You might have been expecting it. Things were off for days, months, years, possibly. Or maybe it came out of nowhere. On Monday you guys kissed each other good night and on Tuesday he broke up with you.

You can never plan for a breakup. Breakups don’t make any sense. There’s no perfect time to do it and there’s no perfect time to be on the receiving end of it. You can’t prepare for them or work your way around them. They’re unavoidable. They’re also very messy, because they’re based on feelings, and feelings are uncontrollable. They just happen.

Sometimes breakups are mutual, sometimes they’re not.

This one was not, and for days or months or years you’ve been racking your brain to figure out what went wrong. What you could have done differently. Why this happened to you and why you’re the one whose heart is broken instead of that random stranger you passed on the street.

Here’s the answer: it doesn’t make any sense and it never will. There’s no logic in relationships because people think with their emotions and with their gut, as it should be.

There could be a million reasons why he left you. Or there could be one. The point is that you can’t dwell on it, because it will just trap you inside of a black hole where the only things that keep you company are the questions you will never get answers to. Dwelling on the one reason or the twenty reasons why he left you will not bring you closure and it will not speed up the process of getting over him.

The reason you want a concrete answer on why he left you is that you want to be able to change what has already happened. You want something tangible that you can tinker with because you think you can bring him back to you. But you will not be less heartbroken if you find out that he left you because you are not as spontaneous as he would like or because you do not have blue eyes.

You could get contact lenses or you could become more spontaneous and maybe he would stay. But you don’t want to do that, because it wouldn’t be a return to love. It would be a new relationship based on molding yourself into another person’s ideal significant other. That’s not love. That’s craftsmanship.

The real reason he left you is that you two weren’t right for each other. If the problem was that you didn’t open up enough or he was scared to be vulnerable, you could have worked on those issues. Those are steps in the long process of building a solid relationship. If it was something you could have done, and he wanted to be with you, he would have asked you to do it.

But if the problem was that he was restless or he wasn’t sure that you were the right person for him or he just wasn’t happy, then it all goes back to the same thing – you were not right for each other. It’s not your fault if he was restless. None of this makes you undatable or unlovable. It just means that you were with a person who wasn’t ready to change for you. And you were with a person who didn’t want the relationship badly enough to ask you to change. If he was ready to be the man you needed him to be, he would have stopped worrying about dating other people. He wouldn’t worry about feeling restless or happy. He would have made adjustments, because your relationship would have been his top priority. It doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person if he was this way. It just means he wasn’t the person for you.

It’s a hard and brutal truth to accept. It stings. It’s not fair. It makes you feel helpless and out of control. But the fastest way to get back into control, to feel powerful, and to mend your wounds, is to face the truth. To look it in the face, accept that it is painful, and promise yourself that you will keep acknowledging it every day –  until it becomes less like the brutal truth, and more like a story you tell to the guy who would make any adjustment in the world in order to be with you.