What It’s Like To Go Through A Breakup In The Real World

It’ll happen at night – probably following an argument you’ve had a thousand times before. You can’t have known each other long, so you’ll come to terms with not really knowing each other at all. 

Regardless of whose decision it really is, after the dust settles, you’ll both agree it’s “for the best.” Whether it’s for the best or not will still be unclear at this time, but that’s how “for the best” works.

You’ll agree to go back to being “just friends” despite that even at the time of the agreement you’ll know the unlikeliness of this because you can’t go back to a place you’ve never been. But you’ll agree anyway as an attempt to save the mutual group you belong to the pain of having to choose sides.

Sliding back into the behavior of being single will be easy because you won’t have been too far removed. You’ll be fine for a while – going out with other single friends, exercising more now that you have free time, and focusing on your job in a way you’d almost missed. It’ll be a refreshing, yet at the same time, familiar change of pace. It’ll be comfortable.

You’ll even mentally prepare yourself by reading up as much as possible on “how you should react to seeing your ex for the first time with someone new,” and brace yourself for the pain that will surely be induced by whichever attractive little thing fills the role in all their fun, flirty, twenty-two year old glory.

But that moment will never come. You’re adults now, and the end goal of any post-break up action isn’t to deliberately hurt you. All the practice you had in college making ex-lovers jealous was never meant to pay off. 

Still, much to your chagrin, you will feel deliberately hurt anyway. Somewhere, somehow, you will have associated any lack of attention paid to you in the aftermath of a break-up as a direct correlation to how much you were cared about during the actual relationship.

If you haven’t already, you will cry your eyes out. You’ll question what was not to care about you, and wonder if maybe no one will ever care about you again. You’ll blanket yourself in such an intangible amount of pity that all the extra socializing, exercising, and focusing you had been doing will be forgotten. You’ll be sad, maybe even depressed – not because of the break up, because you’ll fear the relationship didn’t matter, and figure in the real world, the ones that come and go never will.