Stop Chasing Your Ex Back

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
-Albert Einstein

It’s liberating when you realize that someone doesn’t love you anymore. Well, at first it’s devastating. At first you’ll be stricken with grief and question what’s wrong with you. You’ll ask yourself what you can do to make yourself more lovable, as if changing one thing will suddenly make you more appealing to a mass group of people. There must be something you can fix inside yourself that will bring all the men and women who loved you back, who once held you like a boa constrictor in bed and delighted in your every movement. You were a gold star they stuck on their bedroom wall until the edges started to wilt, and you fell down. Gold star, little star, crumbled up piece of sticker on your foot that you can’t seem to get off.

No, no. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t bring anyone back. What’s done is done. Something inside of them switched and they made the decision to stop loving you. If only we understood at that moment how little it had to do with us. When you fall in and out of love with someone, it’s like you become privy to all the secrets of the world. You understand what life is all about, how badly we all just want to connect with someone and feel like we have a partner or a teammate. It’s cruel how quickly things can change, how your teammate becomes an adversary at the drop of a hat. All the while, you keep asking yourself “How can I get the gold star to stick again? How can I get my teammate back?” What you don’t know now, you’ll understand later. Trust me.

Pero una sa lahat isipin muna natin, bakit nga ba gusto mong makipag balikan kay Ex?

Why would anyone want to get their ex back? Why would you want to take back someone who walked out on you? Why would you want to start a relationship that already ran its course? Why would you want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you?

These are all legitimate questions that some people have about reconciliation.

But not those who do want to get their ex back.

They have a very simple answer to all these questions.

“I still love my Ex”.

And as we all know, according to the media and all that John Lloyd/Bea Alonzo movies – Love is the only thing that matters in this world.

Is it?

It’s not that I am against the idea of reconciliation, but I am against the idea of putting your ex before your happiness. The only reason to get back together is if you want to give the relationship another try and not because you need your ex.

The fact that you love your ex, you miss your ex, or that you are miserable without your ex is never a good reason to get back together. Your mind will trick you into thinking anything just to avoid the pain of breakup. So, if I were you, I won’t believe anything that your mind tells you after the breakup.

There are a variation of reasons that your mind will give you (and you will try to give to your friends and family), which are not really a good reasons for reconciliation like – I can’t live without him/her, I can never find someone like him/her, He/She was the one, No one can (insert some activity) like he/she used to do, I am miserable without him/her,I can’t imagine a life without him/her.. and of course – He/She made me happy.

Pambihirang mga rason yan! Kung totoo nga na they did make you happy then why are you so miserable now?

Remember, it’s not a solid reason if you can see a desperation or neediness in it.

You learn a lot about people and their ability to disengage when you get your heartbroken. But believe me that you’ll learn even more when you break someone else’s heart. That’s when it all becomes clear and you’re finally able to get over that one person who stopped loving you. Because now you know the secret. Now you know how random it all is. It’s a scary truth to realize. It’s a much easier pill to swallow when there are concrete reasons why the love stopped — it makes people seem less scary and more rational — but sometimes love is just as irrational as a loss of love. Things stop just because. Wala eh, ganun talaga.

If you had the experience of falling out of love with someone then you’ll understand it all. It will become clear that your ex didn’t love you anymore. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. You could have plastic surgery to look like Emma Watson and it wouldn’t make a lot of a difference. Just like how it was with the boy you stopped loving. He could have done anything to make you love him again and it wouldn’t have mattered. In your mind, the doors are closed and there is NO WAY to reopen them.

Realizing this might sound depressing but it was actually the ultimate relief. You can finally stop torturing yourself over “What if’s” and ways to get your ex back. You now know that it is impossible. Just like you had done with this boy, the love switch had gone off in your ex’s brain forever. It was no longer about you and your shortcomings as a partner. It was about something inside of him changing forever that was out of your control. Knowing there was no hope in salvaging the relationship was the greatest gift you could ever give yourself.

Now that you’ve seen both sides of the coin, you can see love in all its screwed up complexities and here’s the take-away message I’ll give you: Love is there until it’s not. It might have everything to do with you or it might have nothing to do with you. The point is that people change and outgrow each other. Placing the blame on yourself and agonizing over what you could’ve done to change the outcome is fruitless. It’s all chemical anyway. Take the weight of the grief off your shoulders and take solace in knowing that you will be loved again.

Now do me a favor, stop chasing your Ex back.