Getting your heart broken once is bad enough, but if you’ve ever had your heart broken twice — and by the same person, no less — then you know it can feel like the world is ending. You never want to enter into a relationship with the assumption that things aren’t going to work out, but in retrospect, you wonder if you should have known better.
- You have to accept that you knew better and got involved anyway. You were fully aware of what could go wrong, but you suspended that logic to give it another shot. Now you just have to figure out if that makes you the strongest romantic in town or if you’re in need of a little more common sense in your life.
- Your friends have already gone through this. Some of them are doing their best “I told you so”, some of them are beyond pissed at him, some of them are just as heartbroken as you are, and some of them are a little pissed at you, which just makes you even more confused.
- You question your own judgement. You really truly believed you were doing the right thing at the time, but you can’t help but if wonder if that’s true now.
- You try to pat yourself on the back for trying. You believed that the relationship was real and deserved a second chance, and you don’t want to be punished for trying any more than you need to be. You even feel a little courageous in your better moments.
- You finally have to face reality. If the reason you got back together with him was because you were in denial about how wrong you were for each other, then now is the time that you really, really have to feel the pain. Before, you wanted to believe a fantasy, and now that fantasy has finally burst.
- You feel extra betrayed. There’s a part of you of course that thought he would be different, and that if he wanted you back, then he had things all worked out and wasn’t going to screw them up. Now you really don’t understand why he got back involved with you at all.
- You know it’s time to go in a totally different direction. In a certain way, this gives you the opportunity to fully cut the ties with a guy that doesn’t deserve you and start being open to a different type of relationship with someone who does.
- You recognize that relationships constantly change even with the same person. Phase one of your relationship with this guy was quite different from phase two, so it really shows you how quickly things can change. Hopefully your next relationship (with a new guy) will have changed for the better.
- You can’t really demand the sympathy that you could the first time around. It’s not that people don’t feel your pain, because they do, but you feel kind of silly making an uproar about this guy who already smashed your heart once before.
- You can’t let this experience shut you down. As bad as it hurts, you know that not everyone out there is like this guy, which is an equally depressing and somewhat hopeful thought.
