Learn to tie up loose ends after break-up

A few weeks ago, I sat at a small table in a restaurant across a woman who dated my father 50 years ago. They were together a few years or months, I’m not sure. His family knew her. They broke up. He got married to another woman for 35 years, and raised seven children. Then the first woman heard that he died, that his estate was being divided. Could she get something?

I felt very many things at this short meeting. Hurt that she would wait for decades, for him to die to harass his children, angry at the whole scenario but mostly disbelief that she seemed not to have moved on from him five decades later.

This got me thinking about how we focus too much on relationship beginnings and the things that happen in the course of a relationship, and not enough on how relationships end. It’s no wonder we have women still hang up on men they were with years ago, it’s no wonder we have news stories of men attacking and sometimes killing women they had relationships with because they feel that they are still owed something.

How to tie up loose ends after the sun sets on a relationship is a conversation we all need to have. The first thing out should be the fact that a break-up is a relationship end and not a relationship failure. Perhaps if all women remembered this, moving on from a break-up would be easier.

Also, no relationship is a waste of time. All relationships, even those ones you wish you could turn back time and cancel, teach us something. You just need to pay attention, pick the lessons, discard the rest of it and move on to the next class.

If a person breaks up with you, hear them. Don’t listen to those women who tell you to hang in there even if this means losing your self-worth and your peace. Being in a relationship is not a life achievement. Even if being in a relationship means so much to you, letting go of one that has run its course only means that you have a fresh chance to get into another, which will serve you. Don’t let a hang up be the reason you never get to your happy-ever-after.

Learn to tie up loose ends. There is a breed of women who make it their duty to ‘warn’ other women of just how bad their exes are. They will diligently hunt for numbers of their exes’ new women, and will call persistently with these warnings. If you find yourself having the urge to call that woman you heard is dating the man who almost drove you nuts when he slept with all your cousins while still carrying on with you, snap out of it. It’s not your duty. And even if it were, that scorned, vengeful woman is not a good look on anyone.

And don’t wait until someone has died or is inaccessible to begin seeking closure. It’s not right.