How I Moved On After a 9-Year Intense Relationship (Real Story & Lessons)

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Table of contents

Forgetting someone, especially your loved one, is a very difficult task. Once they leave, their memories fill up our empty lives, just like a breeze of air that enters our room without permission and makes a noise. We keep scrolling through old memories, photos, messages, and interactions endlessly. When we see something that reminds us of them, we unconsciously start thinking about the old interactions.  Old memories, the pain of separation tries to escape from the windows of our eyes.

Sometimes, we just want to forget them, not because they are evil, but you start to realize that their absence is killing you from the inside, and if you don’t do anything about it, you are most likely to get drowned in that broken relationship. This is the story of myself, how I ended this endless, painful loop of uncontrolled emotions and unforgettable memories and how i moved on from this intense relationship of years.

How I moved on After Brutal Breakup

This was life changing relationship for me

I don’t know about her, but for me, our love was deeply rooted in my core identity and belief system. I never believed, expected, or imagined that someday, this would break apart. I had created my world around her. She was part of my every planning for the future and the present.

She had flowered, nourished, and watered my dry and loveless life. She was my father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, and my whole family for me. I had no one in my life unlike her. She came into my life like a stream of warm water in winter.

We created countless memories while traveling, engaging in endless chats and interactions. I had stored thousands of our photographs.

She Left Me After 9 years of Relationship

And one day, she said, “This is not working for me.” “We should move on!”, I said, “Okay.” Thinking, she is joking, or this is just another “mood swing’. I kept waiting for her response, not realizing she had already moved on in her life, ruthlessly. It took me days to process that she had gone from my life. Suddenly, my life started to feel cold again. As I told you earlier, my life was cold earlier due to family responsibilities and non-ending family wars. 

One day, I made up my mind and decided to move on, and for some days, I was okay and living my normal life. On such a normal day, an intense memory surfaced in my mind, which came like a devastating tsunami that broke all the walls I had built to forget her. Without my knowing, that suppressed pain, memories, and betrayal caught me in the battleground, and I started losing this war.

This is not working for me.

How I Kept Fighting and Struggled to Let Her Go

I kept suppressing all those emotions, and they kept coming like waves of tsunamis, and they started to hit my foundations of love, identity, and belief system.  I started to think and believe that there is nothing like love. I started to believe that people stay with us until we provide them with something, or they get something from us, and when they stop getting what they want, they just leave, without giving any closure.  

I started deleting everything that was reminding me of her, not out of hate, but I never wanted to hurt her, and I believed that, if I kept thinking about her, I might hurt her, not physically, but at least through some verbal confrontation, because she never gave me closure, that why she left so cleanly. Her clean exit was the main trigger point for me, that if she left so cleanly, was I, was this, nothing for her, and she was just pretending all these years, and this is what eating me from the inside. I had deleted all her memories, but later I realized that this was never about the memories but about the closure.

How I couldn’t hate her and why I couldn’t leave her

But still, all these realizations were not good enough to create ‘hate’ for her in my mind. I realized my poor defense system cannot defend against this in the first place. I truly loved her, even if she did not; this is what my confused mind was thinking at that time. I realized I cannot forget her, because her presence was a habit for me for years. I was likely more emotionally invested in her than she was. Her looks, behavior, presence, and style had created a long-lasting impact on my mind.

How I moved from ignoring/suppressing emotions to starting to process them

Her memories kept coming in, and I kept losing my ammunition to defend my poor castle. One day, I dropped my swords and just started ignoring her, letting to surface emotions and all that came with her memories. They kept coming, and I started realizing that ignoring isn’t going to help solve this issue. I started writing down my emotions, whatever came to my poor mind. While writing it down, I learnt that this is the right way to forget her, not forgetting, not suppressing, but “processing”. I started noting down what “bothered” me and what I can do about it. At the end of the processing, I concluded that, I –

  1. Loved her; that was 100 %, genuine love.
  2. Also learnt that, at the initial stage, she also loved me.
  3. Accepted that people change over time, for many unknown reasons.
  4. Realized that love and choice are two different things, and love cannot force choice.
  5. I forgave her for not leaving me, but for not giving me closure. She didn’t owe me an explanation; she at least told me she was leaving, and that closure was acceptable for me.
  6. Accepted that it wasn’t my fault that she left this relationship, but it was her choice, and I had always respected her choice, even if it meant leaving me.
  7. Let my mind process that her choice, her thought process, is not in my control, even if she is incorrect, and I don’t have the moral authority to judge her actions just because she left me.

These conclusions were able to keep intact my identity and my belief system, and that love is real. This acceptance /realization slowly started healing me, and I started feeling more open to new relationships and opportunities in my life.

How This Breakup Changed Me

We take relationships for granted, and we forget that they are as fragile as glass; one misunderstanding, one argument, one crisis, and we are gone. I was born and brought up in a Hindu Kshatriya family. I am not exaggerating, but I was trained to value our words, promises, and vows. I was extremely loyal to her, as I had promised her in front of the gods and the fire not to leave her. For me, it was a divine bond. This philosophical, or you will say, religious thought process was keeping me hooked in the situation that I couldn’t complete my promise, I couldn’t complete my vows.

One day, when I was reading something, suddenly a strong realization hit me that in a marriage, vows and promises are not the responsibility of one individual. She also vowed to be with me , forever.  I discovered that relationships are more like two people standing on the same ground, trying to balance a glass of water by pulling the rope towards each other. If one person leaves the rope, then it’s over; there is no role of other individual to balance the glass anymore.

Can I find another Relationship After this Breakup?

Seriously? I don’t know. But I have learnt through this bitter experience of a relationship that my capacity to love is more than enough. But, then again, I remembered the glass and rope theory. Just because I want to be loved, I can’t give my love unconditionally. I don’t do casual dating, relationships, and all those fancy dating things anymore.

I love to spend time with my friends and family; they make me happy. I am loving this freedom of not trying to get love or attention; I am better this way. I no longer want a relationship that requires my constant performance and efforts just to keep it alive. I am not thinking negatively, but I have accepted my fate. That, if she found me or I found the right one, then I will give it a try. I will still give it a chance, not to win anything, but to prove to myself that I still have faith in love and relationships.

I work on myself, go to the gym, and check my health whenever required. I keep learning, making new genuine friends, and that’s it. I keep myself engaged, and I try to be as generous and humble as I can.

Why I valued dignity and self-respect after a breakup.

There are many things I value, such as my dignity and self-respect after this incident. I knew this was going to be a very bad experience of me or for me. If I had lost it, that could have worsened my situation. Say, for example, after this breakup, I could have found another relationship immediately, and there is still a fifty-fifty possibility or worse that that could also have not worked for me. Then imagine the consequences for me, I still had not processed the earlier heartbreak, and again I was hit with the new one. Even if she didn’t, I valued that relationship, and I wanted to keep that memory as genuine and happy, which I could remember after years and still smile.

I never badmouthed her, never blamed her. If I had blamed her, it could still have questioned my love for her. So, after a breakup, it is better to accept and let it go, instead of blaming her, you, or the situation. It is better to accept that relationships are fragile and that they are meant to be broken by either side. It is also better to accept that it is okay, not to be in a relationship forever or for some time.

How my Self Questioning Helped me to get out of this brutal heartbreak.

When she left me, my overthinking mind tried to solve everything. I tried to find meaning, but I didn’t find none. There were many ways I could have closed this in my mind, that it was her fault, it was my fault, women are like this, she never loved me, I never loved her etc. etc. Every such excuse was a self-doubt and self-questioning for me which tried to find the balance between taking extreme decisions and reaching any extreme conclusions. This self-questioning kept my thought process balanced and helped me process this overall trauma with very ease.

Conclusion and Way Forward If You are trying to move on in a Relationship

  1. Accept that, you gave your best and even if you didn’t relationships are not / can not be forced by a single individual, it is a two-way responsibility.
  2. If she / he left you try to give a proper closure from your end, even if they don’t.
  3. Keep in mind that, it was meant to be broken in the first place, because if it wasn’t, it should not have broken now.
  4. Don’t take it personally, remember the Darwins law of survival of the fittest.
  5. Work on yourself, best way? go to the gym and do strength training. Believe me, running, walking, and all those trainings don’t work for heartbreaks. When you do strength training, your body gets triggered to think that, it needs to be repaired and believe me, your body knows how to heal very well.
  6. Always remember, you are still and always be worthy enough to find a new soul.
  7. Never suppress or ignore your emotions, they will keep you hooked as your brain will try to find meaning in the past.
  8. Sleep well, go to your hometown or where you lived in your childhood. It helped me to restart my mind from the absolute zero.
  9. Through away all their belongings, because they will keep you hooked.

Stay Happy, Stay Blessed.

Find a new relationship here.