When an important relationship ends, it only grieves. Don’t look for a rebound. You can’t run away from your problems. Only time will heal.
I agree with that common advice halfway. I think it is absolutely half true, so I would like to defend the other half.
Life is incredibly short. We don’t have forever to cry. Until you have exhausted all available options and settings, you would do well to move on, start a new life, change the scenery. The rebound is good. Life bounces and you should too.
The question is not whether to bounce but when and to what.
I think of it as brachying, letting go of a branch to reach for another like arboreal primates do. If it’s too early to drop the last branch, you’ll never get to the next branch, but it’s hard to drop the last branch without a new branch pulling you forward. In other words, if you’re looking for a rebound before you let go, you won’t get it, but the best way to let go is to have something new to reach for.
One argument against rebounding is that you will miss out on important lessons learned only if you sit down with the grievance. Yes, of course you want to reap the lessons of whatever you are suffering from, but how much can you reap? In any long-term relationship, the number of interactions, motivations, and causal links is simply overwhelming. What caused what is usually extremely complex. You won’t be able to figure out exactly what went wrong.
Also, the grievance itself is likely to cloud your analysis. The more you need to know the answer, the harder it is to come up with an honest and neutral answer. Grievance’s urgent query has meat in the game. He prefers some and fears other explanations for what went wrong. Care confuses clarity.
As for it being impossible to run away from problems, yes, some of them, but for most relatively well balanced people, different circumstances and different relationships cause different behaviors.
Once, I had a four-year partnership that we never clicked. When it was over, I thought to myself, “Wow, I finally graduated. I’m essentially fight-free now. I’m an adult!” In the next relationship I fought quite constantly. I came away feeling terrible for having turned out to be, in essence, a bully.
But it is not clear whether to fight or not to fight was my essence at all. Both fighting and not fighting were apparently in my range and repertoire, but most likely a difference in chemistry between myself and the two different partners was the determining factor.
Just because you weren’t the best in a circumstance doesn’t mean you’re the best you can be. Some circumstances bring out the worst in us. So don’t stop; rebound. Use your life wisely. Do what you are good at. Use whatever freedom you have to find the people who bring out the best in you and be with them.
If you have been grieving for a while, calculate the grieving time as a percentage of your remaining life expectancy. You can check your life expectancy here: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html. I’m 53 years old, so according to the chart, I may have another 30 years to go. At my age, if I mourn a loss for a year, that’s 1/30 or 3.3% of my life left, a sobering statistic.
Sobering, but of course, it’s not like a stat could change one’s dueling behavior. Who has so much conscious control over strong emotions? Once, when I was deeply grieving, a friend told me that the solution was to spend just twenty minutes a day grieving. It sounded good on paper, but that’s not how tort actually works. It’s not like you can stop it by rational choice. “There’s always something to remind me of,” as the song goes: Little triggers everywhere reopen the wound, and the more often it reopens, the more likely it is to reopen.
Still, there is often a conscious ambivalence about whether or not to cry, and the statistics can speak to that. Those mourning the death of a loved one may feel, even years later, that they are dishonoring the memory of the deceased by not crying anymore. For that, statistics does help to put it in proportion. My mother, in excellent health, mourned my father’s death for a full year, then discovered terminal cancer that killed her the following year. That made me understand the ways in which protracted grievance implies a lavish overestimation of the time we have here.
Yes, time heals, but slowly. Time plus changed circumstances heal faster.
I like to have a role model on each side of a question like how long to grieve. In favor of long grief I see the monk, patient with suffering and pain, who can meditate for years and come out wiser and clearer than the reckless leaper.
On the other hand, I see and admire the efficiency of a cancer patient whose prospects are poor. She throws herself fully into a treatment regimen, certain it’s going to work, and then at some point when it’s not working, she suddenly abandons that treatment, withdrawing her commitment entirely, instantly moving on to another, saying “that last one.” It was never going to work, but this new one will surely be the cure.”
It is the logical thing to do. In life’s limited-time Easter egg hunt, searching for the people and circumstances that bring out the best in you, you must give your all to each candidate, and then be strategically fickle enough to weed out the others. strategically unsuccessful candidates instantly and completely. You want to cultivate the amnesia of the romantically infatuated teen serial: “John? You mean my boyfriend all of last year? He was an idiot. I always knew that relationship would never work. But, Sam, my new boyfriend, he’s perfect.” shape!”
It is logical, although it is not very human. We’re not good at stopping on a dime like that. We don’t turn corners so easily. The machines do it. When you turn off your computer, you don’t grieve that the fun is over. It doesn’t stop at the past.
Why then us? A very short answer is that clothes beget clothes. A relationship is an attachment habit that is reinforced over time by the accumulation of all kinds of other attachment habits. Divorce settlements between people who have been married for a long time are often much more complicated than settlements between people who have been married for a short time. Attachment compound. More time; more attachment. Not so with computers. No matter how long you leave them on, they don’t get attached to being on anymore.
The longer you are in a relationship, the more dependencies you will accumulate. So there is always something there to remind you.
