Hate To Break It To You But There Is No ‘Winning’ The Breakup
It is hard to reimagine a journey that you had already imagined with someone. We cannot replace people as easily as we would like. Every end damages a part of us that can never fully heal.
When I was young, I was told that there is always a winner and a loser in a breakup. The winner is the one who initiates the breakup and the one who gets dumped is the loser. I don’t think that’s ever been true, but I used to believe that.
It makes breaking up seem like a game, which makes love sound like one, but love is not a game. If you see love as something where you win or lose, I don’t think you know love is. When real feelings get hurt, it becomes more than just a competition and it becomes more than just winning and losing.
When a relationship ends, lives change. Routines change and our patterns change. The person who once used to be your everything is no longer around to listen to your stories. You can no longer call them to tell them about your day or ask them their opinions on what to do next.
When you remove someone from your life, you can stop all modes of communication, but you cannot do the most important thing of all—you cannot stop feeling for the person.
It becomes impossible to listen to ‘your’ song and not feel sad and angry. You cannot forget all the little things and not think about each other. You remember the details of what they liked on their pizza or their weird feng shui obsession with where to put the bed.
When someone witnesses your vulnerability, the whole dynamic changes. They change from a stranger you met to a part of your life, a part that never leaves your life (no matter how hard you try).
It’s easy to say “move on” but equally hard to do that because the love you have in your heart cannot just go away—it fades with time and it seems to take forever.
When you imagine a life together, irrespective of the brevity of the relationship, you cannot unsee the life you once planned. The beautiful images of your togetherness haunt you for months and years to come.
Life can be so unfair.
We can always justify when something didn’t work, but it is impossible to rationalize why it couldn’t have. It is easy to see the logic behind the end, but it is hard to console the pain in your heart and wonder what you could have done differently.
We move on, but the thought of us being replaced never sits well. We hate thinking that the hand we used to hold is now holding someone else’s hand and the face we kissed is being kissed by another.
We find faults in the other to validate the end, but a part of you will never forget the night you met. We never stop wondering what we could have done differently so hearts didn’t break along the way.
Why do we miss someone for so long?
It is hard to reimagine a journey that you had already imagined with someone. We cannot replace people as easily as we would like. Every end damages a part of us that can never fully heal.
No one ever really wins or loses a breakup. Honestly, both people lose each other. Some lose a little more than the others, but there are never any winners in a breakup.
The sad reality is that one always gives up first and the other can only hold on for so long.
Memories get carried from one year to another as we wonder what could have been done differently—perhaps it was the pride, the ego, or maybe it was the time and the place.
One will always move on before the other, and the world may see them as the winner. But the truth is that there are no winners in a breakup.
There is no such thing as winning a breakup because honestly, both lose a part of themselves and the whole of the other.
