Before I start, I have experienced the grief of losing a loved one, the death of my beloved grandad when I was 12 years old has continued to have an impact on me into my adult life. There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t miss him, but after all this time, the raw pain has been numbed a little, and some days I can simply smile about the good times, and be happy for the memories I do have of him. I am in no way suggesting that losing a living person, whether through a break-up, or the end of a friendship, is the same kind of pain as when a loved one passes away, but what I am saying is that it is ok to grieve situations like this, it is perfectly normal to hurt.
Over the past decade I have lost several people, who were once a big part of my life. Some people I have simply lost touch with, the friendship slowly fizzled out, or we just stopped seeing each other as often due to taking different paths in life, but others have left a lasting impact, and those are the ones that I continue to work through with therapists, to understand why the relationship ended as it did, and to come to terms with how it has affected me since.
The truth is, when a relationship ends, I struggle. I put everything into my relationships, whether it is platonic or sexual. I throw myself into things and I care about that person above (almost) anything else. So, when that relationship ends, I am left feeling lost, unsure of where I stand, and, going from talking all the time, from seeing that person all the time, to never seeing them again is hard. It is difficult to come to terms with, to get used to a new way of living. I apologise if that sounds over the top, I don’t know if this is something other people experience, or whether a relationship ending is more of an acceptable and natural process for other people.
When a relationship first ends, understandably it feels harder. There are people from my past who I still miss, who I would love to have a friendship with now, but who I can quite happily live my life without them being a part of it, and there are people I have fallen out of touch with who I don’t actually want to be a part of my life anymore, I feel better without them in it.
Then there are people who have left my life more recently, and these are the people I am still trying to get used to not seeing, and it does feel like a grief. I am not so much grieving the person, but the relationship itself, the things that I saw us doing or experiencing together, the sense of having somebody there who wanted to talk to me, wanted to see me, wanted to be a part of my life. That grief may be different than when somebody dies, but knowing that the person is still there, but just not a part of your life, can feel just as painful, at the time.
You find yourself looking back at the time you spent with that person, the friendship you had, the experiences you had together, with rose tinted glasses. You focus on the good, choosing to gloss over any negatives, making it harder to get over and more painful for you to move on. The truth is, any relationship which has ended, has ended for a reason. You might not feel it at the time, especially if the relationship ending was not your choice, but with time you will come to terms with it, and realise that you weren’t meant to stay in each other’s lives.
And sometimes a break-up doesn’t mean the end, you can remain friends with an ex partner, you can forge a new relationship, with different experiences to enjoy together. This is something I have gone through, and it is lovely to be able to keep those people in your life, to be able to move on and stay in contact, but it won’t work if either one of you are still harbouring a hope of a reunion, if you are staying in their life to hopefully make them realise what they lost. That is only going to cause further heartache and pain down the line.
Ultimately, the end of any relationship is going to be hard. It is a loss, regardless of whether they are alive or not, the relationship has died, even if they haven’t. If you are going through a loss of a living person, know that you aren’t alone, and it is perfectly normal to feel a form of grief, to go through this before you can come out of the other side and fully move on. I have written before about my experience of being ghosted by a close friend a few years ago, and this is something I really struggled with for a long time, but I am starting to realise it says more about them than it does about me. You will get through this stage, and you will be able to look back and learn from the experience. It’s a process, you just have to work through it.
