Breakup Rules: What to Do After a Breakup
Wondering what to do after a breakup? This post will show you clearly all the dos and don’ts of a breakup so you heal a lot faster.
Breakups are hard and no matter how much you pride yourself on being an emotional juggernaut, you will feel some form of pain at the end of the relationship.
Most of us have had those breakups that put us down for a just a short while and then we’ve also had that particular one that almost did us in.
Research has found that the extent of pain you feel after a breakup is equivalent to how emotionally invested you were in it. If you were really into your ex and had been with them a while, you are bound to feel the breakup a lot more as opposed to just being together a few weeks to a few months.
Healing From a Breakup
The average person will be sufficiently healed from their breakup in six months to a year. Some people find they are stuck in that spot a few years longer than they would have loved and that’s because they failed to follow the right breakup rules to heal faster. If you are wondering what to do after a breakup (what these breakup rules are) here are some that should guide you.
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What to Do After a Breakup
1) Give Yourself Time to Mourn Breakup
A relationship breakup feels as real as losing a loved one to death. The comparison might not be a pleasant one, but it is no less untrue.
When you have been with someone a while, your lives become interwoven and when you both have to go your separate ways for one reason or the other, it can feel like the center of your world just caved in.
In this vein, you should allow yourself mourn this drastic change. Now would not be the time to go all superwoman and act like the breakup didn’t hit you.
If you did that, you would be lying to yourself and making it a tad bit difficult to heal.
What you want to do is give yourself a little time to mourn the loss of this loved one (and that’s what they were for that short period of time).
You are likely to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.
How long a time you take would depend on how quick you think your heart can process the pain. However, you don’t want to wallow in this spot for too long or life and opportunities could just pass you by.
You want to give yourself some days to a few weeks to really let out the pent up emotions welled inside; cry a river if you feel overwhelmed, give in to the desire to eat a bowl of ice cream, watch reruns of your favorite show while curled up on the couch in your pajamas, then when your mourning period is over, dust yourself up and then get on the journey towards putting the past in the past.
2) Do Away with Everything That Reminds You of Him
What to do after a breakup? Get rid of everything that reminds you of him. This includes pictures, gifts, clothing, everything.
Hanging on to keepsakes from the relationship is keeping a line alive still long after your ex has probably moved on. What this does is undo the whole progress you have made.
You could be feeling good about yourself after a long while, only to stumble on a loved-up picture of you both which would then take you down memory lane.
Doing away with stuff might also include unfollowing them on social media, that way you no longer will receive notifications about their lives and doings.
3) Learn From the Breakup
You also want to learn from the breakup so you never make that same mistake again.
Some people find they are unable to hold down a relationship for longer than a few months and that’s because they carry the mistakes of the first into the next.
It takes two to make a relationship work and most times, it also takes the same to see it break down. What you want to do at this point, is not point out who was at fault, but learn from your own mistakes so they don’t repeat.
4) Mix with Others
What to do after a breakup?
It would be so easy to become a recluse after the breakup and stay holed up longer than you have to. However, you want to do the opposite.
Even when you don’t feel like it, you should try to mix with others to get your mind off the pain. Isolation will do you no good at this time.
You could also pick up a hobby or project to keep your kind preoccupied.
5) Avoid Social Media
Social media might undermine your progress journey or make it slow. Even when you unfollow your ex, it’s possible to still get updates of him If you share a number of mutual friends.
For your mental health, you should stay off social media to avoid seeing updates that would hurt you.
6) Give Yourself Time to Heal
It takes time to heal from a breakup and you want to give yourself plenty of this. The best thing about time is that each hour or day brings you closer to the healing you crave.
While it might seem like your heart is about to explode from all that hurt and pain, each day chisels a little of it away until you wake up a few months later to discover you can think of your ex without that almost-suffocating pain.
What Not to Do After a Breakup
The above are what to do after a breakup (to speed up your healing, you should also know the don’ts of any breakup.
Here are some key what not I do after a breakup:
1) Stalk Your Ex in Any Form
The desire to keep tabs on your ex is always quite strong, especially a few days after the split happens.
You’ll find it would be so easy to check their Facebook updates to see how well or otherwise they are handling the breakup.
Doing this however, would be undermining whatever progress you make, especially when you see they have moved on.
2) Ask Friends About Him
The temptation to find out stuff about him might be high and see you turning to friends to ask what you want to know.
You should avoid this, no matter what. You might want to pre-inform friends beforehand not to give in to your request about information of him.
3) Beat Yourself Up
You also never want to beat yourself up over the breakup. Not every relationship is meant to last beyond what it did.
What you want to do is hold on to the good moments (and there will be a few) while you learn whatever needs to be learned.
4) Agree to Stay Friends Immediately
Staying cordial with your ex is good, however, this isn’t something you want to do immediately.
After a breakup, both parties need some time apart to completely heal and expunge the memories of each other sufficiently from their systems.
Choosing to stay friends immediately is defeating your healing as the lines of your relationship would be blurred. It would feel as though you both are still together without actually being together.
5) Agree to Friends with Benefit Arrangement
What not to do after a breakup? You also don’t want to agree to becoming friends with benefits with your ex.
This problem with this type of arrangement is that the relationship continues without the respect of a defined relationship.
So, unless you are completely okay with such an arrangement, which is unlikely considering, you want to avoid this situation.
6) Share Dirty Secrets of Him
If your ex hurt you, then the desire to get even might be strong. A good way to do this light be sharing some of the dirty secrets he let you in on.
You should avoid this, however, as the thing with sharing other people’s secrets is that it breaks the trust others have in you.
People would be have the mindset that you are likely to also reveal their own secrets if their relationship with you ever went south.
7) Go on a Rebound
You also want to avoid going on a rebound. While rebounds aren’t all that bad – a few have even been known to be successful – the majority fail.
Rebound relationships typically have a shaky foundation. You’d be going into it with all the hurt and baggage of the previous relationship and most are unable to withstand such an onslaught.
8) Swear Off Men
While experts recommend you stay off relationships for the time being, at least until you are sufficiently healed, you shouldn’t swear off men and relationships altogether.
Your breakup might have been hard, but there are still a lot of good men out there that are willing to give as much love as you are.
What to Do with an Engagement Ring After a Breakup
Most state laws require that you return an engagement ring at the breakup of the marriage. The argument is, the ring remains the property of the man until the marriage takes place.
In the event of a marriage breakup, the ring becomes the property of the woman and she is free to do with it as she wills.
After an engagement breakup, the polite thing to do would be to return the ring to your ex and forget about it. Some people even report doing so helps them heal and move on faster.
However, some men will ask you to keep the ring and in such cases you are free to do whatever you want with it.
Some women choose to repurpose it into a necklace, something that’s as different from a ring and changes up the memory, while others would rather go the complete mile by selling it.