How to let go of her and move on when you’re stuck in the past. Has your breakup been quite a while in the past? Easily at least 4-6 months, maybe for some of you it’s been way longer than that. And you just can’t get over your ex-girlfriend? You broke up such a long time ago, but it still feels to you as if it only was yesterday, and your feelings for her practically haven’t changed at all? You still love her as if you only broke up a week ago? Let’s talk about how you can finally stop being stuck missing your ex-girlfriend and maybe even start dating other women again.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriends. If you’re still stuck in the past, and to you it feels like no time has passed since you and your ex-girlfriend broke up, then believe me, I really can relate. It’s so hard to deal with it when the months go by, and you think you should be getting better, but despite everything, you keep on missing your ex-girlfriend. 

You keep on wanting her back, and you keep on comparing her with everything that you’ve got going on in your life — and most likely, you’re also comparing her with other women. And because of all of that, you can’t move forward with your life. I’m sure a lot of you guys want to move on, be happy, find a new girlfriend and stop being miserable. But despite all of that, you just can’t let go of your feelings for her. 

You keep circling back to her. What you had was great. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternative of being single, or being with a girl who just doesn’t seem to have that magic spark that you had with your ex… Is that roughly how you feel? That you’d rather stay nostalgic of what you had in the past, rather than looking forward and being appreciative of your present? It’s a difficult life situation to go through as a man.

Perhaps a part of that also has to do with the fact that real chemistry is rare, and so a lot of it has to do with you really fighting hard to find the right girl, because men have to try harder to get a woman’s attention, than the other way around.

On top of that, let’s be real, it doesn’t always feel as if it is easy to find a good woman to date. Maybe she’s too conservative, or maybe too sexual. Maybe she’s not smart enough and you can’t keep up a good conversation, maybe she doesn’t have the same lifestyle as you, or she doesn’t like to cook certain types of foods. There are all kinds of turn-offs.

And at other times, it’s the reverse. Either you get rejected, or she’s just generally not interested in you and you get ghosted relatively quickly. There are a lot of variables that go into dating, and for a man, we tend to really get hung up on a girlfriend because it’s not exactly easy for us to find the right girl. And once we have her, we feel like holding on for dear life to her. It’s really understandable. Even a woman, who clearly has far more options than a man, can still relate to the struggle of not meeting the person who feels compatible with you.

And so naturally, we would rather stay emotionally in the past, with the girl that we thought was the right one for us. Maybe you wanted to marry your ex-girlfriend one day. Maybe you thought you would have kids in the future. And now you really don’t want to go through any of that dating hassle again. Your ex-girlfriend was good enough. And whatever the reason was for why things didn’t work out, I’m sure in your mind, you could make it work again. I’m sure you think your breakup wasn’t meant to happen and that no woman can possibly measure up to this relationship, that felt like it was perfect for you.

And this kind of thinking, which I think is very normal after a breakup, especially for a man who has a hard time finding a new girlfriend… It kind of reminds me of something that I thought about recently. It’s been plastered all over social media in the last few years: You often hear it nowadays that men say to themselves, oh, there are no more traditional women out there. It’s hard to find a good girl. They are all too promiscuous. But that, of course, is a mindset problem. There are great women out there, the men who complain about this are just not looking in the right places and making excuses for why they can’t find that type of woman. Sure, on average things have changed in society, but in the end, it is what we make of it. We have a choice to go to the places where women with a similar mindset like ours hang out.

Breakups lead to a similar mindset where you focus only on the bad aspects. With a breakup, when you bank all your emotional investment on your ex-girlfriend, and when you tell yourself that you can never find another woman like her, you’re sort of doing the same thing. If you’re still stuck in the past, months after the breakup, or maybe it’s been even a year or longer, then I bet that you are giving the relationship with your ex-girlfriend far too much weight, and you’re not seeing all the great opportunities that are right in front of you.

Not just romantically, but in terms of your overall life, in general. In the last years I had to deal a lot with grief and loss, and I honestly haven’t done nearly enough to live life and enjoy it, to live it in a way that I’d be happy and proud to remember it. And that is often what we do after a breakup with a woman as well. We kind of just get stuck in the past, paralyzed and unable to move forward, and we don’t appreciate what we have going on right now, in the here and now.

I think that appreciating what’s right in front of us is a choice. It’s something that we can do every single day. You can choose to either stay stuck in the past, or you have to take some risks. Let go of the past, bury it and take the risk that it’ll be gone forever. And you’ll also have to try out lots of new uncertain things, that may or may not play out for you the way you had hoped.

You will have to make new friends, move to a new city, start dating new women, go out to social events and meet people who could maybe become girlfriends in the future. Everything that you are going to do, now that you’re single, is going to carry some risk. I know that’s not something you want to deal with when everything with your ex-girlfriend was so perfect. But that’s the only way how you can move on from your ex-girlfriend if you feel stuck. 

Sometimes, the past is the past and it will always stay that way. We just cannot get it back, no matter how much we wish it would happen. And at the same time, something just as great is practically around the corner, but because we stay so focused on what’s already a finished conclusion, we turn our future opportunities already into forgone conclusions, where we tell ourselves that anything that’s about to happen in the future could never be as great as what we had back then.

But that, of course, is silly. It’s not true. You can meet a great woman again. You can have fun with your friends again. You can feel confident, smart, sexy, desired, and so much more. I’m sure your ex-girlfriend was an amazing woman, and I bet she made you feel amazing. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t also live an amazing life without her, and in the future, find another woman who is going to make you feel just as amazing.

It’s extremely simple advice to be honest, but if you want to let go of the past with your ex-girlfriend, then you have to live in the present. It may be simple advice, but I know it’s not easy to follow through on it.

So I would suggest to you to brainstorm right now about one thing you could do in your life to live in the moment. To enjoy life. Is it going to the gym? Or traveling somewhere? Learning to surf, to climb, to play the guitar, to skate, to paraglide, or anything else that seems exciting? Or perhaps it could be something even simpler, like going to the movies with your best friends. 

Finding peace after your breakup is all about finding peace in the moment with simple things that are good for you. Don’t reflect so much on the past. Don’t think about your ex-girlfriend. Find things that you can do right now, or tomorrow, or latest within the week. Something that shows you that right now is the best time to live. There’s a great song, written by Jason Mraz, that captures the idea perfectly: 

Living in the moment, living my life, easy and breazy, with peace in my mind.
With peace in my heart, with peace in my soul, whereever I’m going, I’m already home.

You have to enjoy the things that you have. That includes women whom you could date. There are many great women, and sometimes we can’t see that because we’re so occupied with the past, or finding the girl who’s just as great as our ex-girlfriend.

But you’d never find a woman exactly like your ex, nor should you. What you should do, is live your life in the moment, see where life takes you without worry, and if things don’t work out for you, then you keep on going until you find something that gives you that happiness. We only get stuck when we don’t use every day as a brand new opportunity to find something to enjoy, on that given day. So, I hope you’ll give it a try, and find something that brings you back into the moment, away from the past.

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