100 Ways To Get Over A Guy

Maybe the point of dating him wasn’t to find lasting love. Maybe the point of dating him was to show how capable of love you are.

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1. You only lost something you never had. If he wanted to be with you, he would be with you. All that you lost was an idea you had about what one version of your future might have been.

2. You are now free to find someone better.

3. “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”

4. Don’t you feel free now?

5. You’ll realize you weren’t who you were supposed to be when you were with him, you were who he wanted you to be.

6. You can no longer rely on him to distract you from the person you know you need and want to become.

7. You have time and energy to focus on selfish pursuits that will improve your quality of life for decades to come.

8. Now you know that the things you choose to have in your life are there because you choose them, not because of how they look to another person, or what they like.

9. You have more money now, no more buying and feeding for two.

10. You have time to rebuild relationships with the people who will never leave you — friends and family members.

11. Not to be vulgar, but as Violet Benson says, “dick is free, you can get that shit anywhere.”

12. You can be anyone you want to be now. No one is attached to the old you requiring that you to remain that person they fell in love with.

13. You are now free to experience again the extreme pleasure of kissing a stranger.

14. You are now free to dream bigger than the very flawed person you were kind enough to fall in love with.

15. Nobody owns you now.

16. You could leave, right now, and drive for hours and not have to tell anyone. No checking in.

17. You can spend $30 getting a grilled cheese sandwich and a bottle of wine delivered to your house to be consumed while watching Sex and the City reruns for the hundredth time and wearing a face mask and getting a little buzzed before wandering around your apartment belting Jewel as loud as you want. No one will judge.

18. You can do whatever they hated to do. You can go out dancing or eat Indian food or let yourself be too messy (or too clean).

19. You have more options in your future now.

20. Every breakup and rejection is a second chance in disguise. You get to do better next time. You get to pick better next time.

21. You lost someone who didn’t want to keep you. Think about that hard and then say ‘good riddance’ while you look for someone who understands quality when it’s right in front of them.

22. You are now free to find someone who is as generous as you are: “I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.”

23. No one is ‘the one.’ Open your eyes and realize there are so many people around you with potential, removing one person from the list of prospects decreases the overall chances you will find love by an insignificant margin:

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A Single Man
A Single Man

24. This advice can be found in song form here.

25. What if you spent the rest of your life fighting for him to love you instead of doing the brave thing and moving on?

26. What a great excuse to get off social media for a few months and take a breather away from other people’s opinions.

27. Now you can sleep diagonally across your bed.

28. And not deal with his snoring.

29. There is no greater time to listen to music than when you are heartbroken. Your situation right now is practically the whole reason music and art exist in the first place. Embrace it. Make a million playlists about moving on. Listen to this one. Sing out loud. Sing in the shower. Sing in your car. Feel like the baddest bitch in the world. Think about how everything exciting in your life is in front of you and everything you miss about your ex you get to experience again, soon, with someone new.

30. Think about who you were before you met him and who you are now. Thank him for being a teacher — even if you were the one that had to teach yourself not to love someone like him.

31. Struggle makes you a better person:

“The harder you slam a ball into the ground, the higher it bounces back up… A divorce, a breakup, losing a job, or just feeling seriously down can ground you, rough you up a bit, leave calluses on your feet and grit under your finger nails. But more than that, it leaves you wiser and stronger next time.” — Laurel House

32. When you meet the right person, you will appreciate them more — because you know how much you suffered to get to that point.

33. No one is as happy in a relationship as they lead themselves to believe when they want it to work out. Now you are free to see him without rose-colored glasses. Now you can see what wouldn’t have worked and adjust your standards for future men accordingly.

34. You have time to take a cooking class now. Or learn a new language, or get into fitness and get ripped.

35. You don’t have to cook man-friendly food anymore. Every night can be rice and avocado if you want it to be.

36. The only opinion you have to consider is your own.

37. The only permission you need to do something is your own.

38. You know that he has it far worse than you do — he lost you.

39. Think about how exciting it is to sleep with someone new and how eye-opening it is to discover a whole new world of things someone else likes/is good at doing. You’re not tied to the guy who didn’t/wouldn’t do that one thing you like anymore.

40. You get to remember the incredible joy of hanging out with mostly women.

41. This could be the universe telling you it’s time to get a dog.

42. The worst has happened. You loved someone and they didn’t love you back. So what? You’re still alive. You made it. You’ve proven that you are not so easily destroyed.

43. You can pick up a job, or multiple jobs and spend your free time hustling to get closer to the life you’ve dreamed of.

44. There’s no pressure to go out, if you like to stay in.

45. There’s no pressure to stay in, if you like to go out.

46. Your best friend can sleepover in your bed again and you can wake up at 4am and giggle about nothing in particular.

47. You have the freedom to travel, no strings attached.

48. You no longer have to waste your precious time guessing:

“If you have to speculate if someone loves you and wants to be with you, chances are they don’t. It’s not that complicated. Love, in most cases, betrays the one feeling it. Don’t waste moments waiting and wondering. Don’t throw away your time dreaming of someone that doesn’t want you. No one is that amazing, certainly not the one who would pass you up.” — Donna Lynn Hope

49. You don’t have to share your bathroom with a man.

50. No one steals the covers or your pillow in the middle of the night. No one wakes up earlier than you. No one suffocates you with their body heat. You can keep your bedroom freezing because you like to be a little bit cold and snuggle into the duvet.

51. You got shaken out of your complacent life. You’re forced to reimagine and reevaluate what you want. What a blessing. Now you can see whether you really want to be on the path you’re currently on.

52. It’s easy to think about your first boyfriend and realize that he was nothing to cry over either. You wouldn’t want him today, he wasn’t right but you were young and crushes make everything hard to be logical about. You’ll feel the same way about this guy in 10 years.

53. You now have time to work on yourself so you are worthy of the right person, when you meet them.

54. This is the universe holding onto your shoulders, gently shaking you, and saying “dream bigger.”

55. What if you put all the energy you put into trying to make the wrong person love you into trying to become the right person?

56. Maybe the point of dating him wasn’t to find lasting love. Maybe the point of dating him was to show how capable of love you are.

57. “If you can love the wrong person that much, imagine how much you can love the right one.”

58. The only person who will make you feel guilty is yourself.

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59. Instead of constantly feeling like you are not enough, you get to prove that you are.

60. Imagine how much times you saved by breaking up with this person now and not in 6 months — or 6 years from now.

61. You get to realize that your self worth doesn’t depend on what you can do for other people, how easily you can find a home inside them. Your self-worth comes from how much you can give, not how much you can receive.

62. Going home for family events can be about family again, not about making another person feel comfortable.

63. You learn all the things you didn’t learn because you were with someone who could already do them. You learn to cook for yourself, how to update your professional website, how to do your taxes — you will become more self-sufficient because you have to rely on yourself. This means that when the next guy comes around, you have more to offer.

64. You’ll set better boundaries next time. Did you let him come over too often? Did you always drive? Did you establish a precedent that it was totally okay with you if you didn’t orgasm during sex? Whatever it is that you let slide — you’ll realize how to ask for what you need next time.

65. You can watch Anchorman or Zoolander and belly laugh and it will feel better than it’s ever felt before.

66. You’ve learned that love is something you can lose. When you find a love that’s worth not losing, you’ll fight like hell to keep it.

67. You will not, for the foreseeable future, EVER have to listen to anything in the car besides exactly what you want to hear.

68. No more Sportscenter ever, unless it’s because that’s what you want to watch.

69. You can work as much as you want to and no one will call you a workaholic or tell you they don’t see you enough or complain about your work life balance.

70. You can watch The Notebook or The Mindy Project or Keeping up with the Kardashians and no one will make fun of your choices.

71. It’s the perfect excuse to buy some really nice sex toys and learn how to give yourself the best orgasm of your life.

72. You get to feel a weight lifted off your shoulders as you let go of the burden of having a man in your life. It doesn’t matter if he remembers to call his mom on her birthday, or whether he buys a gift for his sister’s baby shower, or whether goes to the doctor when he really should. It’s no longer your responsibility to worry about him.

73. Going out is exciting again. There’s potential everywhere.

74. There’s a reason people always talk about low points being the best thing that ever happened to them.

75. When you get dressed in the morning, you don’t think about what someone else will like. You just pick out what feels good. You’ll spend your whole day feeling happier and more *you* because your criteria is simply your own happiness.

76. As much as you feel sad, you also feel relieved.

77. There are worse things than being unhappy in love — like being unhappy with yourself.

78. Why would you want to spend the rest of your life with someone who was stupid enough to let you go?

79. You can’t do anything about the way other people feel on you. This breakup is forcing you to learn the one lesson that will have the greatest impact on your happiness for the rest of your life: the way other people feel about you is not your responsibility.

80. Think of all the doors you closed because you were with him. Consider which ones you want to open again.

81. You got to love someone. No one can take that away from you. Even a person who didn’t love you back.

82. You can do better:

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83. Every ending is also a beginning. You get to decide what kind of beginning it is.

84. You can stop feeling guilty about making more money than him or whatever way he felt your shine took away from his.

85. Inevitably, you build your life around the person you are dating. When they leave, you get to build it around the things you actually like.

86. By saying goodbye to someone who doesn’t love you as much as you love them, you are closer to saying hello to someone who does.

87. Just because something ends doesn’t mean it was a failure. “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

88. Very few things in life will feel as good as deleting his number from your phone will.

89. It sounds like you have a very good excuse to have a very big party and make some very questionable decisions.

90. Breaking up with someone causes panic and sadness because we have been rejected. Our egos hurt. But we can’t confuse that with feeling panicked or sad about not having this person in our lives anymore. Our egos will heal, we will learn to let go, we will move on. Recognize the source of your feelings and just feel them without any self-judgement attached. There are worse things in life than an ego bruise — like ending up with the wrong person.

91. It’s much lonelier to be the person who can’t accept love than it is to be the person who can love someone who doesn’t love them back.

92. When you meet the right person you will look back at this rejection as the best thing that ever happened to you.

93. “This relationship wasn’t the very best relationship you can have, so why waste another fucking second on it.”

94. You showed yourself that you are strong enough to do one of the hardest things we do on this planet: open up to another person. That’s enough, to start with.

95. One day soon you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and everything in your life will feel like yours and you will be so happy and proud that you have gotten yourself to where you are. Your accomplishments are now completely your own.

96. All the energy you once expended making him happy can now be completely devoted to making you happy. If you’re like most women, this is a lot of fucking energy.

97. Every breath is a beginning. Breathe in and out. Breathe in your new life, breathe out your old one with him. Think about everything you are going to create when he is fully detoxed from your system. A newly single woman is a force to be reckoned with.

98. We think of forest fires as these devastating events that we need to stop, but they are actually vital to ecological health of an area. There are plants that require the heat of a wildfire for their seeds to burst open and plant themselves in the earth. There are others that are meant to be flammable, so that fires quells competition. As it turns out, forests are made to have a periodic cleansing by fire. Your heart is made this way, also.

99. Remember that time you got really excited about something you’re passionate about and then stopped yourself and said “sorry, this must be boring for you” and he didn’t correct you? Imagine what it would be like to love someone who didn’t make you feel like you needed to apologize for what you love.

100. You lost him, but you didn’t lose the most important thing, you didn’t lose yourself. Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

Chrissy Stockton