Heartbroken? Try remembering the bad times

Almost everyone I know has had at least one heartbreak, most of us have probably had more than one. I know I certainly had my fair share of lost loves before I met my wife.

I had one that made a list of the 23 reasons why she didn’t want to be with me. Luckily, one of the reasons was not that I made jokes about everything, because after she took the time to read me the list I said, “Well I guess I’m kind of happy about that list”. When she asked me what that was, I responded, “Well you could only find 23 things wrong with me and you didn’t insult my abilities in bed”. I suspect that might have led to a last-minute addition to the list.

Another had moved interstate for work, but she would ring me every night in tears saying that she missed me and wanted to come back. Finally, I agreed to pay for her plane ticket to move back. I wasn’t exactly flush with cash, but I loved her and was glad that she wanted to come back to be with me. Two days after she returned, I went to work, when I got home, she’d moved out, leaving a note that simply read, “I don’t love you anymore, sorry”. She also took with her one of my favorite t-shirts, which equally devastated me.

Now, I can write with humor about these past relationships, I can make jokes about them and put on a brave face. But at the time, I genuinely believed that my heart would not survive. I thought my world had come to an end and that no one would ever love me. It was dramatic and over the top. In later years understanding how my upbringing, depression, and anxiety also played a part made me understand why I reacted the way that I did whenever a relationship would fail.

I have always talked about how lucky I have been to have so many good friends in my life. They would happily step in and take care of me, provide comfort, and occasionally put a boot up my ass when I needed it. It was in the depths of one of these break-ups that a good friend gave me the best advice.

I had been dating Bec for about three years. She taught first grade, and I’d met her one day when I took Santa Claus to school. Our relationship started with mutual attraction and curiosity, but as time went on it was punctuated by some intense chemistry and, yes, some great sex. She ended up breaking up with me because I was going away regularly for work, and she didn’t like that. Ironically, she started dating a soldier after she broke up with me, who immediately deployed to Iraq. They’ve been married for the better part of twenty years now.

When it ended, I was a mess. I couldn’t eat or sleep, I was even more irritable than I am normally, and I ended up applying for a job in the middle of nowhere (side note: don’t make radical life-changing decisions under adverse personal circumstances).

Finally, my friend Pete sat me down and said, “Hey mate, I know you’re upset, but you know you just need to remember the bad times”. For a second there I thought he’d misspoken, but then he continued, “Think about every time you had a fight over stupid shit, think about every time she yelled at you for minor things, or she made you do things you didn’t want to”.

I laughed and then with his prompting I started to think about our fights (there were a LOT), I thought about how she’d made it clear she only wanted to live close to her Mom, and the time she yelled at me in front of my work colleagues for having after work drinks. I ended up building a pretty good list of things that represented the bad times and it occurred to me that we weren’t suited to each other. It was better to have called it quits when we did, rather than prolonging a relationship doomed to failure.

If you’ve had your heart broken, and you don’t know what to do, let me suggest thinking about the bad times.