How to move on when your ex girlfriend was a good person? That one is really a rough type of breakup. Of course, many breakups are drama-filled and often couples can be quite nasty towards each other around the end of the relationship, but what if your ex-girlfriend generally wasn’t a bad person, and even around the end of the breakup, you still feel that she was treating you with respect, but somehow, things just didn’t work out between the two of you any longer? 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. Missing an ex-girlfriend is worse enough when the relationship and your ex were anything but perfect, but it gets so much worse when you actually know with certainty that she wasn’t a bad person. Finding peace when you know that you lost a girlfriend who is extremely precious is a really tough breakup.

It’s hard to sugarcoat this… A good girlfriend can haunt a man with lots of regret for many years to come. I think most guys tend to never fully forget the great women that we dated in the past, because they stand out a lot from the lower quality women who were easily jealous, were unfaithful, often picked fights, and so on. Some women and some relationships are objectively better than others. And if you have just come out of such a relationship, for whatever reason that may be, and the good qualities of your ex-girlfriend vastly outweigh the bad ones, then I’m sure you must be having a really tough time moving on from your ex.

I’m sure you miss her a lot. I’m sure you want everything that you had back, and you can’t help but think back towards all the good things that happened in the last months or years. Unfortunately, or ironically, most of the time, looking at the negative things of a relationship has been found to be a great way to move on from an ex-girlfriend, but with an ex where nothing was too bad, it’s hard to try and find reasons why you should be moving on and you can’t tell yourself that she was a bad woman to be with either.

So what should you do? Well, it’s about perspective. I think in the case of a relationship that was great, there’s no point in trying to find flaws, but at the same time, you also can’t hold yourself back by holding on to the good memories.

Great relationships are an outstanding teacher about the beauty of love. They teach us that life can be amazing and that a truly great relationship with a woman is priceless. And therefore, when you have experienced an incredibly great relationship, it’s an opportunity to learn what you want to have again in the future. The best thing we can take away from relationships is that they teach us how to live in greater harmony with the woman we love — whether the relationship was more bad or more good, we always take away some lessons for the next relationship. 

And so in my opinion, the only good way to move on after a relationship with a good woman is to try and remain positive that another great relationship will be waiting for you in the future, and you also should take note of the things that were great indicators that your relationship was healthy. When you can be grateful for the good things of your last relationship, you should look forward to find this again with another woman, and consciously work hard to find this woman.

And yes, of course, the odds of just having such a great relationship right away in a short timeframe are low, but of course, that should not be the goal. That is a long-term goal.

I think the best part about a relationship with a good woman is that you both built a life together and explored how to craft the perfect life, both individually, and as a couple. Those positive moments are almost priceless. When you can look back at those explorations with a grateful frame of mind, you may feel that you don’t have to resent all the good things that happened in the past. Instead, those good moments can be guidelines for how you want to continue with your life. 

This is of course, what a lot of men do when they had a bad relationship, when their ex-girlfriend was a bad woman, or when there was a lot of drama at the end of the relationship. In those situations, we often cling heavily on both the negative parts with a lot of pain that we’re unable to let go, and we desperately cling to the good moments, because we want them back and we believe that without them, our life no longer has meaning.

As such, bad relationships are often heavily codependent, where we completely forget who we were and make it all about what we have lost. But with a relationship with a good woman, often both partners pulled on one string and supported each other to reach their full potential. In those cases, we can look back at the good memories, and just appreciate the good moments without desperately clinging to recreate them with the same woman. Instead, they can act as your north star for what you’d like to experience again in the future. And even when aiming to recreate those good times, we don’t have to desperately seek the exact same behaviors and traits in the new woman. We can just be grateful and have a rough direction of where our new life is supposed to go, without all the burden of the regret and pain that a bad relationship or a bad woman often brings with it. That gratitude for a great relationship is worth gold. There’s so much good stuff to learn from it.

If you and your ex-girlfriend were a strong support system for each other, then you should identify which areas of your life were greatly supported by your ex-girlfriend and why you are so grateful for this support. Whatever she did for you that you appreciated a lot, is likely very important to you on a fundamental level, and so you should see if you can double down on some of these areas of your life. Now that you’re single again, you can take the next best step in the right direction, and identify goals, hopes, and dreams that you want to pursue that align with the things that made you happy in your last relationship. It’s not always necessary to fully reinvent ourselves if the last relationship didn’t take too much away from your own identity and happiness. Some relationships generally just add to you, rather than subtracting from you.

So if you are able to move forward with positivity towards old or new goals, then eventually you will forget the slightly bittersweet heartache of losing your girlfriend. Even if right now, it still stings a lot that you and your ex-girlfriend had to call it quits, but if you keep going and focus on what worked in the last relationship, you’ll most likely very soon discover your gratitude and perhaps even feelings of happy nostalgia when you think back to your ex-girlfriend. Sometimes, we act as if the memories from the past, where something didn’t work out, can only be bad for us, but of course, that’s not true.

I had a lot of bad or painful memories about living in the Philippines… Not from back then. Back then I loved the place and had a great life there. But during the COVID pandemic, I lost everything I built there, and yes, for a while, I spent far too much time on the pain, the regrets, and the resentment that slowly built up. I even began disliking the Philippines for some time, even though nothing bad ever happened there. I had to remind myself consciously of the good memories, especially because those good memories were also a good reminder of what a good life I wanted to recreate again in the future. And one day, especially because I looked forward with hope and gratitude, to recreate a similar great life, but in a new home, eventually I got over all the pain.

So try to find the good parts of your relationship and try to be grateful for the things that went right, rather than focusing on those that went wrong. This is the best type of moving on from a relationship that you as a man can have.

If your ex-girlfriend was a good woman, then you should try to get out of your heartache zone where you regret losing her. It’s very satisfying when you look back towards a great girlfriend and be grateful and perhaps smile about the good experiences that you had together. But to get to that point, the first step, of course, is to forget the negative aspects of the temporary, short-lived breakup pain right after losing that relationship. It might make sense to write a gratitude letter or journal towards the relationship, simply to process all the great memories that you are grateful for. 

And then you could write a future vision statement for your life to visualize what type of similar memories and experiences you would like to have in the future with another woman. I did this very same thing with my plan to move to Japan… Eventually, I was done with being heartbroken because something in the past didn’t work out, and instead of being stuck in the past, I focused on what had worked for me in the past, and I wrote an actual list of everything that I wanted to bring back into my life. And then, I took real steps to work on these.

The first step for you has to be to reframe your breakup in a positive way. It’s not easy, but especially with a good, kind-hearted ex-girlfriend, it’s possible to look back with gratitude, rather than remorse or regret. I hope you can find that positivity so that you can draft a new plan. A new future. I’m sure you already know exactly what you loved about your ex-girlfriend and the relationships — after all she was a good woman, right? So visualize your happy future life. See which parts of the last relationship that you want to replicate. Put it down on paper and verbalize exactly what you want to find in your next relationship and life. And then ask yourself how you can find the same things again in the future. This approach worked for me to be happy again, and I’m sure it will work for you as well.

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