Every single day of the week I get an email, a Tweet or a VYou question from a different lady asking me how to get over a boy she likes that hurt her feelings. I’m guessing that this is at least partially due to the fact that I was once Internet famously dumped via flip phone by my boyfriend of two years. I’ve also written about seeing guys I really cared for out on dates with other girls (and it killed me! Killed! Me!)
There’s no special tip or trick I can give you on how to get over a bro. Remember My So-Called Life when Angela just woke up one morning and she was no longer in love with Jordan Catalano? And she knew she was no longer in love with him because that day she got out of bed and the bricks of torture she’d been dragging around via her heart had somehow disappeared overnight? That’s the only way heartbreak goes away. It’s time, dawg.
But you can do things to distract yourself from the pain, and I usually find that the best things for that are drugs and creativity (if you’re shocked by how irresponsible this advice is, welcome. Please add me to your Google Reader and enjoy the show.) When Flip Phone (we’ll always refer to him as Flip Phone, you guys) dumped me, I took a lot of Xanax, I wrote or made videos every day and I sat in bed and modified my t-shirts. And I listened to a shitload of Fiona Apple.
Four months of that and I was fine (I understand that that doesn’t sound impressive, but I typically find that these things take seemingly forever to get over.) Plus, the writing and videos that I made during that time changed my life for the better in ways I’m not even allowed to tell you about yet. I came out a winner in every way. In fact, I feel like I owe Flip Phone some sort of a check or an Edible Arrangement for the way he forced me to better myself.
One common cure that didn’t work for me, though: Faux-relationship rebounds. I made the mistake of that and behaved like a horrible child in every case. The way I treated people during that time actually kind of haunts me, so be careful who you take your low self-esteem bullshit pity party around.
Finally, people get really blasé about other people’s break-ups. I remember feeling so misunderstood by most of my friends when my heart was the most broken. I’d be trying not to cry over sushi and they’d look at me with dead eyes and say something like, “Don’t worry. You’re bigger than this. You’ll get over it.”
It’s not that they weren’t right or that they didn’t truly believe what they were saying. It would frustrate me because I wasn’t even close to being in a place where I could see an upside to our break-up. I’d walk around all day afraid that I was going to burst into tears in public, feeling like my ability to breathe was being slowly taken away from me. I had no control over parts of my life that I used to have control over, and that’s some scary shit. Other people’s positivity about my situation made me want to feed them an endless string of knuckle sandwiches and delete them from my address book.
If you feel like your life is over, I get it. And I get that me saying “I get it” is equally as frustrating as me saying “don’t worry, it will get better,” but it’s the only way I know how to tell you that you’re on the road to recovery.
Someday that mother fucker will be delivering your mail and you’ll be all sparkly and moved on, but it takes a minute to get there.
Good luck, my fellow sentimental sistas.
