Breakups Hit Different, But We Move On
A friend recently broke up with her boyfriend and, just a week later, told me she wanted to go out and meet new guys. It made me think of the How I Met Your Mother episode where they discuss how much time it takes to recover from a breakup.
Here are the responses from each character:
Lily: “Half the length of the relationship.”
Marshall: “One week for every month you were together.”
Robin: “Exactly 10,000 drinks, however long that takes.”
Barney: “Something about the distance from her bed to the front door.”
Ted: “I think you start to recover the moment you meet the person who gets you back in the game.”
It got me thinking about my own breakups. I have to say I’ve always had relatively amicable breakups with the guys I’ve dated. A few of them happened because one of us was moving to another country, so there wasn’t much conflict—just geographical inconvenience. That’s the only bad thing I find about living abroad.
As a Spanish student in Paris, I was always going out with foreigners like myself—people from all sorts of nationalities. Everyone except the French. I love their country, but I just can’t seem to get along with them—whether in friendships or relationships. Maybe it's my attraction to people who have traveled or come from different cultures, and thus, have a different, more open view of life.
Eventually, many of the people I met had to leave at some point. They either returned to their countries to continue their studies or traveled some more. There’s something about the grayish sky of Paris that makes people leave the city. But it actually made the breakups easier, because we couldn’t control that—at least not at a younger age, when there’s still so much to discover.
There have been months when I’ve stayed single for a while. Maybe I had casual sex here and there, but no guy really interested me. Other times, it seemed like there was always a guy following another guy. So, there’s really no use in putting a fixed timeframe on recovering from a breakup. Once, the day after a breakup, I asked a guy for his number in a supermarket. He texted me that same day to say he had a girlfriend, but still, I was happy I’d already started thinking about dating again. That didn’t mean I didn’t love the person I’d just broken up with, but when someone chooses to let you go, you should let them go too.
Every person, every relationship, and every breakup helps you grow. You learn from your mistakes, their mistakes, and it helps you figure out what you want from the person you might one day marry—or choose to spend your life with, if you’re not the marrying type. I’ve come to appreciate all the guys who have been in my life because they helped shape the person I am today. Some helped me open up and express my feelings, others made me more comfortable talking about my sexuality, and some showed me how deeply I could be loved.
And on a lighter note, dating all those men from different nationalities gave me the chance to travel and visit their hometowns or countries without paying for a place to stay. My first boyfriend took me to a cozy house near the beach in Brittany, one guy invited me to his beautiful family home in London, and another took me to the Swiss mountains—not bad at all.
Sometimes, we never fully recover from a breakup. I know I’ll always think about some of the guys I’ve dated and still love them in a way. I wonder what their lives look like now and hope they’re happy. Although I do get jealous when I see a picture of them with a new girlfriend.
Nevertheless, remembering them means that you truly loved them, and that feeling is worth holding onto. As Dostoyevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov: “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” I know I have loved in my life, and I am grateful for that—to have met people who allowed me to share and express my love.
In the end, I don’t know which character had it right. Maybe Ted. You start to recover the moment you meet someone who helps you move on. Whether it takes 10,000 drinks or half the length of the relationship, there’s no single formula for moving on. It just happens when you’re ready.