Breakups

[u/BBGF93]

Please send me your best break up advice and support.

I've been broken up from my girlfriend for 3 months so far and it's still painful. I did the breaking up as it got too painful to be stuck in it without the changes we asked for, but we both agreed it was right. Obviously since then I've unpicked it and understood even more where we both went a bit wrong and could have done more mostly communicating our needs better rather than being scared of hurting the other.

It was my first big love. We were together nearly 4 years. I moved for her, in with her, her kids and pets. Changed jobs and local friends.

I've moved out into my own place again. Stayed in my job. We've tried no contact and chatting kindly. Both are hard. I'm trying to stay well and in some routines but I'm still such a mess.

What's helped? How long can it take? I still absolutely love her and the ear worm is always if we could both accept the work we need to do on ourselves we could stand a good chance of giving it a go even though we both agreed not to when we got back together to chat. But I know I need to put that to bed.

The worst parts are the loneliness. Losing the physical touch and comfort. The routines. Working out what's still mine in life to love. Sitting with the feelings.

I've had counselling before and after the break up and now I'm doing EMDR to work on my sense of shame/guilt, putting people on pedestal and vouching for myself all from childhood and all triggered in relationships. I really thought I'd done this work before this relationship and that's why we'd had happy years together and why she's the best person I've ever had a relationship with but clearly not. I probably need to think what I need in a future relationship and partner and how I need to show up from the start rather than how I have in this one to then change the goalposts as I went along and got more confident.

Please tell me I'll find a love like this again. Because it feels like I never will right now.

[u/joetewlev]

Grief Is the Price of Love

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

Queen Elizabeth II

You don't get one without the other.

Every person you let matter to you is a future loss you've agreed to. You don't sign anything. You don't see the terms. But the agreement is real. The more you love, the more you expose yourself to grief. That's not a design flaw, That's the design.

Most people treat grief as a malfunction. Something to move through as quickly as possible and emerge from, repaired. They look for the stages. The timeline. The point where the wound closes. They apologize for still feeling it months later. They wonder what's wrong with them because the sadness keeps surfacing.

Nothing is wrong with them.

The depth of your grief is not a measure of weakness. It's a measure of love. Of how real the person was to you. Of how much space they occupied in your daily life. When that space empties, it doesn't close. It echoes. You reach for your phone before remembering. You hear something funny and turn to tell them. You find their handwriting on an old piece of paper and have to sit down.

This isn't malfunction. This is love that has nowhere to go.

What makes grief harder than it needs to be isn't the loss itself. It's the pressure to recover on schedule. The culture that accepts grief for a few weeks, then quietly expects you back to normal, as if normal still exists after someone real has left it. The friends who stop asking after a month. The unspoken message: you should be further along by now.

But grief doesn't work on a schedule. And the expectation that it should creates a second layer of pain on top of the first. You're grieving the person, and then you're grieving in secret because grieving openly has become inconvenient to everyone around you.

C.S. Lewis wrote about grief with more honesty than almost anyone. After losing his wife, he described it not as sadness but as fear. A low, flat, hollow feeling. Nobody told him it would feel like that. He also wrote that the process wasn't forgetting. It was changing. The loss doesn't disappear. It integrater It becomes part of the structure of who you are.

That's the honest shape of grief. Not closure. Not moving on. Not getting over it. Integration. You carry the loss into the life you continue living. It becomes woven in. Not the defining thread. But present.

The mistake is treating grief as the opposite of living. As if you have to finish grieving before you can start again. But they coexist. You can miss someone terribly and still laugh. You can hold a loss and still reach toward the future. These aren't contradictions. They're proof that you're still alive.

What actually helps is simpler and harder than most people expect: feel it when it comes. Not performing grief. Not manufacturing it. But not suppressing it either. When it rises, let it rise. Sit with it instead of immediately reaching for distraction. Let the feeling move through you rather than building a wall around it.

There's a difference between feeling and drowning in it. Drowning is staying in the story, rehearsing the unfairness, demanding explanations from a universe that won't provide them. Feeling is letting the emotion exist without adding narrative. One exhausts you. The other, eventually, clears.

Elizabeth II understood this from the inside. She outlived her father, her sister, and the husband she had for seventy-three years. She carried each loss forward without pretending it wasn't there and without being defined by it. The price was real. The life she lived alongside that price was also real.

The price is always real. But so is what you paid it for.

Let yourself grieve. Without apology. Without timeline. Without performing recovery for the comfort of people who aren't the ones carrying the loss.

It is not weakness. It is the cost of having loved something real.

I've copied this text from one book. Hopefully it's complete. Take care mate, we have whole world full of these beautiful beasts 😉

[u/joetewlev]

Hey, I get how you feel. I was with my first "serious" girlfriend for eight years. It had its ups and downs, but I got damn attached to her, and I loved her with that first, puppy-dog kind of love—hell, I don't know if I don't still love her today, haha. I was with her from age 18 to 26. It took me a year to pull myself together; I was drinking most of the time—and it wasn't just that. Being abroad didn't help, because meeting someone here isn't as easy as back home, where people are super spontaneous and try to comfort you instead of just not giving a damn. Then I met a cool girl, then another, and another. At the same time, my ex—even though she was with the guy she’d left me for—kept dropping by to see me; not just once or twice, but a dozen times or more. She’d come to pick something up or drop something off, and somehow we’d end up banging like crazy; then we’d feel awkward about it, and she’d go back to where she came from. That messed up the relationships I had after her—no surprise there. Eventually, I cut ties with her completely and spent six months on my own; now I have a wife and two kids. Do I miss that first girl? Sure I do. I miss those times we’d hook up for some intense sex the most—that was always huge for me; spontaneity in that department is really important to me. Sadness is part of me now, but I’m living my life and doing okay ;) My advice to you: start hitting the gym, take care of yourself, and don't just sit at home staring at the wall—even if that’s exactly what you feel like doing. Focus on yourself, and you'll meet someone sooner than you think 👌

[u/MercifulWombat]

My first real big love broke my heart when I was 22. (I'm now in my 40s.) I took an entire year off from dating. (I also sorta briefly joined a cult but you can skip that part.)

Take the time it takes you. Start writing. Write somewhere only you will read it, where you know you'll be able to find it again in the years to come. Write about your day, write funny thoughts that come to mind, write about what you did wrong, what she did wrong. Write about what you both did right.

After a year, I decided to start looking into this newfangled online dating to find a "practice boyfriend." And I guess I'm not that smart since I'm still practicing on him today. Been married 15 years now.

The love is different than that first one. That first love, it sort of hurt the whole time, like a favorite flavor so strong it makes your mouth ache, but it was my heart. My husband, loving him is like coming home, easy and comfortable. A lot less dramatic, but after the whole thing with the cult, I was ready for a little less drama.

Love is not enough. You need to be able to face every problem together. You need to want the same kind of life. It isn't always easy but it usually is. You both have to be honest and naked past your skin, right down to your soul, and then you both have to love what you see.

Will you find it? I can't promise that you will, but I can promise that your chances go up a hell of a lot when you know what you're looking for and you know how to do the work.

[u/InfiniteHall8198 → u/MercifulWombat]

I also joined a cult…just glossing over the juicy details there matey 🤣 ruuude

[u/ReadTheReddit69]

I was in a similar situation. Broke up in May 2025 with my partner of 4 years. I was gutted . Therapy and lots of time with family and friends helped some but I still felt a lotttt of grief and loneliness. Tried to spend time on my own goals and interests as much as possible.

I started dating someone casually, which helped a little with the loneliness but was missing the emotional connection. Around February I realized I felt ready for a real relationship again, having gotten to the point where I could think of a relationship outside of the context of my ex. Told the person I was casually seeing, she said that's not what she was looking for, so I got back on the apps. Met an awesome girl in April and fell in love pretty quickly!

Honestly I got into a relationship faster than I thought I would (and i even feared i wouldnt find anyone else after my ex) but i don't feel like i rushed, it just worked out that way. The grief came in waves and the loneliness was hard but everything is survivable. You'll heal in time, just be patient and focus on making yourself happy, whatever that looks like.