Breakup Advice

Here are some interesting quotes about breakups that we’ve seen on different websites and pulled together conveniently for you here.

Some of them put breakups into context. Some are quotes about moving on.

Each of the breakup quotes is linked to the page where we found it so that you can explore further to find more related quotes.

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“I don’t miss him, I miss who I thought he was.” – Unknown

– from LovesAGame’s 10 Positive Break Up Quotes And What We Can Learn From Them

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“Breakups aren’t always meant for makeups. Sometimes, they’re meant for wakeups.”

– from Christi Hampton’s Break ups Pinterest page

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“The worst feeling is not being lonely. It’s being forgotten by someone you could not forget.”

– from LoveQuotes1’s Tumblr

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“Nothing hurts more than realizing they meant everything to you, but you meant nothing to them.” – Unknown

– from Sad Break Up Quotes’ Top 50 Breakup Quotes of All Time

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“Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.” – Gertrude by Herman Hesse

– from Flavorwire’s 30 Literary Breakup Quotes

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“I don’t hate you. I’m just disappointed you turned into everything you said you’d never be.”

– from Caley Horan’s BreakUp Quotes Pinterest page

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“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

– Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet

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“Time is only a healer if you use the time to heal.” – Marina Pearson

– from Five Break Up Quotes To Get You Through A Relationship Breakdown on the Huffington Post

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“If you are going through hell keep going.” – Winston Churchill

– from Five Break Up Quotes To Get You Through A Relationship Breakdown on the Huffington Post

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“Some people think that it’s holding on that makes one strong; sometimes it’s letting go.”

– from Best Breakup Quotes and Sayings

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“Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.” – Rita Mae Brown

– from BrokenHeartedGirl.com’s Breakup Quotes

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If you like these, you might also like Quotes on Relationships or Some of the Best Marriage Advice Quotes from Around the Web.

Do you know of any great quotes about breakups? Let us know about them in the comments. What are your favorites?

Today we have a question from a reader who had an affair for a year, which recently ended. She is having an extremely painful experience trying to get over this relationship and asks:

I am currently dating a man for 12 years and last January 2012, I met this man. We talked on the phone a lot, and since he was a carpenter, he said he could do some work for me. I knew that was just a way of getting to know me.

As time went on, he took me for drives and we had many fires in my firepit all summer long. Very romantic. I didn’t intend on cheating on my boyfriend, but I did. I feel like a very bad person because I have better morals than that.

Dec. 22 of 2012, I told this man that it had to be over. I was starting to get severe anxiety over it. I had a nervous breakdown and had to go to the hospital which my real boyfriend took me to. He has no clue that I had this affair and I can never tell him about it as he would be done with me and I don’t blame him for that.

I did fall truly in love with this other man and the breakup in Dec. has caused me severe anxiety with nausea. They first put me on tranquilizer and now I am on 20 mg of prozac. It has been 5 weeks today since the breakup with this man. I guess I have only been in the relationship for a year and really didn’t get intimate till this summer which I do mean we had sex. So it has been a year since I have known him.

How long do you think that I will get over this breakup? I am still with my boyfriend of 12 years but he doesn’t understand why I have severe anxiety. I told him it was over work and he seems to believe it. This has been really unbearable. And believe me I will never be unfaithful again.

Please give me some advice.

God Bless.

And our response:

There are a few pieces of advice/information I have to offer you.

Whenever the reaction to a relationship is so overwhelming and intense, you have to wonder what it’s dredging up from the past. Usually the type of symptoms you’re having where you are nauseous and so anxious you need hospitalization and medication as a result of a breakup have to do with some underlying attachment issues. That might go back to your family or other experiences in your younger years that left a wounding.

It may be that the reason this connection was so intense for you, even when you already have a longstanding boyfriend, is that this new person triggered to the surface wounds that your boyfriend does not. So there was a strong drive to explore and heal those together. When the relationship ended, it left those surfaced wounds raw and exposed along with the realization that they would not, at least at the moment, be healed in this relationship.

The best way to understand the symptoms you’re having may be to think of it in terms of withdrawal from an addiction, as we talked about in a previous piece on this site. I’m sure you can see how a lot of the cravings and feelings and other symptoms involved are analogous.

I highly recommend these books to help you understand that addictive nature of the situation.

Luckily, as with other types of withdrawal, if you have the proper support you need (which it sounds like you’re getting, at least to an extent) you can get through it and come out on the other side. But withdrawal is always a very painful difficult process that you have to take one day at a time.

One thing you might consider doing is looking for online forums of people going through relationship withdrawals as that might offer you somewhere that you can – anonymously if need be – get some support from people who recognize how painful this process can be.

As far as exactly how long it will take to get through that phase, as we’ve said in our article on the topic, it really isn’t worth asking that as focusing on that question is like watching a boiling pot. It is understandable to want to ask and try to figure it out, but it only keeps you locked into the feeling. Focus on getting through each day and processing the withdrawal, finding the support you need to get through it intact and the passing of the pain will come upon you like a sudden surprise one of these days. And whatever you do, if you are determined to move on, don’t have any contact with this other person, not even indirect contact like checking their online pages and so on. Focus anywhere else, as difficult as that might be.

A lot of people, when wondering what to do in their love life, turn to relationship advice columns. There are many columns out there and they often give contradictory advice. So which ones should you believe?

The first thing to understand about relationship advice columns is that their writers all subscribe to different schools of thought. There are as many schools of thought about relationships as there are about other controversial topics such as politics or religion. And this can make it confusing to figure out whose words of wisdom really are wise for you to follow.

One thing that can help is realizing that these many schools of thought can basically be grouped, as we have discussed before, into two main categories:

• Symptom-Focused Breakup Advice
• Origin-Focused Breakup Advice

When you just need a quick fix to a superficial problem and are truly alright with knowing you will probably have to face it again in some form later, symptom-focused breakup advice – and relationship advice columns that take that perspective – can be useful.

However, in most cases, we at Breakup-Advice.org favor an Origin-Focused approach for reasons laid out in the blog post linked above.

When you are considering a relationship advice column, you need to think critically. Start by reading a few of the author’s pieces and deciding if they tend to write from a symptom-focused or origin-focused mindset. Some authors may combine the two and, if done well, this can be very helpful.

In the end you will have to make up your own mind about which school of thought on relationships appeals to you – or, more importantly, which one you think is actually accurate. Just know that there are various perspectives and don’t simply believe the first one you read offers the golden ticket to happiness.

Now what relationship advice column do we recommend?

Since we strongly favor the Imago Relationship approach, it is no surprise that we recommend columns by people involved in that community. And there is one in particular that stands out.

Al Turtle is a therapist who works in the Imago tradition and he runs a website where he addresses countless questions about relationships and offers his wisdom. It is appropriately titled Al Turtle’s Relationship Wisdom. We have no doubt you will find it extremely enlightening.

Al’s is the column with which we are most familiar. But if you do some searching, you can find others written by people schooled in Imago therapy. For example, with a quick search we discovered that Stacy Notaras Murphy, a certified Imago Couples Therapist, writes a relationship advice column for The Georgetowner.

Ultimately, the best advice of all is to read a variety of relationship advice columns by people from different schools of thought and, over time, compare and contrast them to find the ones that really have the most to offer.