There was a girl that I went to school with named Shawna. She moved to my school when we were in 4th grade. We hung out all the time, and went everywhere together. We were really close friends, and began wanting to be more than friends by the time we were in 9th grade. We slowly started dating. We did a lot of the things we had been doing for years.

I finally asked her to be my girlfriend. We dated for about three years. This was my first love, and I thought we would be together forever. I went to pick her up from a friend’s house one night. I arrived early, hoping to surprise her by taking her out to dinner. I walked into the house and saw Shawna kissing, Daniel, another one of our friends.

I was devastated, I took off running out of the house as fast as I could. I could not think of anything but how Shawna betrayed me. Healing a broken heart is much harder than it looks on television. They make it seem bad, but nowhere close to the way I felt. I felt like there was a hole in my heart. This was the first time I had experienced a heartache.

The first few days I wanted to wake up and realize it was just a dream. How could someone I had loved for so long betray me, and with my friend? I did not eat for days, and could barely sleep. This was the worst feeling I had ever felt in my life and it was not seeming to go away. At this time I did not think my life would go on.

A few weeks went past, and I admit I felt a little better. Things just weren’t the same without at least talking to Shawna. I just wanted to hold her again in my arms. After a few more weeks I finally started to move on with my life. Mending a broken heart takes a long time, I still had her in my mind all the time. I tried dating a few other girls, but it just didn’t feel right.

I felt like I was cheating on her still after all this time. A few more months past and I met a girl named Alexis. We hit it off and have been together for 5 years now. I still wonder about my ex girlfriend sometimes and what could have been.

Once upon a time, there was a perfect relationship, with the perfect girl and a good looking guy. They had the perfect apartment, albeit mediocre jobs. Then one day, she came up with the perfect excuse to breakup – “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Getting over an ex is never easy, and the days immediately following those infamous words were filled with pain, longing, regret, wonder…Longing to hold her, a longing to tell her that I loved her, if only just one more time. Regretful for all those things in that past that I didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t say. Wondering what it was I did or did not do to make my ex girlfriend leave. It eventually came to the point where I couldn’t eat or sleep, and all I thought about was how to get her back. It made me almost physically sick when someone mentioned her name, to the point where I couldn’t stand be around our friends because all it did was serve as a constant reminder of the past.

I realized, of course, that getting over my ex girlfriend would not be easy if all I thought about was how to get her back, which was all I wanted at the time, but was proving to be very detrimental to my health – it had been only a month since and I had already lost 20 lbs and was getting increasingly darker bags under my eyes. So, I resolved to stop obsessing over the breakup so much, and go to the bar with the guys once in a while and just kick back.

I needed to get back in the world to distract my mind from my ex girlfriend, which was proving to be no easy task – we used to do everything together, so naturally it would all remind me of her, making my attempts at getting over her all the more difficult. No, what I needed was a new hobby, and after two months of misery I finally found the one thing that provided a release – writing. Writing poetry, short stories, articles, which is why you’re reading this particular tidbit.

So I finally found an escape from the pain, however fleeting, and this helped me to slowly get over her. I slowly began to think of her less and was able to focus on life more, to where I was finally ready to start dating again. In a way, all this time later, I’m glad that it never worked out between me and Ms. Perfect, because I would never have the most amazing wife if it had. The most important thing to remember in getting over an ex is that there is a reason that certain people don’t make it to your future.

Kim was the one for me. I knew I was destined to spend the rest of my life with her; we were going to have a beautiful family and then grow old together. I had no doubts whatsoever that we would live happily ever after. Well, let’s just say we didn’t have a fairy tale ending. This is the story of how I had the strangest breakup of my life and the task of getting over her.

I had been dating Kim for three years until the fateful day. I came home early from work to surprise her with a beautiful bouquet of calla lilies (her favorite flower), a bottle of champagne, and some delicious chocolate covered strawberries. I was looking forward to a romantic evening and was smiling throughout my drive back to our place.

When I got to our house, I had my first surprise. There was a car I had never seen before in the driveway. Alarm bells started going off in my head. I very quietly opened the front door. The first image that came into my vision was a trail of clothing leading up the stairs. I started to feel a little sick to my stomach, like I had gotten a whiff of spoiled milk.

I crept up the stairs and looked into the bedroom. It was then that I experienced the weirdest sight of my entire lifetime. My soon-to-be ex girlfriend was naked on the bed with her new lover. I wasn’t really seeing her however. My eyes were filled with the guy in the room and his performance of an unspeakable act. To put it delicately, he was playing his own flute. And not with his hands. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or vomit. I dropped the flowers, champagne, and strawberries and left the house immediately.

The ludicrousness of the situation helped me in getting over my ex girlfriend. I met up with my best friend at the bar and he helped me to see the funny side of the state of affairs. He helped me to realize that to get her back was an absolutely awful idea. Any girl that was weird enough to have been involved with the scene I had just witnessed definitely deserved to be my ex girlfriend. We drank ourselves silly and I woke up the next morning laughing. Thank goodness the weirdness of the situation made it an easy breakup.

Jim Duncan, 28, newspaper reporter

Getting over my ex-girlfriend was a long road for me, literally! There was a nine-hundred mile stretch from her house (where I found her cheating) to mine.

I was once a quiet, painfully shy kind of guy. I didn’t venture out much. Meeting a girl in general public was virtually non-existent for me.

So, way back when open chat rooms were ridiculously popular, I found myself self-confined to my dark and dreary house, additively glued to the front of the computer monitor every day after work.

That’s when I found her.

She was the love of my life (or so I thought at the time). We spent months on the phone together. She’d whisper sweet nothings into my ear every night as I sat there absorbing it all up into my lovesick heart.

The time came. I had to visit.

The first umteen trips went great.

I had it in my mind that I was going to move there; replant myself in a foreign state where I knew no one but her. I was going to marry her—the love of my life!

Until…

It just so happened, after scraping the bottom of my piggy-bank, I found just enough money for a (yep, you guessed it) surprise visit.

Oh, how surprising it was, indeed.

I drove sixteen hours to find the one who swore would never lay her eyes on another man…on TOP of another man. I’m not sure if her eyes were open or not, but I had a feeling it didn’t matter much to her.

I never said a word, never made a sound. She never even knew I was there.

UNTIL…

I was stuck in her driveway because my car wouldn’t start. I was crankin’ on that son-of-a-bitch like I was stalled on a railroad track and I could see the train coming at a hundred miles an hour.

I hold the record for the longest stretch of road-rage in history; nine hundred miles of red-eyed, mind-blowing madness.

Surviving the breakup was difficult. For months afterward, it seemed as though I was dreaming. She was all I had consumed for a solid year. Suddenly, she was gone—an emptiness words can’t explain.

But, in the end, I pulled myself out of the mud and soldiered forth.

Since breaking up, she has tried to contact me several times, trying to win my heart back. Ha! Dream on, hooker!

Don Compton, 30, Chat Room Moderator

I didn’t date in high school. I barely had crushes, I didn’t know how. Flirtation was a language I’d never learned, and dating was a completely different country.

It’s no stretch to say that I was kind of a nerd, but I had friends and she was one of them. The Christmas after I graduated high school, she went for it. She kissed me! I asked her to be my girlfriend, she agreed and everything was great.

One week later she called me up and told me she wasn’t ready for a relationship yet, but of course, we could still be friends.

Being just friends meant we could go to dinner, ride our bikes in the park, talk for hours, hold hands, even snuggle together during a movie. It was exactly like dating, except without anything concrete.

Since she was technically my ex girlfriend, I finally told her I needed some space. Getting over an ex can be hard, even harder when you’re still sort-of-not-really dating. She asked why I needed space, so I finally called her out. I told her I still had feelings for her, and I needed to know if she had feelings for me.

She did, but she valued our friendship too much to mess it up with a relationship.

Seriously. getting over her was hard. We stopped talking. The first week was the worst. Every time I was bored I would pick up my phone and then remember that I couldn’t call her. Over the past 2 years she had not only been my best friend, but my only friend.

I dated other people, but always found myself fantasizing about a way to get her back. I would imagine her showing up on my front porch in the rain, begging for me to forgive her. It never happened.

Eventually, we got back in touch online. One day I got an e-mail from her, telling me she still thought of me, and sometimes thought of leaving her boyfriend for me.

I should have been thrilled, but instead I was mad. I thought about how she had jerked me around for years, and how she didn’t really want me, she just wanted me to want her.

After so many years, I see how she and I would have grown apart no matter what. A relationship would have been a disaster, but so was our friendship, so what’s the difference?

Finally getting over her took me six years and we only really dated for a week. I’m sure that must be a world record.

R. Miller, 26, Student

One of the things about getting dumped is that when it happens a second time around with the same girl, it can be more than just a bit heart-wrenching. When she tells you that she doesn’t want to see you anymore over the phone, it can be twice as bad, and when you’ve just spent a college binge weekend experimenting with controlled substances her news can throw a monkey wrench straight through the carefully laid out scientific blueprints floating around your cranium.

What really helped me get over my ex was not the fact that I was totally too wrecked to comprehend what was going on. While intoxication did take a large portion of the sting (and my potential to react to it) out of the equation…

Tamiqua, (which is not her real name) and I had dated for longer than I was able to readily erase from my memory banks. For a long term solution, I had no choice but to take the hard road to surviving a break up, and for those of you out there in similar situations, I’m afraid your fate is similar.

When you’ve developed feelings for another human being, and cultivated your reaction to those feelings through habitual association and intimate contact with them, the only way to let them go is to wait it out. Once destiny separated Tamiqua and I, the inevitable progression of time, which I spent tackling the hefty goal of chatting up every woman at my university, made us eventually forget those deep associations. Emotions, positive or negative, build with experiences, and moods often attract similar dispositions.

If you’re having trouble getting over her, it’s not because she was that important to you, but rather because if you’re not actively trying by thinking about someone(s) else, then you’re not trying correctly. That may sound harsh, but what you should aim for in all aspects and stages of relationship development/destruction is similar to the old maxim “work smarter, not harder.” if you constantly need to do hard work to maintain your communication at a comfortable level, it usually means the relationship isn’t that much fun anymore, so let your attention wander, just be honest with yourself about it. When your direction splits from hers, take it as a blessing, as Tamiqua went on to birth beautiful babies with the next cat she met.

“Brickbeard” 26, Buccaneer fan

I should have known in the beginning that the relationship was going to end badly. After all, I watched her go through a lot of guys – including my best friend. But as I watched her, I fell in love with her. I thought I could change her. After all, through all this, she fell in love with me, too, or so I thought.

We lasted an amazing couple of years before she started cheating on me . . . that I know of! We were on a double date at the drive-in with one of her girlfriends and this other guy. I got out of the car to get popcorn and pop at the stand, and I saw the other girl going into the bathroom as I was heading back to the car. As I was approaching the car, I noticed nobody was in the front seat. I figured my girl was in the bathroom with her friend. Until I got closer. Turns out she was in the backseat with her buddy’s boyfriend! And they were going at it pretty heavy.

So, I tossed her and her high-fashion pumps and webbed toes out the door. I regretted it as soon as the door closed behind her. I thought we’d be together forever. I even thought about buying the engagement ring.

It felt like there was this crushing weight on my heart. I spent four days in bed, just thinking about her. Pathetic, I know. I just knew deep down that I was never getting over her.

Over the next year I moped around. I avoided all the places she liked – I even avoided eating the foods she loved. Every thought I had dealt with how to get her back. I had girls hitting on me, but I was too depressed to even try to find someone else. Nobody was going to replace my ex girlfriend. My buddies were giving me advice about getting over an ex – even my mom was trying to help by giving me magazine articles. But there was no getting over her. I just needed time.

It’s been a few years since my ex girlfriend. But even after this time, that event still bugs me. So, my new girlfriend takes the opportunity to poke fun at the ex whenever she sees fit. What a great one I have now!

Steve
Construction Worker, 28

Summer

To say that we had some fun together would be an unforgivable understatement. Emily and I had a frigging blast. She was wild and spontaneous but had a thriving inner life, while I was hunkering over Camus with an untapped longing for action. We complimented each other in nearly every way and got into a terrific amount of trouble with our families, with the law and with each other. It was young love, neurotic and complete. She was the only person I saw when she was in the room.

Fall

Things began to take a turn for the worse when it became clear that I, well, I thought that this was going to be forever and she didn’t. Within a short period of time, it was clear that it was going to take a lot of effort to sort out our differences, and Emily made the decision to call it quits over a 2am phone call. I managed to make it through the call pretty well, and it wasn’t until I hung the phone hit the receiver that the dam broke.

I’ve never been able to relate to people who describe crying after a break up as a cathartic process. Maybe it’s because I keep things bottled up, but crying is a violent and angry process for me that I find difficult to deal with.

The next day, it was incredible just how dull the world outside suddenly appeared. It might be melodramatic, but it was true; a world without her seemed pointless and empty.

Winter

PostEmilypartem depression came on with a rush of emotions that I had never felt before, and I was immediately hooked. In the aftermath of a breakup, no one wants to hear that time heals all wounds because your pain is the only thing you have left from your love. Instead of thinking and doing the things that I knew would make me feel better, I became obsessed with my sorrow and wallowed in it shamelessly. 80′s torch songs were resurrected from ancient playlists as I commiserated with Phil Collins over candlelight and boxed wine. I tortured myself endlessly with the indie pop songs that we use to cruise and make love to as messages from well meaning friends went unreturned. In other words, I became ridiculous.

Spring

I don’t clearly remember the first time that I realized that I had gone through an entire day without thinking about Emily, but I’m certain that it is was in the spring. New life was emerging from the ground as the world turned green, and there was this unfamiliar freshness to things that took some time to get used to. In a matter of weeks, I found myself in my favorite record store buying new albums that I had never listened to with Emily and was able to think that she might have dug a particular track without feeling any sense of loss. It took some time and some awkward false efforts, but I started getting myself back out there. Those phone calls from friends got returned, and, slowly, time did heal those wounds while allowing me to still cherish my time together with her.

Anon.

I don’t think I will ever forget my worst break up. Back in the day I worked full-time to pay for college. I was dirt poor, but had huge dreams. However, the parents of the girl I was in a relationship with had even bigger dreams for their little princess. Unfortunately, I was crazy about this girl. She was very much out of my league, but very much into me. Her parents were millionaires and she was terribly shallow, but I didn’t see that. Now, while those two things do not always necessarily go hand in hand; in this case, they did.

A major contention with her parents was my motorcycle, and for this reason I guess they considered me a “bad boy”. Me? I was the guy who got picked on in high school and just wanted to make something of myself. We persevered though, declaring our undying love for one another; until one really bad day.

Her parents called me and asked me to come over and meet a few close friends of the family. Her parents hated me so, and  although my radar was going ballistic, I went. I tried to get in touch with my girl, but she couldn’t be reached. I got there and her parents ushered me in. There on the couch was my girlfriend with this blond guy with pecks, legs and arms like tree trunks. Turns out, her parents had been working that angle for a while. Needless to say, he had her out with him soon after that. She never even bothered to formally break it off with me. I was crushed over the relationship break up.

What ensued in the next two weeks was not pretty, and this is in no way intended to be taken as advice to anyone who has had a recent break up. I can only say what worked for me.

After the break up, in a nutshell, booze. I drowned myself in anything that wouldn’t drink me first. I didn’t go to school and was fired from my job. I wouldn’t shower, nor would I climb out of my boxers.

I became “King of the Crooners” by night and “King of the Losers” by day. My friends had finally seen enough. They started circling the wagons after one too many sad Karaoke songs. After three months I rejoined the living. Without them I may have never gotten over the break up.

Jared D, 41,  writer