Who can blame you if you feel like you are in a hurry to get over your ex?  Patience is something we often don’t have when we face an emotional upheaval like a breakup.  Being stuck in grief and waiting to get used to the changes we face is not fun  – no one likes pain or discomfort.  We want the storm to pass quickly so we can get on with the new stage of our lives.

But sometimes being in a hurry means we don’t process our grief like we we need to. You deny that you feel bad and instead divert your sadness into getting busy – maybe you develop a crush and convince yourself that this is the man of your dreams.  Or you throw yourself into your work or your family.  Perhaps you drink your sorrows away, partying away the grief.

In our fast lives we expect everything instantly.  If the webpage doesn’t download in seconds we are off to find a different page, if a restaurant doesn’t serve you quickly, you complain.  And likewise you may expect your broken heart to mend right now. If it doesn’t, you fight against it.  You push to move on, instead of accepting that some things still do take time.

How much time?  I can’t tell you that – you probably already have an idea of the time it takes you to really get over someone.  One day you will wake up and you will realize the neutral zone has passed and you’re ready for your new life.

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One of the hard things about the sudden ending of a relationship – especially when it involves a third person with an affair – is learning to accept that it has actually happened!  To accept that your partner, who last week seemed so wonderful, has been lying and cheating behind your back is hard to come to terms with.  In a normal breakup we might have seen the signs that the end of the relationship was coming, but with infidelity, the end of the relationship can come as a shock.

It can also be a shock to discover your darling partner is a cheater and a liar – the relationship was not what you thought it was at all.   After finding out about their cheating, to be able to accept it, many of us rewrite our history.  We find we need to know what happened – in detail.  To others this may seem masochistic but instead it is us trying to find a way to accept our new reality.  Don’t be hard on yourself if you find you have this driving need to know, but also understand that you may never know everything.  Your cheater is an adept liar and will protect himself and his affair – he will think he is protecting you too by hiding details even now.

A friend wrote to me with advice about accepting a breakup – it is worth reading as well.

If you are worried your partner or spouse is lying and cheating on you – then check out The Breakup Bitch’s latest site about Catching Them Cheating. You don’t have to put up with lies anymore.

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Yesterday we looked at Getting Some Control Back after a Breakup. Here is an interview with Rachel – a woman who was dumped in a restaurant – after a 5-year relationship!

I talked with Rachel, a final year grad student about her breakup.  She met me in the park outside her University on a sunny day.  She had beautiful olive skin and black hair with a sheen that can only be natural.  She lifted her sunglasses in greeting and I could see the puffiness under her eyes.

‘I don’t really know what to do,’ she said.  ‘It’s too hard. Jack broke up with me three weeks ago.  I was…I am… devastated.  We’ve been going out for five years.  He’s my first real love.’

Breakup day

They had a long-distance relationship and when he came to visit one weekend a few weeks ago, he broke it off.

‘I don’t want to be together anymore Rach,’ he said over the restaurant table. ‘It’s the fights…I’m too busy with work to handle it.’
Rachel couldn’t say anything in response, she just let out a groan that she quickly tried to muffle.
‘We’re young,’ Jack said in a rehearsed tone. ‘We need to live our lives.  I can’t take the stress Rach.’
‘I have to go home,’ she replied.  ‘I can’t do this here.’
He stood up with her.  ‘I’ll get the check.  I’m staying at Mike’s, he said he’ll pick me up from here.’
‘You’re not coming back to my place?’
‘I can’t Rach.  Like I said…’
‘Right…yeah…we can’t be together,’ she replied, acutely aware of the other diners around her in the small restaurant.  ‘I’ve gotta go.’

Blaming herself

She got herself home and then the blame set in.  Instead of getting angry with him, she blamed herself for the arguments, she was sure it was her fault.
‘I’m very insecure and have no self-confidence,’ she said to her roommate, Yolanda. ‘He’s really busy with work and goes out all the time with his friends drinking and to clubs.  I just get jealous.  I can’t help myself…always ringing him, asking him where he’s been.’
‘It’s difficult,’ said Yolanda. ‘Long-distance relationships are almost impossible.  Don’t beat yourself up.’
‘But he never gave me a reason to doubt him.  I’m an idiot.  He never gave me a reason to think that he would cheat on me. Why did I think that?’

The other woman arrives

These thoughts continued to plague her over the next weeks.  She talked to his roommate, Gary, who was a mutual friend.  He didn’t know they had broken up because Jack hadn’t said anything and seemed normal.  Then another friend told her when Jack started dating someone else.  She also found out he had been hanging out with this new woman before he broke up with Rachel.  She was confused about what really happened.

I spoke to her on the phone and suggested that a short breakup conversation in a restaurant wasn’t enough for her to move on.  She could ask to meet him next time he was in town.  It was a five-year relationship, and she deserved better.

The final post-breakup meeting

I caught up with her a few weeks later, this time when she removed her glasses, her eyes were back to normal and she gave me a brief smile.

‘I saw him last weekend,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t want to know, but it was bugging me so much.  I can’t believe he broke up with me in a restaurant!  We talked for a couple of hours.  I’m not sure I believe everything he said – that woman had been around for a while but he said they were just friends before.  I don’t know about that though, I think he was seeing her before.  I feel better, still sad though – five years is a long time.  Why would he throw away five years just like that?’

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I am really excited to have my 3 Simple Steps to Getting Over a Breakup Faster eBook ready for you to download.  It coverse the early stages of breaking up.

You might feel you are stuck in your breakup. You might worry that you think about your ex too often and that you may never get over him.
What you want is:

• To move on faster
• Get over him for once and for all
• To do more than the no-contact rule

If you want to turn into a free woman and start your new beginning, your first action is to download my FREE 3 Simple Steps to Getting Over a Breakup Faster eBook.

Take strides towards getting over your ex today!

3 Simple Steps to Getting Over a Breakup Faster gives you:

• Concrete exercises you can do now to help you let go of your ex
• New habits to start you on your new beginning
• A strategy to deal with friends and family (who might not be helping)

You get told ‘accept your breakup’ or ‘don’t be hard on yourself’– what does this mean? How are you meant to do it? In 3 Simple Steps to Getting Over a Breakup Faster, I’ll give you some easy things you can start doing today.

Change your attitude & your life!

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I have been emailing a friend, Alice, about her breakup and how she managed to finally accept her breakup.  It is an important stage of breaking up – I have written a post about her process for finding acceptance after breaking up with her husband, over at my hubpage.  She has moved on now – feeling fabulous and single, but she has some tips that I have shared with you, along with the summary of acceptance.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who has done landmark research to do with grief and loss, explains in her book On Grief and Grieving that acceptance is when we learn to live with our loss - it doesn’t mean that we necessarily are OK with it.

She goes on to gives some other signs that acceptance is starting to come into your life:

• You start to accept things when you become aware of the practical reasons for the loss – even if you don’t understand the reasons

• Slowly you withdraw your energy from your loss and begin to invest it in life again.

There are some other things you could try to help you progress with your acceptance.  You need to work out what you need to do to convince yourself that this has happened.

• Like Alice, you need to take time to feel that reality.
• You need to tell your story, although be wary of seeing your ex through a soft-focus lens (this is called splitting), so get that good friend over and talk about the breakup (make her some fabulous most delicious brownies from my recipe as well).
• Do something that helps you convince yourself that you have broken up, maybe go with a friend or alone to one of your ‘couple places’.  Go to a movie you might have gone to together, alone.  Create a ritual to farewell your relationship – I have a friend who throws an annual ju-ju party where people throw mementos of past loves or jobs on the fire, and then go on to celebrate the new.  Other people have told me that as part of their breakup process they planned to do the things they couldn’t do while in their relationship – go on month-long hikes, travel to countries that their partner didn’t want to go to.

Ask yourself: Who or what would convince me of what has happened?  And then spend some energy on finding the answer to that question.

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I’ve written a post on accepting your breakup over on my Hub Page – and how sometimes we ’split’.  This means editing the memories of your ex: either they become an angel in your mind or a demon, they can do no right.  It is  interesting how often this happened in my interviews.  Read more over at my hub pages on breakups.  And you can get more detailed information in my eBook – it is one of the 3 Simple Steps to getting over an ex faster.

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This is breakup tip number 4 from my friend A who recently survived her breakup:

#4 Work on accepting what has happened.  Choose to accept that you just broke up.  Choose to accept that you are single.  Choose to accept that your life is not working out just as you had hoped or planned.  Choose to accept that he is seeing someone else.  Choose to accept the thing that is the hardest part of the breakup.

Sometimes I could only choose to accept being separated for about 15 minute intervals.  To cope my mantra was ‘I choose to accept that I’m separated, I dont like it, but I do accept it’.  It worked for me.  (I got this from a website I think called – how to divorce as friends – it was useful).

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