When you really struggle to move on from your ex gf — what are you supposed to do when you just can’t forget her? Man, I feel for a lot of you guys. When you can’t cope with the breakup, and perhaps you’re going through one of your biggest heartbreaks ever, it can be so insanely difficult to not go insane with everything you’re going through. It’s an awful feeling when the days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you still miss her like it was yesterday. And the worst part is that it’s almost like time stands still. You may have been broken up for just two weeks, but it feels like it’s been months already. Breakups can be insanely overwhelming for men, so let’s talk about how to properly move on when you just can’t seem to get back on track with your life.

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. Struggling to move on from an ex-girlfriend really is an awful experience. As a man, your entire world order can be flipped upside down when your ex no longer is a part of your life. It’s hard to rebuild your life seemingly from scratch. And quite frankly, I think when most guys struggle to move on from their ex-girlfriend, the problem is that they, in fact, aren’t properly trying to rebuild their lives, but instead, they are spending a lot of their time clinging to their ex-girlfriend, to the old relationship, to the old life and all the comforts that came along with it. That’s a pretty reasonable and natural emotional response, but it really explains why some of you might be struggling a lot with getting over your ex-girlfriend.

As a man, life’s always about struggle. You always have to work hard in life to get the things you want. You need to develop charisma to approach a woman. You need to have the discipline at the gym to look attractive for these women to not reject you. You need financial stability and wealth for a woman to want to commit to you. And so on. Of course, women can also struggle in life, but generally speaking, especially in the area of love, you either fight hard to be as attractive as possible as a man, or you will be on the losing end.

So, life is always a constant battle. Do you fight and come out stronger as the winner? Or do you give up and go back into your shell, where life is convenient, but you may stagnate or even take steps back in life? Life’s a struggle. And we always have two choices of how we would like to struggle.

You can choose to struggle at the gym to get fit and at times, sure, you’ll hate the pain. Or you can choose to struggle with being seen as attractive. And worse, you would struggle perhaps with being overweight, having health issues, and so on. So we can always choose our struggles. Are we willing to move our muscles and to work on whatever is causing us pain? Or are we going to do something that will just briefly feel good? Like, for example, buying that bag of Oreos and chips and eating it all in one sitting over a Netflix show. Obviously, the right choice would be to have discipline and say “Nah, not today,” right?

With a breakup, you have to make these same types of decisions. You can either struggle by focusing on your breakup, or more precisely, your ex-girlfriend. But then, you will be stuck in place, and eventually, you are going to struggle in other areas of your life. Or, you can try to find a different kind of struggle. You can choose to pursue something new in your life, to no longer look back to what used to be comfortable and felt like home, and instead, begin to build a new home, a new daily routine, new habits, new ambitions, new types of relationships to pursue, and so on. All of these and more require work, and will surely be accompanied by some intense struggle. Sometimes, it will feel as if all of it is just too much than you can handle. But that’s the cycle of all new beginnings.

For example, if you have never been a gym goer or generally have never been fit at all, then hitting the gym for the first time to transform yourself will be a massive struggle. But once you reach a certain level of transformation, everybody is going to respect you. If you’ve never been confident talking to women, then working on your social skills and learning to be charismatic will be extremely difficult, but with time, you will become a lot more attractive to everybody that you meet. 

If you are struggling to move on from your ex-girlfriend, then perhaps, finding a different kind of struggle can become very empowering for you and eventually will make you feel extremely good. Let me give you a simple example. I’m a skinny-type guy. I’ve always been on the smaller side. I never hit the gym until my late 20s, and even already around my late 20s, I was still very shy. Being at the gym just felt awkward to me.

Once I started going to the gym regularly, eventually I really found my confidence. And there was this exercise that I sucked at so much early on: Cable crossovers for the pecs and delts. Pulling the cable to lift the weights was so hard in the beginning, even with very little weight. But with time, that exercise became my go-to machine to push a little bit harder, to add a little bit more weight, to the point where it’s so heavy that I had to scream to lift the weights beyond the initial momentum point.

Once you get good at something like this, and really accept the struggle to push your limit, it feels absolutely amazing. What feels impossible, embarrassing, and like an insurmountable challenge, eventually becomes almost like a game, where you try to see how much further you can push yourself.

That’s the kind of struggle that I want you to be going through right now. I know that you are so focused on your ex-girlfriend, and you’re working through the pain of losing her over, and over. You spend all your days thinking about her, missing her, you miss falling asleep together, or going to random restaurants and places. Teasing her, laughing together, or just watching a good movie was the highlight of your day.

I know it’s not easy to no longer have all of these things in your life. But right now, if you really want to move on, then find something to struggle with that seems even harder, even more painful than missing your ex-girlfriend. 

Just like my metaphor about the gym exercise that I became really good at, it’s good for you if you find something new for your life that doesn’t seem to be fun. Pick something that’s too much of a challenge. And slowly, day by day, get better at it, until you hit the breaking point where you are good enough to really enjoy what you’re doing. And then you’re able to really push yourself to the next level. Ascend and transform yourself into something that you think is impossible to achieve right now. There’s something magical that happens to a man when he surpasses his limits and challenges himself. We men LOVE competitiveness and competence. We are built to struggle because once we overcome it, we feel absolutely unstoppable.

If you’re struggling because you are always occupied with the thoughts about your ex, then it means that you are probably not spending enough time on something that feels equally painful. The thing is, you will never turn that pain of losing your ex-girlfriend into something that you can enjoy. Looking back at your relationship with her will hurt for a long time. And even when you no longer miss her and when you’re technically over her, it’ll still be a little bit of a bittersweet feeling when you think back to your relationship with your ex-girlfriend.

So instead of looking back and being focused on the pain of the breakup, which is extremely unproductive and doesn’t help you improve and grow in a specific area of your life, find a different kind of pain that eventually can turn itself into something that you’ll enjoy doing. Go hit the gym and push yourself. Train for a half-marathon or a marathon and push yourself to see how far you can go. Join an obstacle course race and push your body to its limits to reach the finish line. Or go to the gym and try to triple your weights within the next 3 months… That sounds impossible to you if you’ve never gone to the gym, but if you’re brand new, you’d be surprised how quickly something like this is possible.

There is nothing worse than sitting in place after a breakup, and the only thing that you can think about and focus on is the struggle of thinking about your ex-girlfriend, and just feeling horrible, utterly useless, absolutely unloved and unwanted, and so much more. When you don’t occupy your mind during those kinds of times, you will likely feel worse over the coming months.

In life, you always have to keep going as a man, so the best thing you can do, at the very least, is to try to identify some new areas of your life that you would like to improve and then invite the struggle of making some of these goals happen. Many of them may never fully unfold, some of them may turn out to be something that you realized were interests that didn’t suit you, but at the very least, you moved forward and learned to challenge yourself with a positive kind of struggle, rather than being stuck with the type of struggle that only makes you fall behind in life. 

So if you can’t forget your ex-girlfriend, then now is the best time for you to set your mind to something new. Pick something that’s intimidating. Pick something that’ll be hard and painful to achieve. And over the coming months, really try to push yourself. Once you push yourself beyond some of your limits and have achieved the first small baby steps of success, you will feel proud of yourself and you will find a glimpse of happiness because you will start to notice that your life can still have meaning, success, and inspiration.

So don’t give up on your happiness. It’s out there, but you have to consciously pursue it, rather than hoping that you will start to feel better out of the blue without doing anything productive with your life. I know this is an intimidating suggestion for you, but you can. Every man has it in his DNA to push himself beyond his limits, so I know you can do it. 

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