Why does the end of a passionate short-term romance sometimes feel more devastating than a longer-term relationship?
It’s because short-term romances are like fireworks—explosive and exciting—only to fizzle out soon after. We get addicted to the feeling of intensity they give us, and feel empty when they disappear.
In today’s video, I’ll show you the best way to move on from a short-term romance and stop obsessing over “the person who got away.”
MATTHEW HUSSEY
So, yesterday, I did a session with my Love Life Club members, and there was a particular story that spoke to me that I wanted to share with you. This person had been seeing a guy for two months, and it had been this incredible romance over that time. It started in a difficult place because this person said that they wanted to be alone at this point in their life, but when they started to actually spend some time together, he started to come around and started to say, “I really like you.” They started to have an amazing time together. And in these two months, the attraction, the connection, the chemistry, dare I say, the love, became very, very intense.
At the end of those two months, this person that she had met, who had always planned to go traveling, left to go traveling. And in the process, she had hoped that maybe it would become a long-distance relationship, maybe she could go with him for part of it. But in her mind, there was no way that this incredible thing that had been happening for two months would not go on. This was too good. We have something too special here. And after all of the things that he had said and the ways that he had shown up, the way that he’d been vulnerable over those two months, the ways he’d opened up—after everything he had done, she assumed that he must feel the same way.
Instead, what happened at the end of those two months was that he said, “I’m going to go traveling.” And he said to her very soon afterward, “I’ve realized I really do want to be on my own.”
And the state that she was talking to me in was one of being truly devastated. As I was talking to her, she was extremely upset and teary. And talking from that place that we all talk from in that moment, which is one of complete confusion and bewilderment that someone who’s been having the same experience we have, or at least, we feel like they’ve been having the same experience we have, could not want to see where that goes, could not want to carry that on. How, after everything we’ve just done, all the ways we’ve connected emotionally? How, after how great this has been—how much you see me and I see you, and all of these wonderful moments of connection we’ve had, the spark that we both haven’t felt in a very long time? How could you give this up?
Anyone who’s been through a situation like this knows that heartbreak is very, very specific to the person it’s happening to. I did an interview recently with the number one expert in the world on grief, David Kessler. And when I sat with him, he told me every broken heart is that person’s broken heart. It’s not a broken mind. If it were a broken mind, then we could start comparing logically to someone else’s breakup: “Well, I’ve been having this two-month relationship with someone, but it’s not as bad as someone who’s been with someone for two years or 20 years.” And that logic would help us. But it’s not a broken mind. It’s a broken heart.
And so, our broken heart is our broken heart. It didn’t matter that this woman had known and been through this intense situation with this man for only two months. Her heartbreak was extremely real to her.
And if you’ve ever been in that situation yourself where there’s someone you got brokenhearted over who you only knew for a short space of time, leave me a comment. Let me know: What was your situation? How long was it? Did it surprise you? Was it shocking to you that you could be that brokenhearted over something that was so short-lived?
For some of you, you’ve been brokenhearted over someone you didn’t even really date. My brother Stephen once wrote a piece called “How to Get Over Someone You Never Dated,” which is so relatable. We hear that and we go, “Oh, my God, I relate to that,” because most people who have been in a situation in their lives where someone really hurt you, and you can’t even speak to a history with that person. But something about it, it hit you on a deep level. Why does this stuff hit us on such a deep level, especially if it’s short-lived?
In this woman’s case, it represented something she had been looking for, for a very long time. And maybe you can relate to this. She hadn’t felt a connection with someone in years. She hadn’t felt this deeply. She hadn’t felt this seen. The sparks she felt with this person are something that she thought, “This has to be special. I haven’t felt this in years.” And maybe she’s never felt that on that level.
So, the intensity of the feeling made it feel profoundly important, profoundly special.
Now, I want to challenge the idea in this video, and if you watch on, I’m hoping that you’ll find that if you’re in this place of heartbreak, whether it’s been months or years, this can offer you some solace and might just give you the daylight you need to start to feel a little bit better.
What I wanted her to understand, and what I’d love everyone out there to understand, is that there’s a big difference. Here’s an example I want to give you to help with this: I want you to think of fireworks. We often use that word in a relationship that was hard to get over, especially one that felt really, really intense in the beginning, don’t we? We say, “Just the fireworks were amazing. I had such fireworks with this person.”
We often describe that as the thing that’s missing when we don’t feel something, right? “There were no fireworks.”
Most of us feel like fireworks are special, right? Why is it universal that on New Year’s, we will watch fireworks, or when there’s a big show somewhere, there’s often fireworks? It’s because there’s just something universally dazzling about fireworks. They arrest our attention in that moment. They feel special. We hold someone’s hand next to us, and we look at those fireworks, and it feels incredible. “We’re having a moment. Look at this. Isn’t this amazing?”
But in order for fireworks to be special, they have to have two things: They have to have nighttime, so that they really light up. And they have to be over soon. If you take away either of those two things . . . if fireworks happened in the daytime and they never ended, I guarantee you, it would only be a matter of time before you were looking at your watch wondering when they were going to be over.
So, fireworks are special because of when they happen and because they have an end point. And I often think about short-lived, intense relationships that way. There are so many relationships that we never get over because they never stopped being fireworks. When we were in it, it was intense. Even with people who have affairs, it’s like that, right? A lot of affairs feel really exciting to people because they’re just living in the fireworks.
The same is true of the person we met on a holiday romance and we were there for two weeks, and we have this incredible holiday romance with them, and we went home, and looked back and thought, “God, if I could just find someone. It was so sad that they had to go back to their country and I had to go back my country, because that is what I’m looking for. What I had with that person is what I’m looking for.”
We can’t compare the fast-twitch attraction of a holiday romance to what we’ve ever had with anybody in a relationship. No one you’ve ever had a real relationship with should get compared to the person where once upon a time you had a holiday romance with, or a four-week fling with, or even a two-month relationship with. Because those things are still fireworks.
We tell ourselves in these experiences that we were getting everything we need, but we are blinded by that experience to the thing we haven’t gotten out of this, which is the thing we ultimately want, which is a real partnership, a real relationship, something that is going to last. Isn’t that fundamental?
When you think about your dream relationship, when you think about the thing you’ve always wanted, isn’t it someone you can look at and go, “We’re in this together. It’s you and me.”
It’s two people who have shown up for each other every day in the exciting moments and the boring moments, where two people have successfully been able to collide and come through it over and over and over again, where two people have sacrificed for each other, compromised for each other, made space for each other. Not just been excited by the commonalities but made space, and even found pleasure in the differences.
On New Year’s Day, when you wake up in the morning, you wake up into your life. Now, you may have been watching the fireworks the night before, but when those fireworks are over, you go back to life. What life do you wake up to when the fireworks are over on New Year’s Eve? What day or what year do you wake up into? What’s ahead of you?
That’s your life. None of us think that the fireworks are our life. We know that the next morning, we wake up into our actual life. The fireworks were an experience, but what we wake up into, what we go home to, who we look at when the fireworks are over, that’s our life, and we have to stop looking at fireworks as an indication of our real love life.
In our love life, the fireworks are an experience.
Now, this isn’t a video, by the way, saying that passion can’t last in a relationship. I think there are plenty of people who keep passion alive in a relationship. I’m not trying to say that the fireworks have to end entirely. What I’m saying is that if nothing happens after the fireworks, you don’t have the thing you’re really looking for, which is a partnership, a relationship, a life. You just have an experience. And they’re very different things. An experience is not a relationship. An experience is not a partnership.
So, I say to you, I ask you the question—when you look back on this thing that you’re mourning right now, and make no mistake, you’re mourning it, it’s a version of grief. When we lose something, we didn’t just lose a person. We lost a future we thought we were going to experience. And that’s what hurts so badly is that for a moment, that person, felt like they were the salve to this need that we have had our whole lives. This person came along and they felt like the answer. Of course you’re heartbroken. Don’t beat yourself up for being heartbroken. Don’t shame yourself for being heartbroken. Don’t judge yourself for being heartbroken.
It’s not really about this person. It feels like it is. But what it’s really about is that this person represented something and the feeling I got with them felt like the answer to something I’ve been looking for my whole life, and I don’t know when it’s ever going to come along again. That’s the scary part.
Am I ever going to feel that way again? Am I ever going to find someone like this again? Maybe that was my one chance and I blew it. And of course, we then start looking at all of the ways that we screwed it up: What could I have done differently? How could I have been better?
And we torture ourselves that way.
When you realize, at the end of someone being there in the fireworks stage or someone who comes along to represent fireworks, when you realize that they then decide to leave, that they’re not interested in continuing, then that person is not the partner that you need. That person is not the life that you’ve been looking for. It’s not the person who’s going to build with you.
So, understanding that, you begin to realize that this hurts, but I can live with the hurt that I felt something and now I don’t get to feel that now. But I don’t have to live with the hurt that the love of my life just decided they didn’t want to be with me.
You can miss an experience, but you can’t mourn it as if it were a lifelong partnership. In order for something to be a lifelong partnership, it has to actually be a lifelong partnership.
Now, look, moments like this where I—or another coach or a friend or a family member—comes along and gives you a perspective that can help make a world of difference, even if it’s just 1% . . . a 1% shift in this area can give you just the bit of daylight you need to give you hope and make you realize you can make progress. You don’t have to feel this bad. And if you add up those 1% shifts every day, they’ll make a tremendous difference to your heartbreak, and you feeling like yourself again.
What if I could give you more than a 1% shift today—what if I could give you a 5%, a 10%, maybe even a 20% shift? What I have done for you, and this is something I’m so excited to share with you . . .
For those of you who don’t know yet, I have assembled some of my friends who are the best in the world at helping people through these things. Nicole LePera (the Holistic Psychologist), Dr. Ramani, David Kessler, the number one expert in the world on grief, Tom and Lisa Bilyeu from Impact Theory and Women of Impact, and several others whose names you will know, trust me.
I have put them all together in one series called Happiness After Heartbreak that I am giving you complimentary when you order a copy of my brand-new book, Love Life. This is a series of interviews that are 30 to 60 minutes long, where we do a deep dive on the practical things that you need to know to start to feel better. I believe this is one of the best things I’ve ever created, and it’s on the house.
It helped me. You’ll see as you go through these interviews, I’m on my own healing journey about different heartbreaks in my life because heartbreak isn’t just romantic. You can go through all kinds of different heartbreak and grieving in your life.
So, even if you haven’t got a romantic heartbreak right now, check this out because if life has handed you a heartbreak in business, in your family, in your friendships, and life is just not panning out the way you wanted by this stage, it will help you through those heartbreaks too.
All you need to do to get it is go to heartbreakseries.com. When you get there, you can order a physical copy of the book, because this only applies to the physical version, not the audio. When you order a copy of the book from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or wherever you do it, even internationally, there are lots of options there, all you have to do is take your order number and come back to the page, heartbreakseries.com, and input it there. And you’ll get automatic access immediately to the Heartbreak series.
I’m so proud of this. Like I said, this can be a key for you to achieving happiness after your heartbreak.
I’m so glad you’re here to hear about this. So, grab a copy of the book, enjoy the series, and let me know what you think. The link is heartbreakseries.com. I’ll see you over there and thank you, everyone, as always, for watching the video. Love life!
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