How to Create a Great Romance After Heartbreak

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Most of us who have fallen in love have experienced the heartbreak of seeing it all fall apart. To move on, the strategy many of us employ is similar to what one woman told her girlfriend, “The best way to get over a man is to get under another one.”

Avoid Entering Into a New Relationship

Apart from the humor, entering into a new relationship as soon as possible has little going for it. The new relationship often employs whatever failed strategies led to the breakup of the previous relationship.

Examine What Went Wrong

Many people who have gone through an excruciatingly painful experience will schedule a review of the incident. (Think emergency responders, military leaders, or even high school football teams.) This review is a critical incident debriefing where we examine what went wrong and figure out where we go from here. We should do the same review of our failed romantic relationships.

Don’t Rush It

It makes sense to do this after a breakup, but it’s hard because pain is painful! No one likes to get too close to this kind of pain. And know this: There’s no rush. If you just got served with divorce papers, it’s too early. If you just moved out, it’s too early. If you can’t stop crying, it’s too early. Doing a critical incident debriefing of a failed romance when you’re not ready will only make the trauma worse.

When you are ready, examine everything in the failed relationship because avoiding this work can lead to repeating the mistakes again. Make sure that none of your pain goes to waste: learn every single lesson, every single priceless lesson that the universe is gifting you.

Starting Your Debriefing

We usually have a flawed start to the process of debriefing after a breakup because most of us have a tendency to blame the other person. We have to get over that because blaming the other person robs us of our power to do better. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why did I pick the person I picked?
• How did I miss the warning signs that I now see were there all along?
• When did I first detect these warning signs?

The answers to these, and similar “I” questions, generally point to some character flaw in ourselves or perhaps a thoughtless thinking error. Perhaps we were simply naïve? Maybe we irrationally believed that our love was going to magically take care of our (now former) partner’s terrible work ethic. Maybe we believed that our love could cure our partner of their insecurity, jealousy, or inability to maintain fidelity.

Marriage Won’t Protect You

This magical thinking, as described above, includes the institution of marriage itself. For example, maybe you thought, now that we’re married, we’ll be together forever, or now that we’re married, surely, they’ll stop drinking and get a job and treat me with respect rather than abuse? It’s only as we grow wiser that we realize there’s nothing magical about a wedding, no matter how expensive. There’s nothing about a marriage certificate that seals the deal and makes people change or divorce unthinkable or undoable. There’s also nothing about having sex or abstaining from sex that makes for one outcome over another.

Pay Attention to Your Partner

What makes for a different outcome is paying attention to what is before our very eyes: Our partner. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my partner really goo-goo, ga-ga crazy about me?
• Am I really goo-goo, ga-ga crazy for my partner?
• How does my partner treat others?
• How does my partner treat me?
• Have I been ignoring my partner's disrespect, even their abuse?
• Did I bother performing my due diligence and really get to know my partner before signing on the dotted line?

Depending on how long you were together, you might also ask:

• Why, after all those years, did I stay with my partner?
• Was I too needy to consider leaving because I was afraid of being alone?
• Did my religion matter more than the people (including me) that my religion was meant to serve?

Have Compassion for Yourself

These are hard questions that are even harder to hear the answers to. Painful answers are a clear call for personal growth which can be, you guessed it, painful. But what is our alternative? Staying naïve, uninformed, and impaired?

As Ben Franklin famously said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” If we want to create an epic romance, we all need to get better at examining our failed relationships and approaching our new romances with intention. Let’s learn how.

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