One of the most common emails I get from readers is from people who want to get their ex back. Some of them word it more nicely than that—they say they want to “make things up” or “fix things,” but really it comes down to, “He/she left my ass and it hurts; what do I say or do to get them back?”
This question never made sense to me. For one, if there was a tried-and-true way to get an ex back, then no one would ever break up or divorce. The world would be flooded with happily married couples. And I’d probably be out of a job.
But more importantly, trying to “win” back an ex is impossible because even if “it works,” the reformed relationship will never resemble the one of the past: it will be a fragile, contrived affair, composed of two wholly different and skeptical individuals, replaying the same problems and dramasover and over, while being constantly reminded of why things failed in the first place.
When I think of all of the happy couples I know, you know how many of them say, “Oh, he was a total piece of shit, but then he apologized and bought me cake and flowers and now we’re happily married”?
None of them.
What these emailers don’t get is that relationships don’t end because two people did something wrong to each other. Relationships end because two people are something wrong for each other.
We’ve all been through breakups before. And we’ve all, in our moments of weakness, pined for our exes, written embarrassing emails/text messages, drank too much vodka on a Tuesday night, and silently cried to that one 80s song that reminds us of them.
But why do breakups hurt so bad? And why do we find ourselves feeling so lost and helpless in their wake? This article will be covering coping with all loss, but because the loss of intimate relationships (partners and family members) is by far the most painful form of loss, we will primarily be using those as examples throughout.
But first, we need to understand why loss sucks so bad. So I’m going to whip out an epic bullet point list to set everything straight:
To be healthy, functioning individuals, we need to feel good about ourselves. To feel good about ourselves, we need to feel that our time and energy is spentmeaningfully. Meaning is the fuel of our minds. When you run out of it, everything else stops working.
The primary way we generate meaning is through relationships.2Note that I’ll be using the term “relationship” loosely throughout this article. We don’t just have relationships with other people (although those relationships tend to be the most meaningful to us), we also have relationships with our career, with our community, with groups and ideas that we identify with, activities we engage in, and so on. All of these relationships can potentially give our lives meaning and, therefore, make us feel good about ourselves.
Our relationships don’t just give our lives meaning, they also define our understanding of ourselves. I am a writer because of my relationship with writing. I am a son because of my relationship with my parents. I am an American because of my relationship with my country. If any of these things get taken from me—like, let’s say I get shipped to North Korea by accident (oops) and can’t write anymore—it will throw me into a mini identity crisis because the activity that has given my life so much meaning the past decade will no longer be available to me (that and, you know, being stuck in North Korea).
When one of these relationships is destroyed, that part of our identity is destroyed along with it. Consequently, the more meaning the relationship added to my life, the more significant its role in my identity, the more crippling the loss will be if/when I lose it. Since personal relationships generally give us the most meaning (and therefore, happiness), these are the relationships that hurt the most when lost.
When we lose a relationship, that meaning is stripped away from us. Suddenly this thing that created so much meaning in our life no longer exists. As a result, we will feel a sense of emptiness where that meaning used to be. We will start to question ourselves, to ask whether we really know ourselves, whether we made the right decision. In extreme circumstances, this questioning will become existential. We will ask whether our life is actually meaningful at all. Or if we’re just wasting everybody’s oxygen.3
This feeling of emptiness—or more accurately, this lack of meaning—is more commonly known as depression. Most people believe that depression is a deep sadness. This is mistaken. While depression and sadness often occur together, they are not the same thing. Sadness occurs when something feels bad. Depression occurs when something feels meaningless. When something feels bad, at least it has meaning. In depression, everything becomes a big blank void. And the deeper the depression, the deeper the lack of meaning, the deeper the pointlessness of any action, to the point where a person will struggle to get up in the morning, to shower, to speak to other people, to eat food, etc.
The healthy response to loss is to slowly but surely construct new relationships and bring new meaning into one’s life. We often come to refer to these post-loss periods as “a fresh start,” or “a new me,” and this is, in a literal sense, true. You are constructing a “new you” by adopting new relationships to replace the old.
The unhealthy response to loss is to refuse to admit that part of you is dead and gone. It’s to cling to the past and desperately try to recover it or relive it in some way. People do this because their entire identity and self-respect was wrapped up in that missing relationship. They feel that they are incapable or unworthy of loving and meaningful relationships with someone or something else going forward.
Ironically, the fact that many people are not able to love or respect themselves is almost always the reason their relationship failed in the first place.