Why Moving On Takes Longer Than It Should

In an overpopulated planet, our universe often revolves around one soul.

The cosmos we haven’t yet explored as humans seems to fit into one pupil. The blessings of the world seem to cut short when we’re deprived of our loved ones, and we turn blind ignoring what the world has to offer while mourning the loss of a love. Does the world spin ugly when we’re sad? No. It stays exactly the same. The sun continues to rise from behind the mountains, and parties still echo in the suburbs of cities. Earth still rotates, babies are still born every second in different corners of the world. Nothing changed. At least not in a physical way. The only change that took place occurred somewhere at the level of your own mind.

When you lose what you’ve been holding to for so long, or what you’ve got psychologically used to, your mind focuses all its energy on the act of loss, overthinking the situations. It’s like one day this person was occupying most of your thinking, and the next day that person is gone, and you’re asking your mind to simply delete the presence of this person in a blink, but that’s not the way things work. You can’t simply remove the person you’ve had so many memories with from your mind in one day, and that’s why letting go is a rather long and exhausting process.

You’ve built plans with the person you lost, and the mind had a future map illustrated with this person as the main character of most of your endeavors. Now, after the loss, be it a breakup or the death of that person, your mind takes times to comprehend that these plans will never come to life because the main character is no more there. It will take time to slowly delete these plans, and replace them with a different scheme.

In case of a breakup, you will start questioning yourself, and your self-esteem will seem to hit bottom. You question everything about yourself; your mind starts to look for the hitch.

Our mind is programmed in a way that analyzes situations, and when we set our mind on something, we expect success to be the end result. However, when we fail to achieve our goal, we start looking for the mistake we have made along the process. Same goes concerning relationship failure.

When a relationship fails, and when we are left with more questions than answers, we try to solve those questions by ourselves. We try to build our own closure. That’s why the mind takes time to move on. It refuses to move on as long as questions are hanging unanswered. And here we go on our quest to solve the mystery of our life.

We start questioning ourselves, beginning with our physical appearance, because that’s what our society is basically all about. They made us think that physical attraction is the foundation of any relationship. So for an instant, we’re pretty sure it’s because we aren’t pretty enough. We change. We pay excessive money on clothes, we try to seem stylish, we dye our hair, cut it a bit, we start abusing makeup, or we let our beard grow a little to look like her favorite actor.

But wait, it probably has nothing to do with the face, it’s all about our body.

We force ourselves to maintain a strict diet, spend intense hours at the gym, get a bit obsessed with the calorie count game.

But … what if it’s not about how we look?

We shift our focus to our personality until it’s the only aspect to blame for the failure of our “ideal” relationship. We learn to laugh silently and manage to look more reserved. We give up our goofiness and put on a more serious disguise. We force our mind to work against its nature convincing ourselves that this way, they might decide to like us again. But they won’t.

They won’t, and the thing our mind fails to realize is that the problem doesn’t lie with us. It might not even be in them. The problem lies in this union between the two of us. Something, there, at the level of bonding between two people went wrong. Something didn’t click. Something that goes beyond our control. Something we can do absolutely nothing about. And by the time our mind realizes this, it turns out we’ve spent months trying to look for answers that do not exist when the only answer to this situation lies in the following: Something we can’t control, simply didn’t click.

It’ll take you months to start loving yourself again and understanding that it has nothing to do with you because after all, human relationships are like a puzzle. Individually, you are perfect. And so are they. But when you take the decision to be together. You realize that your pieces simply do not fit. No matter how much you change yourself, how much you try to fit into the other piece, some things simply cannot be forced, and the two of you would never make a puzzle.

After all, in a relationship, you need someone who sees treasure when looking into your eyes, not someone you’re trying to convince to see the good in you. Relationships should help you grow, not bring you down, and no matter how much you love a person, ask yourself, would you be able to spend your entire life in a relationship where you have to be constantly proving your own worth?