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You know what is harder than breaking up and moving on?
It’s the feeling of betrayal.
I believe every person who has passed through the different stages of post-breakup knows exactly what I’m talking about.
When one faces a betrayal that leads to a break up, it feels like a double blow and the scar will be there, maybe forever.
Here are four lessons that I learnt when I was betrayed by someone who I thought was the one:
Lesson number one: Guard your heart
Lesson number one: Guard your heart so that no one will hurt you in any way or another.
Most of us tend to think that the person we choose to be committed with, will be our happily ever after, our end game.
The same goes with me. I guess when we are overconfident, we believe that this one guy or girl is the one.
That was where I was wrong.
Yes, it’s true: We choose that person. But we will never know how far the other person would go for us. Maybe weeks, months, or if you are lucky, years.
The gist is that we will never know what will happen in the future. Hence, if we are giving our effort more than required, it will hurt us more than we know.
I’m not saying that all the efforts poured into a relationship are vain, or useless. But it’s better to be safe than sorry right?
People say if the breakup happened due to a mutual reason, then it should be okay for both parties to move on.
It’s much easier, since both parties are agreeable to the separation.
But if it happened to be one-sided? The pain is much harder to tolerate. The process of moving on totally sucks.
You know, it’s like a drug addiction — you will have withdrawal symptoms in order to relinquish the traces of the other party from your life.
For that you will suffer a lot of things, and that’s where you will start to put the blame on the party that caused it to happen.
Lesson number two: Don’t dwell on the past
Lesson number two, we are entitled to feel this way. But don’t dwell on it for too long since that person is not worth it.
There must be a reason he’s not making it into our life story. Be grateful you dodged a bullet.
Once in a while, or I believe most of the time, when we are in a relationship we (especially women) tend to overlook things.
Or in other words, we can accept every flaw of the person because we think “There is no such thing as perfection in love.”
But let’s be real here, honey. We actually realised that there’s a red flag here and there, but we let it slide because we have chosen him, right? So it doesn’t matter anymore.
Fast forward to the break up — when we look back, we know there’s so many things we overlooked before…
Lesson number three: Never settle for less if you deserve more
So lesson number three: Never ever settle for less if you deserve more than what it should be.
The most valuable lesson I learned from a breakup is that, never question our self worth and it’s the other party’s loss for letting us go.
For whatever flaws he points out about you, never ever reply to such baseless accusations. We are way better than that, it’s actually the other party’s insecurity, not us.
It’s not wrong for us to plan things, because life indeed needs a plan, whether we like it or not.
But life may surprise us with something unexpected, and that’s where we get caught up and feel so alarmed until we don’t know what to do anymore.
Lesson number four: Redefine your happiness when things don’t go as planned
Last lesson post-breakup: I learned to have the courage to get up and redefine my happiness by my own self.
Yes, it totally hurts, it caused me so much pain, caused me a miserable life.
If I may list all the things I’ve screwed up, it’s uncountable, but I believe that’s okay, we are normal human beings.
Normal human beings make mistakes, but we need to realise we should do something to rectify things.
And that’s what makes us different from others, the courage to start afresh and the need to be stronger.
Like Selene Gomez said in her song, “I need to lose you to love me” — Hence breaking up and moving on in a way will make us stronger and better in our life’s journey.
Maybe in a few years’ time, all of us who suffered a break up will thank such a person that caused us such pain, who knows?
As cliche as it sounds, it is partially true that it will get better through time.
But the main effort must come from us, if we are to redefine our happiness, to move forward and to start afresh.
For more stories like this, read: Getting over a Breakup? Here’s What Malaysians Advise and I Starved Myself So He’d Take Me Back. I’m Glad He Didn’t.
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