Breakup - Glorifying Your Partner (Current Or Ex) - A Bad Idea!

We've all done it. We've all glorified a relationship or partner, past or present. Sometimes when we lose a girlfriend we think despairing thoughts. "She was the love of my LIFE, and she's gone!". It can be easy to spiral into a pit of despair thanks to the notion that you've lost your "soul mate". However, some guys can simply shrug off a break-up, even when they had a great thing going with their partner. This doesn't mean they didn't care about their partners, or that they're jerks - it just means these guys have the right mind set, and I'll get to that shortly.

When you're IN a relationship, especially if it's your first, it's easy to go a bit overboard and start buying into the whole "soul mate" thing. You might tell your lady friend things like "I don't know what I'd do without you". Sound familiar? It's fine, until you go overboard.

I bet you at least know one guy who does this kind of stuff - writes his girlfriend soppy love poems, talks about her all the time, proclaims his undying love for her on their Facebook page. You may even be this guy. At some point down the line, this guy becomes convinced in his head that his partner is the PERFECT match for him. That the relationship will NEVER end and that he will spend the rest of his days in bliss with his new found soul mate. He doesn't just think his new partners is great, he thinks she is PERFECT. He loses his objective vision of his partner.

While the idea that your relationship is perfection incarnate, and that you and your girlfriend are a match made in the stars is nice and romantic, it simply isn't true. And whilst romantic talk - "I love you more than any man loves any woman" - might make your partner feel good (for a while until they tire of it and see you as needy), it's when a guy gets into the mentality that the relationship is a perfectly crafted thing of beauty and "meant to be" that he's got himself into a bit of a dilemma. Let me tell you more.

I have a buddy who met a girl at a bar. They hit it off, and pretty soon they were dating. Things changed, his IM name suddenly became "Romeo Loves Juliet with all his heart" (his name wasn't Romeo and she wasn't Juliet but you get the idea). Every time he came out he would talk about her non stop. When we saw a pretty girl, he would defiantly tell us all that "nobody else in the world is good looking except my Juliet." (Juliet was, incidentally, overweight and ugly.) Romeo spent all his time and money on Juliet - she was his soul mate after all, right? She deserved it all? Wrong. She left him for another guy after 8 months. Whether or not she left him because of his over romantic behaviour is not the important point in this story, what's important is what happened next.

Romeo was destroyed. Utterly convinced in his head that he had lost the "perfect" woman, he refused to go out. He stopped answering calls and sank into a deep depression. He had lost his soul mate: what was the point of living? Romeo eventually tried to end his own life, but thankfully was stopped.

You know why Romeo hit rock bottom? Because Romeo was an idiot. Juliet was a girl he happened to get on well with for a time. She wasn't particularly good looking, she was fat and she wasn't too smart either. Romeo had been perfectly happy before he met her. He made the mistake, however, of glorifying her in his head. When he finally lost her, in his head, he lost a Goddess. The loss was much greater. He'd fallen into a trap.

If you're going through a break-up, it is important to realise your ex girlfriend is a human being. She's not your soul mate - she will probably have relationships with other guys just like you (unless you manage to get back together), and those guys will probably tell her the same kind of things you told her. She is not a Goddess, so don't make her one in your head. This is something that can make difference between a sad break-up, and a soul crushing one. Choose.

If you do want to get an ex back after a split, you should ask yourself if she's really all that great first.