What Its Like To Start A New Relationship After You’ve Been Broken

When you’re broken by love, you have a few running comments in your head and heart that are consistent. You blame yourself. You wonder, “What if?” You long for the relationship back, and you are certain you will never let yourself get hurt again. But then it happens—you see a face and it looks different than all the others. You find yourself smiling when their name pops up on your phone and you start talking about this new person to friends and family. Could it be that you are thinking of future days with this person?

Fear does not accurately describe the emotion connected to these events. It is paralyzing and confusing. Do you take the safe road and stop it or take a risk and keep going? How do you fall in love after you’ve been so broken?

You’ve taken this risk before, though, and it destroyed you. You jumped and fell. You only just gotten back up, and now your heart wants you to jump again. Your family is scared to get excited because seeing you that hurt broke them too. Your friends are so happy to see you smile again, but they worry that it will turn to tears. You’re worried that if you get broken again, it will be the end of you. You barely survived last time; how much resilience do you have left?

This is where the self-doubt comes in. At this point, you are so aware of all your flaws you have to decide to hide them or be upfront. You compare everything to last time. Are they hiding something too? Every look, eye roll, or smirk makes you scared that you’ve said something wrong or gave the wrong impression. It is a tangled web to like after heartbreak, and sometimes it feels like you’ll be stuck forever.

The worrying of heartbreak is stealing the joy of a new relationship, but you don’t know how to stop it. How do you turn off your fear and replace it with excitement? The only choice you have seems unspeakable, but you do it. You do the really horrifying thing: You tell them about the past. You tell them about your scars, your demons, and your fears. Do they stay? I guess we’ll see.