As I pushed the “delete” button on my cell phone and watched her contact information disappear into thin air, I realized that what I was doing was the modern equivalent of burning my diary or breaking that heart-framed picture on the nightstand. Somehow, simply pressing a button didn’t feel as satisfying. I was still in the first stages of a break-up, before anger and then heartbreak took their turns. I just felt numb.

There were no excuses this time to allow me to piece together the crumbling remains of my ego or self-righteous anger. She hadn’t cheated on me; she hadn’t fallen in love with some old high-school friend or met someone new. I hadn’t done anything in particular to merit her breaking up with me. The words that had left me speechless were the six most-dreaded in the romantic canon…

“I just don’t love you anymore.”

The heartbreaking lines had been saved for the time when they would have their maximum effect. She had been in New York on business, and I had planned on coming up on the weekend, after her presentation was over, to spend a little time with her there enjoying the sights and sounds of the city. We skated in Central Park, attended a Broadway production, and were strolling down a park lane on a crisp night in late autumn. I pulled her close, and she resisted a little. Surprised, I pulled away and looked at her face. It was ashen, guilty.

“Cole, I have something to tell you. I feel really bad about waiting until now, the night’s so perfect, but I was afraid you were going to propose to me or something so I thought I’d just tell you now…”

Had my hand not been in my right coat pocket, it would have dropped the diamond ring in its case. The night, the setting, the ring, those six little words; the perfect symphony of relationship heartbreak.

About 5 days and 5 bottles of whiskey later, the heartbreak hadn’t subsided, so I decided to lay off the whiskey and go for a walk. Fresh air always gave me a little perspective. The daily walks continued, and my perspective grew.

“Better to have found out before the proposal than 5 years into a pathetic marriage”. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but the thought was something to start with, a “delete” button on a bad break up.

L. Hudd, 29 – Writer

I will probably never truly get over my ex-girlfriend because I know now she’s the “one who got away.” I failed because I didn’t try, even when I thought I was. I was disrespectful, unfaithful and unappreciative. It’s only now, with years of perspective behind me, that I truly understand just how much I flopped at being a man. This is the story of my how I learned to survive a break up even when I wanted to get her back.

We met in college through mutual friends, ending up together because my roommates were dating her roommates. I think it turned to love faster than I expected and after the honeymoon phase wore off, I was scared by how much I loved her. I wanted to be cool and macho, and deny that I needed anyone to hold me up when I was down. But I did, and I needed her. By this time I was completely overwhelmed with depression, which was not related to our relationship, but was its ultimate end.

My depression affected my actions, what I never said and what I denied I felt. She was so good to me and I did everything I could to push her away. Our relationship was cyclical, depending on my moods. Sometimes we were together for days on end; other times I would camp out at my house and dodge her phone calls, which was easy to do in the days before cell phones. After a particularly rough point in the third year of our tumultuous relationship, I cheated on her. She found out about the other woman after we’d gotten back together again, but her knowledge of my behavior was the last straw for her. She left me for good. And I was left to learn how to get over a broken heart.

Shortly after learning my girlfriend was really breaking up with me, I sought professional help, where I dealt with my depression and finally came to terms with the fact that I’d lost my soul mate and would never get her back.

Being able to put this all into words gives it life and reality that never existed back then. A lot has happened in both of our lives over the last twelve years, but I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of excitement when I learned that she was recently divorced. I think that means I may never get over my ex-girlfriend.

Paul Douglas 34 –  Journalist

I remember it like it was yesterday. I thought Sarah and I were in it for good. I loved her very much. I had introduced her to my family and my friends adored her. But then, all of a sudden she ended it. According to her, we were not spending enough time together. Apparently, we were always hanging out with friends in a group and were never doing anything together as a couple. I did the initial begging and groveling at her feet, after which she literally threw me out of her place.

So there I was, lovesick, frustrated and quite at lost. I drowned my sorrow in drinks and the comfort of the very friends for whom apparently Sarah broke up with me. They bought me countless rounds of drinks, took me to the newest clubs in town and never mentioned my “ex”.

I was having a tough time referring to Sarah as my “ex girlfriend”. But I knew I had to get used to it…

I knew the drill for I had helped a few of my buddies get over their broken hearts. I knew I would forget her and everything would work out fine. I would meet someone, fall in love and life would be hunky dory again.

But it wasn’t easy to get over my ex girlfriend. Any brunette like my ex would have me longing to get her back. At pubs, any woman ordering a Cosmopolitan would remind me of her. I would relive the way she turned the olive in her drink, left it soaking before chewing on it slowly with relish. If someone put 60s or 70s music on the jukebox, I would be taken back to the evenings when we would have take-out Chinese at home and listen to endless replays of The Beatles and Dylan.

Each time this happened, I would try to snap back out of it and tell myself repeatedly to forget her. Each time my fingers itched to dial her number, just to listen to her voicemail message, I would tell myself to call my mother instead! And trust me, my mother was surprised for she had no idea why I was calling her so many times a week.

Therapy did not work, neither did blind dates set up by friends. Days rolled into months before I realized that it had been almost half a year since breaking up with Sara. And one day, I snapped. While I realized it was hard to survive a break up, I decided to talk to myself once and for all. That did the trick. Every time afterwards, I went over the breakup in my mind, I forced myself to try to look ahead.

Gradually, I opened up more to my friends’ efforts and starting going out with new people. I can now listen to The Rolling Stones without breaking down in tears. I can have a sane conversation with any Cosmo-guzzling date. The only person not so happy is my mother. For now that I am back on track in my life, she does not get so many calls from me anymore!

Joseph Flint,  25, computer programmer

“Hey, can we go someplace private? We need to talk.”

If my girlfriend told me something like that today, I’d know what was coming. I’d be able to mentally prepare myself for getting dumped a few minutes ahead of schedule. Because those words can only mean one thing: she wants to break up with me.

At the time, though, I wasn’t a wise as I am now. I was just a freshman in college, enjoying my first serious relationship. Ah, so she wants to talk? Great! This’ll be fun. I love talking to her.

Do I need to dwell on the details? We’ve all heard it. It wasn’t me, it was her. We had some great times and she knew I would find somebody new who could give me what I was looking for, and she really, really hoped we could still be friends. She didn’t understand, any more than I did, that getting over a broken heart isn’t easy.

I didn’t quite process all this as it happened. Again, I was young and little naive. Today I can at least see the warning signs that the end is near. But then, it seemed to come out of nowhere. She might as well have told me she was alien and was leaving because she had to report back to her home planet. It sounds a little clichéd, but the feeling was exactly like being punched in the gut. I know it’s called heartbreak or heartache but isn’t really the gut that feels the worst of it? But the pit of my stomach was crying out in pain. How could I get over a broken heart if I couldn’t even get over a broken gut?

This happened twenty minutes before I had to go take a final for one of my classes. The girl wasn’t cruel, by the way. She misheard something I’d said earlier, and thought I was meeting her on the way from the test. When she realized her mistake, she was mortified. But in fact, maybe it was for the best. Thanks to the final, I had something to take my mind off the pain.

It reminded me there were other things in life, and that helped in getting over the heartbreak. It took some getting used to being single again, but soon enough I was back on my feet.

- Chris, 26, Graduate Student

To people who have never had one, relationships are like the movies, perfection in every moment of the day. For some people, this may be the case, but I was never that lucky. My relationship, as perfect as I thought it was, didn’t last. At first, I was blinded by her beauty. Every inch of her body, her face, the way she moved invited me in. I finally got up the nerve to ask her to dinner and I was surprised to receive a yes for an answer.

After a few months, I thought it was love. I loved everything about her and it made me happy to see her happy. About the time we hit the seven month mark in our relationship, I accepted a new job helping one of my old friends, as a landscaper. This required more hours away from the house and we even traveled to other nearby cities to do work. The time away caused fighting and we slowly started to drift apart.

One day, I woke up to a note on the pillow next to me. It said, “I love you but I cannot put myself though this any longer” and she was gone.

The sudden nature of the break up and pain of the broken heart devastated me. I felt empty, the silence in the spaces around me that my ex girlfriend used to fill was like a booming noise in my ears.

I knew I had to try to get her back. I tried calling her and she never answered. She was never home when I tried to visit her at home. Eventually I told myself I had to move on and as hard as it was to get over a broken heart, I kept trying.

The months after the break up were hard but I slowly started to move on. I found small things in my everyday routine that made more sense and I focused on them to keep me motivated. I found fun in my boring routine and once again I liked waking up in the morning.

Although breaking up was hard, I found that by accepting the separation and finding new ways to heal the hurt I was feeling inside, it was much easier to survive the break up. I finally realized that I was getting over my ex girlfriend and I was okay with it.

Josh Ranguel – 28, Landscaping Business Owner

When it came to surviving a break up, no one had it worse than me. I had dated a girl in college and it seemed like the right one — her name was Alison. Alison actually worked up the courage to talk to me, and we hit it off nicely. Alison though was more interested in getting a warm body to be married to than anything else.

Instead of just a steady relationship that might develop into something more, Alison wanted to skip all that and go directly down the aisle. Well, that left me feeling like a rat in a cage, and even after I tried to end the relationship four months later, I couldn’t do it. She actually came down and told me that if it was not going to work out, she would be the one to decide it.

Two months later, I had to do the breaking up when I found out from her friend Trish that she had been dating my only other male friend at the time, Jim, for nearly 3 months and started sleeping with him just two days after going out with him. Trish was a true friend and helped me get over the broken heart in a hurry with funny lines like since they were both terminally obese, how the baby would weigh about 30 pounds, or that she was glad I was out of the relationship because I didn’t look good in black and white stripes.

Over the next several weeks, this brand of humor kept me sane as I was getting over my ex-girlfriend but the last laugh came about four months after the breakup. My friend was still living at home with his mom and his mother bluntly put her foot down and told Jim that if he married Alison, he was going to be on his own. Fearing that he was actually going to have to work for a living, he ended up breaking it off with her. Her initial plot was to go out with him so that I would attempt to get her back, but since this friend of mine was nothing but a nuisance and my relationship had more problems than it was worth, I simply cut ties to both of them.

In the weeks and months that followed, I missed having someone in my life but my friends helped me get over it with a few beers, some dancers and making other connections to wonderful people.

Scott, 37- Accountant

I was in college, in my twenties, and in love. With Noel. She was amazing: smart, funny, confident, and someone else’s. Yep, she had a boyfriend. Still, we became friends, good friends. The kind of college friends who cuddle on the dorm bed as we watched television; obviously, it was becoming “something.”

We were getting closer, she was seeing me more, and her boyfriend, well almost never. Then, one day she said that they’d broken up, and soon we were a couple, and her (ex) boyfriend was now out of sight and our of mind.

Things were great for two years. It was October – I was set to graduate in May. She wasn’t graduating, yet. We had both gone away to college far from home, and upon graduation I intended to return from whence I came, and we had planned, those two long years, for her to follow me. But I quickly learned how fast things change, and how fast heartbreak can come.

One day she came by and told me that she wanted to share an apartment with a male friend of hers. She assured me they were “just friends.” I said, “no way,” that no girl friend of mine was going to live with some dude. That went over well. She left, angry. The next day she came over and said she was moving in with him anyway. She then suggested that we needed to take, wait for it… a break. Yep. She said it. I’ll spare you the details and we’ll just say – the onset and pain that comes when that broken hearted feeling blindsides you.

A couple weeks later I ran into a friend of hers; it happened to be a very attractive friend, one Noel had often expressed jealousy of. I asked her out – what better way to get over a broken heart than to put a new person between you and the old one?

Later that week, Noel stopped by my dorm to pick up some clothes she had left at my place. Knowing she was coming, I strategically hung a picture of me and my new flame where she couldn’t miss it. I saw her eyes flick to it, and watched her visibly flinch. Was that the shadow of jealousy, maybe even regret, that I saw pass her face? I like to think so. And while it still took me some time to get over the broken heart, replaying her flinch in my mind helped the heartache – a lot. Of course, time did the rest.

Sky, 38, teacher