7 Humbling Things You Learn When You’re The Last To Move On From A Relationship

By

1. You cannot love someone into loving you back. You cannot tell yourself that if you promise to love them forever, and wait as long as it takes, and do whatever you must, that it will result in them reciprocating the gesture. A lot of the time, all it will mean is you spend your entire life devoted to someone who doesn’t want you. You cannot love someone into loving you if they don’t.

2. Believing that you’re “meant to be” with someone does not make it so. No matter how real it feels, no matter how convinced you are, no matter how many little signs and signals and coincidences aligned and brought you to your conviction. Believing something does not necessarily make it real outside of your own mind.

3. There’s a very particular kind of humiliation that comes with holding on just a little too long. And if you’re not careful, you can so easily start to believe there’s something wrong with you for being attached to a love that doesn’t want to love you back.

4. You cannot think your way into letting go. You cannot analyze, prove, wait or pray your way into letting go. You simply have to step forward and create a new life for yourself, one that doesn’t exist without them, but that never contained them in the first place.

5. Trying to figure out whether or not you’ll get back together once you’re over is usually the best indication that you won’t. It’s what people usually do when they instinctively know the answer is “no,” and they’d like to gather proof that maybe, just maybe, they could be wrong.

6. Love is a choice, but both people have to choose it. You can choose to love someone who doesn’t want to choose to love you back, but all you end up doing is funneling your energy into a situation that fuels the idea that you are not enough.

7. People who have a hard time getting over breakups are the only kinds of people worth dating. It may have been your downfall at one point, but you eventually have to learn that your ride-or-die, love-with-all-your-heart disposition is the greatest thing about you.

Want more articles like this? Check out Brianna Wiest’s book The Truth About Everything here.