Start by Believing In Yourself

A most common reaction to breaking up is usually finding replacement to erase the LGS (Last Girl Syndrome) or LBS (Last Boy Syndrome) stuck in their heads/hearts. In fact, some boys and girls even go on a  "race" to enter a new relationship if only to avoid the embarrassment that comes with "being replaced" as well as to get out of the pain and heartbreak in the quickest time possible.

What happens then is an impatient quest for a replacement that compromises the quality of the relationship and the person being sought. When we don't pause to breathe from a heartbreak, we mostly end up in -guess what- another heartbreak which brings us back to where we started.

It is so easy to just plaster on a band-aid to a wound rather than being bothered with the meticulous cleaning of it that most of the time we just end up wondering why the wound is not healing at all. Then we end up taking off the band aid much much later only to discover that underneath what we've hidden from the rest of the world for a time (which we led everyone to believe is already healing speedily) is a wound that's still as fresh as it had been the day we first got it injured. Now don't we wish we had just took the extra time to clean and treat it correctly the first time around instead of just going by a quick fix that ended up being a waste of effort on our part?

Similarly, healing from a broken heart/ relationship that ended requires hard work and a determination to fix ourselves -and the first step in doing this is by starting to believe in ourselves.

Believe in yourself that you are worthy of love that people write novels about. Believe that your soul mate is in fact out there and not aborted at birth, that you are worthy of getting a proposal bestowing you a lifetime of love, or that you deserve to have some one you will love enough to propose your life to. Identify your own faults that are preventing you from getting a shot at full happiness and believe that you can change them. After all, anything worth having is worth working hard for and waiting for.

On choosing love

Love is a choice, and it has always been that way for me in the past. I think choosing to love is a natural course to follow for girls, especially since it is not us but usually the men who do the picking for us, and we just choose to say yes or reject a love that comes our way.

I can love at will, and I can stop at will, too. I know it sounds mechanical and not at all romantic, but I have lived the first quarter of my life alone and independently before finally caving in and saying yes to a very devoted boy who adored me and loved me with the strongest of passions when I was 24. He was the most sincere, earnest and loving man I’ve ever met that I just can’t refuse him when he asked me to be his girl.

Looking back at all my relationships after him, I have observed that my pattern for loving someone has always been going along with whoever chooses me and humouring his attention/love for me by trying to reciprocate it with as much attention/love as I can. The few times that I had been the one in charge of choosing my partner, I had immediately ended it due to lack of patience in waiting for him to reciprocate my love, or ended it because it never really felt right for me to steal someone else’s love, and I felt the urge to “return” him to his proper owner.

I have always been confident that I can “love” again.

Sometimes, though, I am afraid that I’m not doing it right. “Have I ever really fallen in love?” I ask myself numerous times. I know that one of the most apparent signs of falling in love is holding on and fighting to keep the person you love. However, I found that in my first few relationships, it has always been me who initiates ending the relationship. Sadly, by the time that I have figured out that I was not being the ideal mate by always letting someone go, ironically, it suddenly seemed that my partners are always letting me go.

Now, at a stage in my life where I can choose to love someone else again, I’d like to temporarily release hold on my share of happiness, as I found that it chips away my dignity. As Glory Szabo says, happiness is not a race with other people. I am stronger than my happiness.