friendships offline, go hit the gym, or meet new people at random activities. There are so many things to explore. There are quite literally too many things to try for one person within their lifetimes. I’m not suggesting you have to try out 20.000 different things. That will probably backfire.
But it’s important to get back to being curious about living life. If there is one thing that I would encourage men to emulate from women’s behavior is to be a little bit more outgoing and try to recreate your identity faster. A lot of guys spend too much time in their mancaves, being depressed, feeling defeated and so on.
While I do think that a lot of women do this to the extreme, which isn’t healthy either, I think being somewhere in the middle, and actively focusing on yourself and taking action to find new ways of being happy is crucial. So, with all of this said. Whether you are brave enough to take the leap and take some action to find your own personal type of happiness, at the very least, don’t try to compare yourself to your ex-girlfriend’s happiness levels. Her current stage in the breakup recovery doesn’t matter. What matters is YOUR OWN breakup recovery.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
