Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
My relationship just ended, that I was not ready to give up on. There was a lot that went into why it ended, but it’s not important to my actual question. How the hell do I even get myself to move on? Especially when I wasn’t ready to give up on it yet?? Some important context is that there was a period of over a half a year previously when we were broken up and then eventually reconnected. That entire time, I was never able to give up on hoping for a reconciliation. I kept dreaming and fantasizing. I never got myself to move on then. And I’m scared I will be stuck there again. I can feel my brain constantly trying to go back to dreaming up reconciliation scenarios. I desperately don’t want to do that again. I need to give it up and move on, I know this, but I don’t know how. I am in therapy, and therapy has been helping me realize the ways the relationship was becoming ill and faltering beforehand. And how it wasn’t going to serve who I am now, how I’ve changed into the person I am now over the lifetime of the relationship.
A common thing people have been telling me is get out, keep yourself busy, try new things, etc. And it’s not that I don’t see the wisdom in that. But I’ve been a homebody bordering on reclusiveness for a while, and I cannot handle going from that straight into doing everything all the time. I need other things to try and persuade my mind to go forward, while I’m trying to add more things to keep myself busy in a more sustainable manner and not burn myself out quickly. Other strategies to try and persuade my brain to leave that behind and go forward, instead of hiding within nostalgic memories and deluding myself that somehow it will work out again. I’m not very good at being kind at myself right now about this, which I am trying to work on, but I’m so scared of getting stuck in fantasyland again.
Stuck in the Quicksand
I think you’re making a mistake that a lot of people make when a relationship ends: they try to push through it without actually stopping to process it.
It’s understandable; the feeling is awful, you feel like a part of you has been ripped away and the last thing you want is to feel like this for even a nanosecond longer than you absolutely have to. But the thing is: you can’t avoid pain. Pain is inevitable.
But there’s pain and then there’s pain. There’s the pain of something rotting and festering, and then there’s the pain of healing. The pain that comes when a boil has been lanced and is being drained, when a wound is being debrided and disinfected before being stitched up, when a break is being set and you’re having to prepare for the long dull ache of the bone knitting. And there’s the pain of physical therapy and rehab, the burning and throbbing and grinding of trying to get yourself back into working order.
You have spent months dreaming and fantasizing about making this relationship work and it didn’t. You spent time trying to put it behind you and so far it hasn’t happened. What it seems like you haven’t done is sat down and just properly mourned it. To really just let yourself cry about everything that you now know is impossible, to mourn what you thought could have been and for the time and energy you spent on a person and a relationship that didn’t deserve you. And while the person – or the relationship – may not deserve your tears, your dreams do. It’s always a shame, a literal crying shame, when a dream dies; even when the dream itself was a fool’s errand, it’s still a tragedy.
So I think what you need is not to fantasize about it working out or to think about what might have been, but to sit down and really grapple with what was, to let yourself feel the frustration, the sadness, the anger about it all. It’s not fair, it’s not right, you lost something precious, even if you don’t know what it was. That’s all something to mourn. That’s something to rage about. To let yourself finally express all the feelings that’ve been shoved away into the attic of your heart and to say all the words that’ve been locked behind the barrier of your teeth.
Take a night and just mourn. Scream at the moon about how you were done wrong. Yell into the night about how fucked it is that things ended like this, how you gave your time, love and energy to a relationship that was rotten at its core and how betrayed you feel. Acknowledge your part in it, as much as your ex, recognize the ways that you tried to hold on when you should have been letting go.
Then, when your tears are spent and your ribs and shoulders ache from the sobbing… take all of that and just let it go. Let it disintegrate and blow away like cinders on the night winds. Make it literal, even – take the photos and letters and trinkets of this relationship that crumbled and burn them in a ceremonial fire; throw your rage and your sadness and your regrets into the fire with them and let yourself just be empty for a moment.
And then, you’ve pulled the splinters and shards of regret and remorse out of your heart, when you’ve allowed yourself to mourn what was and what could have been… you forgive yourself. You, like so many before you, have committed the crime of loving not wisely, but too well, and that’s not a crime that deserves recrimination. That’s something that deserves your forgiveness, for doing the best you could at the time, with the resources you had. And if you spent more time trying to make something work because you were holding onto a dream more than on the reality… well, that’s what the forgiveness is for.
This is going to hurt. It’s going to suck. It’s going to mean looking at things you don’t want to look at and facing things that you know intellectually but haven’t let your heart acknowledge. But it’s the sort of pain that comes with removing something that’s been wedged into you for so long that you almost can’t remember life without that familiar pain. The pain you feel upon its removal is the pain of release, of relief, of things returning to the shape they had before they were shoved around and distorted.
And forgiving yourself is going to sting worse than anything else, because it requires that you be honest with yourself. It requires facing the mistakes you made, the illusions you hid behind, all of it. But it’s the pain of disinfectant, the pain of cleaning out the sepsis, and that gets replaced with the understanding that the healing has begun and that you have accepted yourself, warts and all, and realized that you’re still deserving of love and care. From yourself and for yourself, most of all.
Let yourself process this. Let yourself mourn. Let yourself feel all those feelings while you say goodbye, so long and go to hell to all the things that you have had to accept and acknowledge about that relationship and forgive yourself for being perfectly imperfectly human.
That’s when you’ll be ready, and able, to put this behind you and move forward.
Good luck.
Good Morning Dr. NerdLove,
It’s been some time since I wrote a letter but I feel I must now. Getting out of my comfort zone and making a Hinge account. Having my friends take pictures of me during events that show off who I am. I’m not the most conventionally attractive man but I want to have this in the background while most of my dating efforts go in person. To my surprise they didn’t think this was a weird request and were very enthusiastic to help me.
It’s been a brutal year. I moved out of my mom’s house finally after my abusive sister started threatening her life. Went to court and got the restraining order and we’ve consigned her to the void where she belongs.
I’ve been reconnecting heavily with who I am at my core. All the traits I thought made me weak are actually my strengths. I’m very sensitive, empathetic and kind. I had these traits beaten out of me from my experiences but it’s been a long, painful process of recovering my lost identity. I always loved animals and nature so I’ve been reconnecting with that. Trying to find an animal sanctuary or space to explore that and meet like-minded people. Dnd goes well as usual, made one of my players cry but in a good way haha.
Also have gotten into the emo/grunge/punk scene and have been going to a lot of concerts. Since I’ve hit 30 this year I really have found I don’t give a shit how people see me anymore. I am who I am and that means dressing how I like, enjoying what I like and anyone who doesn’t like that can fuck off. I no longer apologize for my existence or values.
My friends have been telling me that I am a very personable, interesting and fun guy and definitely have a chance of meeting a woman I click with. Been trying to internalize these things as I think my friends are being honest. Still working in therapy with feelings of unworthiness and the struggle of accepting love from others.
And I have concrete evidence I am attractive to some people but sadly all the chances I got for some sexy times weren’t healthy. One was an admittedly attractive woman who wanted to cheat on her husband. Another was an 18-year-old who boldly asked me to take her home which I naturally turned down. I guess in that regard being single is now out of choice.
Another point in my favor was getting a gogo dancer and model’s phone number. Still working this thread but one of my woman friends put it into perspective and said “this is a gogo dancer… they don’t just give that out to anyone.”
I’ve changed my life dramatically over the last 3 years. For the better.
Still, I struggle with feelings of “I probably shouldn’t bother her…” or “what if she thinks I’m a weirdo for talking to her?”
I’m afraid of offending or overstepping boundaries even though if I do get rejected, usually politely, I just move on and drop the subject. Though one time I tried to approach a woman and she physically gagged and ran away. I wasn’t even offended, just flabbergasted like “Damn, that was rude!”
I still wait for the flashing, neon signs above a woman’s head that say “HI I LIKE YOU LETS CHAT!” Guess I feel like I’m committing some unforgivable offense by mildly inconveniencing someone who doesn’t want to talk to me and then politely leaving them be. It’s the only way forward but it’s rough going.
This feels like the last hurdle I need to overcome before I can get out there and really have fun and make meaningful connections. I’m not anxious about sex or being fun on dates, I’ve read enough advice on that stuff and I’m gonna trust myself. In the words of a certain space cowboy: “whatever happens, happens…”
I just need to find that confidence to step forward, see someone I think is cute, have been hanging out with and be like “hey you’re cool do you want to hang out sometime” without feeling like I committed some kind of crime if she’s not into it.
Unsmooth Criminal
I think you need to take a second and actually look at the disconnect between the first half of your letter and the second.
No, seriously. You list all the ways that you’ve grown, all the ways you’ve changed, all the things you’ve done that’ve improved your life. You talk about the things that you’ve learned about yourself, the ways that you’ve had your self-limiting beliefs challenged and proven to be false. You’ve talked about your friends, about your accomplishments, your hobbies, the things that you’ve been doing to live a richer, fuller, more interesting life.
Then you talk about how you think that talking to someone is an imposition on them and that you’re bothering them by existing.
These are two things that can’t logically exist with one another. You’ve made all this progress, progress and improvement that you should be incredibly proud of, and then you turn around and dismiss it all because you think that your presence and attention is obnoxious at best and upsetting at worst.
Sometimes you have to be willing to accept that maybe, just maybe, you’re kinda awesome and people dig you. Sometimes you have to realize that the voice in your head saying “well, what if I’m making their day worse by making polite conversation?” is the voice of who you were in the past, desperately clinging to your soul and trying to get another toehold so it can crawl back in. You have to trust that the person who has made all those changes, the person who’s made all those improvements, whose living a much better life than he was not even a year ago is someone who not only knows what he’s doing, but who people will want to get to know.
Just as importantly, you have to trust them to let you know when your presence is unwanted or when they’re not interested. That means not rejecting yourself in advance – you’re saying that you know their minds better than they do, which is the height of not just arrogance but presumption. Yes, there’re times when your presence or attention isn’t going to be wanted – people have all sorts of ways of throwing up the “do not disturb” signs, and you recognize those. But there’re just as many times when someone will be happy to talk to someone who’s chill and kinda cool. And if they’re not feeling it… well, you can take a moment to thank them for their time and bounce.
Now, one thing that can help, especially as you’re building your confidence, is to give yourself an artificial time constraint. That is: you aren’t going to talk to someone until you get a date or you get shot down or told to go away; you’re going to give yourself a brief window to just have a chat with someone and then move on. And, more importantly, you’re going to enlist their help in making sure that you keep that time constraint, by telling them up front “So, I’ve only got a couple minutes before I have to catch up with my friends but I really wanted to ask you about the book you’re reading,” or “May I ask you something very quickly? I’ve only got a couple of minutes left on my lunch break, but I wanted to ask you: where did you get your tattoos done? I really like the linework and color…”
Knowing that you’re only going to be talking for a few minutes at the most means that you aren’t’ going to have time for doubts or for letting your brainweasels get rowdy. And it will mean that the person you’re talking to isn’t going to worry that this person is going to sit down and monopolize her time. You’re just going to have a couple minutes to talk about whatever excuse you’ll use to start the conversation, then wrap things up and move on. And in doing so: you’ll be teaching yourself that you’re not a bother or a time-murderer. You’ll be getting used to being social, getting to know people and making little connections that can build over time.
And then one of the times that you decide to use these artificial time constraints for a practice run, you’ll realize that the person you’re talking to is feeling pretty good about talking to you. You’ll notice that the conversation’s flowing pretty freely, that she’s really enthusiastic in her participation, even starting to ask questions about you. And in those moments, you’ll realize that hey, maybe your “friends” can wait a little longer, or you can take a few more moments before you have to “get back to work”.
Those will be the moments when you realize that you don’t need the training wheels any more. You can still use the time constraint to ease into a conversation at times when a lengthy chat may not be appropriate… but it’ll be one more tool in your collection for meeting people, connecting with them and starting something that may turn into something beautiful.
But to get there… well, first you’re going to have to start trusting yourself and trusting in all the work that you’ve been doing.
Don’t undo all the progress you’ve made by falling back into the old way of thinking and giving access to the jerk you’ve spent so much time kicking out of your head. Start trusting in yourself and in the people you’re hoping to meet… you’re not nearly at risk of wasting their time or yours as you fear.
Good luck.
