a ray of sunshine in the dark world of breakups...
Breakups are shit. It’s an unavoidable fact of life. There’s nothing worse than having the person you loved/were falling in love with turn around and tell you they are no longer in need of your company, depart into the sunset and happily live their life without you. Or even worse: with someone else.
I recently went through my first proper breakup and consequently feel the need to share my new found wisdom on the subject. After 20 years of nothing but meaningless flings, I finally got into an actual full-blown relationship. (What can I say? I like bad guys) I thought it would last at least until graduation. He acted like we were about to get married. He made me dinner. He bought me clothes.
It lasted 5 weeks. Then he broke up with me.
I spent the next day on-off crying in my room and unable to do anything apart from read “It’s called a breakup because it’s broken”*. I despaired at the thought of spending the night alone. I called a few friends to see if anyone was free to let me stay over to spare myself from that torture. No one was.
The best thing about relationships is having what people refer to as an “other half”. Not saying the single life morphs you into only half a person, but unless you and your guy are long distance, if things are getting serious you’re probably seeing each other most days, stay over at each other’s houses and you’ve got someone at the end of the phone who’s always willing chat or come over. And unless you’re close with your housemates or just have a very, very good friend it’s hard to recapture that level of intimacy.
But anyway, back to the awful prospect of sleeping alone in my heartbroken state… I thought it would be unbearable. In reality, I fell asleep at 10 o clock as a result of having no sleep the night before because I was too busy being dumped; then got up the next day with a clearer head and a sudden glimpse of the end of the heartbreak tunnel. I got on with my life. I worked on my assignments, started planning my gap year and enjoyed some “Alisha time”. A realisation dawned on me: you can be alone without being lonely. You can, to use a really cliché phrase, be your own best friend. And you need to be in order to get through life.
Sometimes I feel sad about my lost love, I miss having someone to cuddle, but then I think back to the time I was feeling the most shit about things, and how I got on with it, and realised that, however much I liked him, I don’t need him. It is possible to live your life and be happy without a boyfriend. In fact, I kind of like the fact that while my sickeningly loved up girlfriends are saving up to move in with their long-term boyfriends, I’m saving up for exciting travels on my gap year.
So for all the ladies out there going through a breakup right now, there’s a point where you’ll experience an epiphany: you can move on. So when you feel upset, think back to how you got to that point all through your own strength of mind. Or if you don’t feel like that just yet, look forward to the day that you will. Because you’re a strong woman with plenty going for you, and you don’t require a shitty excuse for a guy who is incapable of appreciating a good thing when he has one.
Because you don’t need him. You need you.
*This book is amazing, if you don’t already have it, seriously, buy it.
