A Handy Guide To Surviving A Break

The communication ban has been lifted and after all that heartache and sleeplessness and lots of tweeted whiny-ness, the break is over. Love Interest E is interested in moving forward with a slower pace and a lighter mood. I’m pumped; it will be fun to stop all this rushing and get back to being goofy and laughing and getting taken to task in scrabble, and yes, lesbian karaoke bars. Oh, how I’ve missed them.

Here’s some rules that I wish I had written before the break. But I didn’t. So I suffered. But now you don’t have to! You’re welcome.

1. Please eat something. Seriously. Even if you feel like throwing up, not eating is just making you more mentally unstable. Low blood sugar combined with heartache puts everyone in your proximity in life-threatening danger.

2. Don’t obsess. The break is for you to get centered too. Go out with your buddies and then talk about OTHER THINGS. My main topic of conversation for the first few days was the break. And then I needed a break from talking about the break, but my friends were a little gun shy from previous conversations. I had to promise zero mentions of Love Interest E.

3. Don’t drink too much. It was tempting to go out! and drink the world! and rage out! and run around dancing and making out with boys and then drunkenly remember your life is falling apart… and then dissolve into a sloshy pile of tears. I’m really glad I followed this rule for once in my damned life.

4. Go out to dinner alone. Just do it. Afterward you’ll get to say, Omfg, I lived! That was not the end of the world! And you might get chatted up! I did, but turns out he was just waiting for his blind date to show up. Figures… Also, people on twitter will tell you you’re bitchin’, if you dig for the compliment a bit.

5. Go look at datable people. Go to sports games, go to the bar, go to the gym, or even, just go run a search on a dating site. Thinking about starting over with someone new, how overwhelming and impossible even finding someone new is going to be, will depress you. Until you look around. And then you realize they are everywhere. Just look at them, all those possibilities and what if’s just milling around, ripe for the snagging. Suddenly single wont feel quite so revolting.

6. Don’t go all emo on me. You will not be single for the rest of your life. You will not “never find someone so compatible again.” You are not doomed to a life of cats and Soup-at-Hands and Snapped marathons on TLC. So turn off the Secondhand Serenade, take off the sweatpants and go DO something, for God’s sake.