How to move on from your long term ex girlfriend? Getting over your ex if she’s been there with you for years can be extremely rough. When you lose an ex-girlfriend who has practically been with you nearly every day, and you were probably seeing her in the morning, and falling asleep together at night, well… It’s nearly as if you have lost a part of yourself once she’s gone. Moving on from such a massive loss is so difficult, that for some guys, it nearly ruins their lives. It’s not easy to go through this. And it may be among the hardest things you’ll ever have to face in your life. So let’s talk about how to deal with all of 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. Long-term relationship breakups are the worst. I talked about this in a few of my posts already, comparing it to the scenario when you all of a sudden are left with an empty house, almost as if somebody took most of your belongings because you couldn’t pay your bills. And sometimes it feels even worse than that because perhaps you didn’t do too many things wrong. When you lose a girlfriend that you spent years with, and she moves on with her life in no time, it’s like you have been robbed of all the investments you’ve made along the way. And, sometimes it’s not even as if she’s moving on EXTREMELY fast… It’s just, that she’s moving on at a normal pace… Maybe after a few months she’s starting to date again. Maybe a year later, she’s in a relationship again. Who knows how serious it is, but either way, it’s painful to see her with another man after all this time together.
A sudden loss of a relationship where what you cherished is gone forever is never easy. If you ever lost something big or important, like a camera, a wallet, a suitcase, and so on, then man… You know how difficult it is when out of the blue, the thing you needed, is suddenly gone. Sometimes, when we lose the things important to us, we quite literally can’t go on. I mean, just imagine a photographer who needs their camera for a photoshoot, only for it to be stolen the day before his big work gig. He probably couldn’t do that photoshoot.
That’s how it feels at times with your ex-girlfriend, doesn’t it? Like you just can’t freaking go on. It’s all messed up, nothing makes sense, you really tried to go on, but without her, something’s just missing. Man, it is an earth-shattering experience. The longer the relationship lasted, the more important it feels what you have lost. And the more you’ve lost, the more defeated you feel. There’s no way you could go on if the most important thing in your life is suddenly gone. I really understand the feeling of despair, like you just can’t go. There’s no way you could forget the past. But just like that photographer who lost all their gear, your life isn’t over yet. Maybe right now, it seems like you can recover from your loss, but your life is more than this week, or next week. You can rebuild, slowly, over time. It’s not important that you get everything back right away. It’s just important that you take small steps to get over the big loss.
All new beginnings are hard. Some are harder than others. And yea, sometimes it takes a while to pick ourselves back up again. The photographer who just lost a 15k dollar camera would probably have to start with a smaller camera. Maybe he would have to take up a loan to get a new camera. Or maybe the type of work he’d do would be different for a while. But eventually, he’d get back on his feet.
After your breakup, it’s no different. In time, you will get back on your feet again. I think among the cruelest parts of a breakup is actually the harsh reality that it’s often self-inflicted pain. Or well, at least, we tend to rub salt in the wound when it’s not necessary. When we lost a girl who’s extremely precious to us, we somehow always try to relate everything to her. We compare every woman to her. Every possible relationship we could have has to match up with what we had in the past. Of course, that by itself makes no sense, because such a long-term relationship was built up and strengthened, possibly over years. After a painful loss of a long-term relationship, all the good things in life can no longer measure up. We want EXACTLY that experience. Exactly that great relationship needs to be back in our lives. Right now. Not later.
But of course, that doesn’t work. And thinking like that only makes moving on harder than it already is. After a big loss, the best thing you can do is start small with your ambitions, hopes, and dreams. That’s not to say you set the bar low for what you want after your breakup, but you shouldn’t expect to find the exact same kind of happiness overnight. Rather, newfound happiness will take time, in small incremental steps. Maybe you have some fun at the gym here or there. Maybe you’ll have one or two fun nights out with friends over the course of a few weeks. Or maybe you’ll go to some cool events every 3rd month or so.
And maybe you meet a bunch of nice women in the first one or two years after your breakup, but things just don’t click 100%. Happiness buildup after a breakup from a long-term relationship takes some time. You really have to give yourself that time and not expect to get everything that you lost back at once. Your ex-girlfriend probably filled a lot of your happiness tanks. Now you have to spend time to re-fill those tanks with other individual things that’ll make you happy until you get to the point where you are at a high enough base level of life satisfaction.
The worst thing you can do right now is to expect that moving on can be accelerated to an unrealistic speed, or that you can achieve all of it all at once. Yes, scientifically speaking there are some things that can help speed things up. Socializing, talking about the breakup, writing about it, verbalizing to yourself how all of it makes you feel, and so on.
It’s possible to strongly empower yourself positively. To hit the gym. To perhaps start reading some relationship or dating books. Maybe try to become more confident with women and slowly start dating again. To dress up more nicely and pursue some new business idea. There are all kinds of things you can and probably should do to feel happier, more fulfilled, or have a greater sense of purpose.
But that’s not to say that you should expect that just because you are doing any of these things, you will get a maximum level of happiness, or that you are magically going to forget your ex-girlfriend completely and move on as if nothing happened. Not right away and probably not even within just a few months. That is unrealistic for a long-term relationship. If we’re looking at the empty house metaphor once more: Your goal simply has to be to set a new vision for how you want to re-decorate your own house, and then start to put the new pieces together, bit by bit, whenever you can make some small progress.
If you’ve ever moved to a new city, or even a new country, then you’ll know that you don’t just buy 100 items all at once when you move in to a new place. You’ll probably get the most essential stuff, but you’re also going to add to your new home, month after month… Year after year. Filling up the empty spots in your heart after a long relationship, should be done just like that. You take the first steps for the biggest, most crucial aspects to find happiness again. What’s the one thing that can help you feel a little bit less anxious, alone, and sad? And then, you try to take more steps after that.
And of course, the first step to improve your life is scary. The first step and the first changes to redefine your life are the hardest. And when you don’t see the results you had hoped for instantly, it’s also tempting to give up again because it doesn’t measure up to what you had before. So don’t give up too fast, and keep on pursuing something new in your life that you believe can bring you a new kind of fulfillment.
And perhaps in the future, one day, when you feel a little more fulfilled again, you will probably meet some women again who make you feel in a similar way than your ex-girlfriend has done. I know it’s possible. It’s possible for every man who’s watching this. Don’t give up hope and keep on walking forward.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
