Here's how you get over a breakup fast. I have a friend going through a breakup right now who's been struggling, and I've had a lot of breakups in my life and watched and helped a lot of others through theirs. As I've been talking with my friend about his breakup, he says, thank you, I feel really hopeful. So I want to share that same hope with you here.
1. Connect with other people
The first suggestion I'll give you to get over a breakup fast is to connect with other people, and to listen to what other people are going through. While I do suggest you share your breakup story, also be interested in hearing other people's breakup stories. You'd be amazed at what a great opportunity having a breakup is to hear about parts of your friends and family, and even acquaintances and coworkers, that you never knew before.
I know how painful breakups are. In my experience, I was drawn to self-harm and addiction when I had breakups in the past, so I understand that pain of loneliness. The feeling like you're never going to find that person. The depression about why is the world this way, can't one person just love me? I know that pain. And you can tell I've been out of that pain for a long time. I've been with my wife for more than 12 years now, married for more than 10 years, and very happy the entire time. And I can tell you that right before I met my wife, I had just gone through that loneliness pain again. I'm grateful I never settled.
2. Be honest about whether this was really the right person
The second way you can get over a breakup fast is, if you can look at your relationship and honestly say that this wasn't the best person for you, or you weren't the best person for them, because it's not all about you. It doesn't matter if you love them and they did everything for you and you'll never find anybody like them again. That story is obviously crap. Do you realize how many people there are in the world right now? There's like a million people for everybody. This is a big world full of a lot of people. And the magic is finding a relationship where you and the person you're with really love each other and grow together. If that's not your relationship, breaking up now is much better. Would you prefer to marry the person, or to have kids with them? Or if you've already got those things, would you prefer to keep dragging this out and keep taking up more and more time of your life with this person when you know it's not right?
My friend who's going through a breakup says he knows that girl is not the one for him, and yet he has to face this loneliness. He's the one who broke up with her, and he feels so bad and he's scared. And I tell him, look, there's not going to be any doubt when you find the right person. If there is any doubt in your mind as to whether this person is right, and what if I don't find the one, then you clearly haven't found a person who's very compatible. When I met my wife, there was no doubt that she was right for me. Now, she's not a singularity. There are lots of other women, and maybe some men, who could be right for me. Because, as I said, this is a big world.
When we have a breakup, we often get stuck in our own minds, and our world gets to be very small. It's just us and our lonely, bleeding heart. I've been there. I've nearly ended it all from that pain. And I'm glad I made it through, because I had hope. Just a little bit of hope sometimes, because I saw my parents stay together for over 30 years before my dad passed. I saw other people having great relationships.
3. Look at other people having great relationships
A big third tip for you to get over this breakup is to look at other people having great relationships. Instead of letting jealousy consume you and saying, why did they get to have this and I don't, look and say, that person and this couple having a great relationship is proof that I can have one too. Because they're not special, and you're not special. There are billions of people on this planet. I'm sure there's someone who would love to be with you.
A breakup is a great opportunity to take inventory of what you have to offer. A breakup can seem scary if you don't think you have anything to offer, if you don't understand the value you have to give to someone else. If you understand that you've got a lot to give to someone else, then it's not scary. It could even be exciting. It could be exciting to think, who am I going to meet next? If you want more on dating with that mindset, I keep this conversation going in my Dating playlist.
4. Lean into curiosity
So my number four tip is to lean into curiosity. As kids, we've often been programmed to stomp out curiosity. Curiosity sucks, don't ask questions, don't think about what could happen, just do what you're told, put your head down and try to survive this awful life. What I've found is that curiosity often helps me through really bad situations. Not by thinking how much worse can this get, but how can this get better? Not really sure right now, but I'm excited to see how it will get better.
If you're in a breakup and you're really hurting, then the only logical place you're going to go from here is up. There's a concept in statistics called regression to the mean. While that's a fancy statistical term, what it means is that if you feel really bad, you're going to feel better without even doing anything, because we have this baseline, this normal feeling for us.
And if you get way above that baseline, you may come down a bit. If you get really happy and excited and life is so good and it's fantastic, you might not be surprised if a few days later you have a bit of a bad mood, a down mood, a depressed mood. What helps me when I get down and depressed and hurt, and I do, even though I have a wonderful partner, wonderful kids, and I'm a YouTuber living everything in my life how I want it, I still get depressed sometimes. This mind naturally is a waveform. It goes up and down, and my average is very happy and excited and grateful, so it's quite a shock to me when my mind goes into everything sucks, life is meaningless. What helps me through that is to know that if I'm experiencing the bad feelings, the hurt feelings, the confused feelings, the scared feelings, I'm going to correct and go back up to feeling really great.
If you're in a breakup, you can look forward to a lot of happiness coming your way in the future. What makes it worse is when you look at, oh, this hurts so much, which it certainly does when you've intertwined your heart with someone else's and you've made your life with them, and for whatever reason the relationship ends. I understand that can hurt. But it's foolish to look at the hurt and expect that it's going to last forever. I'm going to suggest it'll last as long as you want it to. If you truly are tired of feeling bad over a breakup, if you're really tired of it, you'll start feeling better. And the number one way to feel better is to start taking some actions. It's unreasonable to lay around in bed all day and watch all these sad TV shows, and to sit in your house and cry and moan and expect that you should be okay with it. You should feel better. What are you doing for someone else?
5. Get out there and help somebody else
My fifth suggestion is, if you're having a hard time, get out there and help somebody else. That's what has saved my life when I was having a real hard time, especially quitting drinking, and with breakups. Getting out there and helping somebody else. Something as simple as just going to work and trying to do some good for somebody else. Calling my parents, calling a friend, and not just calling because they need to cheer me up, but calling maybe I can cheer them up, and realizing that your pain is an opportunity for someone else to help you. I swear my mother loves it when I have a bad day, because then she has more of an opportunity to help me than usual. Sometimes just telling my mother how bad I feel, I start instantly feeling better, because it creates this huge desire in her to help me feel better. As soon as I tell her I'm not feeling good, her desire to help me is instantly cranking up to volume.
Your pain is an opportunity to connect with new people, to change habits. When I had the worst breakup of my life, which resulted in losing my job and moving out and leaving all my friends behind, I made some of the most positive changes I've ever made. I got out of an environment where I was very lonely and living by myself, and I moved home with my parents. Instead of just grinding out as a police officer every day, trying to make all this money with overtime, then spending it all at the strip club, finding girls to date where one of us wasn't good for the other one, and then being miserable, going down the drain mentally, and doing it all over again day after day, I got out of the grind. I moved home with my parents. I took some quality time to just rest, take care of myself, play some video games, watch TV with my parents, go and do stuff with my parents, and go back to school.
I ended up going to graduate school as soon as I moved home with my parents. I knew I'd have to be working toward some objective, like graduate school or a career, and graduate school seemed the best track to take, both because I wanted to and because it gave me the opportunity to do nothing for a year before graduate school. Of course I had to apply and wait and get accepted, and I got accepted into the University of South Florida, almost fully paid, plus a job. I moved to Tampa, Florida. The worst breakup, the craziest time in my life, in 2009, set me up to have the best time of my life starting in 2011 and continuing for 12 years.
I learned so much from that breakup. I learned both that I had a lot to offer as a partner and that I needed to find someone who was compatible with me. I couldn't date someone else who was an alcoholic like me. I had to date someone who would be complementary in that department, who would be more of an Al-Anon, or an enabler, or a caretaker, and who would take good care of themselves. And I found my wife, and the compatibility was instant. We moved in within six, seven months of dating. I had never moved in with a woman before. We moved in in 2011, so I was 27 when I moved in for the first time with a woman, even though I'd dated and had relationships and all the pain.
All the pain I experienced dating set me up to have a wonderful marriage. I had as much or more pain dating, and as many or more failures, than any of my friends, often more than several of my friends put together. Most of them enjoyed lots of monogamous relationships that were pretty happy. Me, I barely could string together a relationship here and there. I'd always be either getting rejected, or trying to get rid of some girl who wasn't taking my rejection, or picking some girl up and then being sad when it didn't work out. My friends consistently had to console me through my breakups. And all that pain was transmuted into learning, into growth.
6. Ask what you can learn from it
Breakups provide very valuable learning and growth. One of the biggest things you can do to transform a breakup and get out of this place of feeling so bad about it is to start thinking, what do I learn from this? And don't take stupid negative lessons, that all men are jerks or all women are gold diggers, or whatever your mind is telling you. That's stupid. Don't take that kind of lesson out of it. Take a positive lesson out of it.
For example, if you aren't feeling that you're attractive, take it as an opportunity. If I'm so insecure that I think this breakup is the end of my dating life and I'll never have a person this good again, why don't I work on myself and see what I can do to make myself more attractive? Maybe the learning opportunity is that this is a good time to check in with your diet, your sleep habits, and your career, and to learn how to look at your life and think, what kind of life am I living, and who would want to be with a person living this kind of life? Knowing that almost everybody wants to have a partner, there is someone for you.
7. Put the odds in your favor with where you live
The last suggestion I'll give here is, if you're living in an area where, perhaps if you have a breakup with someone, that might be the last single person in your area. I used to live in Columbia, South Carolina, and if you used the dating site and put in certain criteria like college education, age, and so on, there were two men for every one woman who matched my criteria. Dating in Columbia for me was difficult because the odds were stacked against me. There were many more eligible bachelors there than eligible bachelorettes.
I remember I hated the bars in Columbia. It would always be a sausage fest, where there's a lot of dudes and not a lot of ladies. I went to Charlotte, North Carolina, with my friends one time. We go up into a bar there and the whole bar is hot chicks and there's hardly any dudes. I'm like, oh my God, where has this bar been? And then I figured it out. Columbia, South Carolina, dating's been brutally difficult because the odds were stacked against me. I need to go somewhere where the odds are stacked in my favor, like Charlotte.
This is especially relevant if you are in a more niche demographic, like if you're gay, or if you have certain preferences. For example, you want to date just single moms or single dads, or you want to date someone younger or older. There are certain places you can go that will have a lot of the people you want to date. If you're gay, St. Pete, Florida, is a great place. There are a lot of gay people here. If you're an attractive single man, St. Pete is a great place for you, because there are lots of attractive women who move to St. Petersburg, but there's not a lot of attractive single straight guys who move here.
That's why I found a wife very quickly when I moved to Tampa. Before I moved there, I checked the dating sites and saw that there were 2,000 women who matched my search criteria within a one-hour drive of Tampa, and there were 1,000 men who matched the same criteria. That means it's effectively four times easier for me to date in Tampa compared to South Carolina. Four times easier. That's why in Columbia, I was devastated, because when things didn't work out with this really attractive girl, I'm like, oh my God, I'm done, this is it, I'm finished. I moved to Tampa and I'm like, oh my God, it's like the Bachelor up in here. There are so many attractive women. I can lock down exactly what I want and what's good for me. My wife might say the other end of that, like, I just had to settle for whoever came along. But you want to put the odds in your favor. A breakup could be a good chance to make sure you stack the odds in your favor, and to figure out where you can position yourself so you can be free to choose.
And know that if you're, for example, an attractive man and you move to St. Pete, Florida, you're doing the women here a favor. That's really nice of you, because they need more guys like me. Except, see, I'm married now. That's what happens. There's not a lot of guys who are single and attractive here, because if you're halfway decent, some woman's going to lock you down. Whereas if I lived out in the country, as I know some of my friends do, or in Columbia, South Carolina, it's going to be difficult. A guy like me could easily be single out there, as I was a lot. If you'd like to see how I think through dating and relationships across many of these situations, you're welcome to join my Family and bring your own questions.
Remember who you are
I hope this helps you with your breakup. Your breakup can be one of the best things that's ever happened to you, especially if you feel like it's one of the worst things that's ever happened to you. This is a great opportunity to turn it around. I know it hurts, but remember who you are.
I am not this mind. I'm not this body. I'm not my story. I am the spirit that gives this life, that is here experiencing it. I am here for the journey, for the ride, the joy of the human experience. The things that happen to me do not define me. The things I observe and participate in are not me. Who I am never changes. I am that which controls this body and this mind. I am here for all of the human experience. Not just what you'd call good, not just happiness and joy and freedom, but I'm here for the bad too. And when I feel down, I remember, this suffering is delicious. It's nasty, and I like it.
Enjoy your breakup. It can be the best thing that ever happened to you. If you can turn that pain into learning, you will get massive amounts of pleasure as your reward.
It's never too late
One last point I want to address. I had a family member who was trying to put out there that they were too old. They hadn't dated, they were in their 50s. Too old. It's too late for me. They went out on one online date and were ready to just give up. Ah, this online dating doesn't work, it's not going to work out. And I said, is it reasonable to expect to try something for the first time and just, it works immediately? In what area of life do you do that? In almost every area of life, you have to suffer and struggle and figure things out.
No matter who you are, there's somebody you can enjoy being with. As long as you can enjoy being with them, you're good. As long as you're here, there must be opportunities to learn and grow. If you're so stiff and rigid that nothing will be right for you, the Tao Te Ching tells us that things that are stiff and rigid are death. Things in death are stiff and rigid. Things in life are flexible and grow. So what are you? If you have the chance to grow and are flexible and you want to live, you absolutely can find love and romance. I don't care if you're in your 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s. There is someone out there who needs your love. And if you have an open mind and are flexible and ready to receive, it will come to you, or you will run into them.
If this gave you some hope, you might also like how I got over a broken heart and my guide to healing after heartache.