Your Breakup Survival Guide…

 

Breakups are when you feel like crying all the tears out of your body and feel so angry you could decapitate your teddy bear. You’ll do things that, in a sane mind, you wouldn’t normally do, like… getting a spiky haircut, eating an entire tin of Quality Street in one sitting or deciding that you’re now straight.

What you have to realise is…

That you’re not the only one that’s going through it.
And yes, I know that reading the last sentence will make you want to hurl your computer against the wall in disgust but in time you’ll realise it’s true.

Many people around the world will be breaking up right at this very second: walking in on their partners sexing the girl from the post office, deciding that they just can’t put up with the dead badger collection any more, or simply just from being bored.

How you deal with it all depends on what type of person you are.
You may be the one doing the breaking but it can still hurt as much as getting salt in a paper cut.

You might go on holiday to get away, you might stay in your onesie for seventeen days watching ‘Rom-Coms’ or you might fall straight into the arms and legs of another woman to help ease your pain.

Whatever you do, you will go through the five stages of the break up.

The first stage is denial.

They didn’t really break up with you, it’s not really over, it will all be okay and you’ll live happily ever after and get married in a field wearing a dress made of wheat. The quicker you get out of this stage the better really. It can be a happy delusional bubble filled with happy expectations and rainbows and you need to pop it so you can move on.

Before you move on to the next stage, I recommend you hide all the items you care about from yourself…

The Anger Stage

… can have you losing friends as you think how they must have known the relationship wasn’t working, losing valuable objects as you hurl them around to make you feel better, and losing respect as you scrawl “cheating whore” across the wall in crayon in the conference room at work.

Don’t ignore this stage and tell everyone you feel fine and keep it all bubbled up inside you.
Because you’ll only explode at some point, maybe when an old lady offers you a toffee on the bus.

You don’t want to be shouting at her that no you don’t frickin like caramel, just like you don’t like being alone.

Bargaining is the next bit.

You might contact the person and try and make things work with them.
Might tell them that you want them in your life, that you’d like to be friends, that you’d like to meet their new girlfriend.

You don’t.
You really don’t.

You might think you can handle it and you’ll smile and grit your teeth during the whole process, but really, all you’ll be thinking is how much you want to feed your ex grapes and stroke her hair while setting a pack of wild boars on your replacement.

And that just ruins anyone’s Tuesday.

Another way of bargaining is doing it with yourself.
If you don’t eat fried eggs for a week she might come back to you.
If you see three yellow cars on the M25 she’ll call you and patch things up.
If you watch her favourite film she’ll sense it and come over and watch it with you. Fail.

When you’ve moved on from the exhausting bargaining stage where checking your phone in case she’s called becomes a twenty four hour obsession then you move onto sadness.

Sadness.

This is when you feel so depressed you can find yourself crying in the cereal aisle of Salisbury’s.
Move away from that aisle and go to the freezer section and buy several tubs of ice-cream.
Then phone your friends and get them to suggest doing some fun things like going to TopShop or to the fair.
Then eat more ice cream.
And buy some chocolate, melt the chocolate and then pour the chocolate into the ice cream.
Watch some L Word to see that lesbians can be happy sometimes and eat some more ice cream.
And then buy some wine and pour that into the ice cream before downing the entire contents.

It will all help.

Start living again.

After the miserable time it’s time to get out the onesie and start living again.
Go out to places your ex didn’t like, go out drinking and dancing with your friends or do something crazy like a parachute jump or golf.

You have to start a whole new chapter of your life so you might as well begin it with a bang. As more time passes you will finally, and probably without noticing, move into the…

Accepting stage.

You’ll stop trying to fix things, stop crying over Rose on the door of the Titanic and stop drawing up plans of how to torture your ex.

Everyone goes through them and they’re the worst.

But it’s a fact of life just like how six out of seven dwarfs aren’t happy and how you can always smell a slut’s perfume.

It’s an emotional teacup ride of shitty feelings and resentment, but in the future, when you are celebrating your tenth wedding anniversary surrounded by your kids and your pet giraffes, you’ll barely remember her name.

 

Effi Mai writes at FemmeFace, she wears stripy and spotty dresses a lot of the time, loves tequila, unicorns and dancing with glitter. When she’s not busy writing, she’s one half of event organising duo MissFit.