No Contact: The Brutal Way To End Heartbreak
By: Jennifer M. Wilson
Tags: Relationships, Love, Mental Health, Sex, Self Improvement

No Contact: The Brutal Way To End Heartbreak

Love addiction is rough.

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

I’m shocked when people comment on how they appreciate and follow my shitshow of a love life. Truthfully, I wish I could write about political foreign policy or editing tips in Google Docs. But we write about what we know best, and I know my internal rollercoaster quite well right now.

Everything went to hell last week after I had an effing dream about Jon, a guy I fell in love with while I was married.

We ended things shortly after the pandemic hit because we knew there was no chance of success in any relationship until we had divorced our spouses and had a few flings. Well, he immediately started a new, serious relationship before even moving out of his marital home or filing for divorce. That’s his choice, but it was a rough blow worsened only with the few times we still hooked up or texted.

After the traumatic dream and a necessary-but-painful phone call, I’m vowing to finally stick to the No Contact Rule. Granted, I only broke the rule once in 6 months (the rest of the times were all him), but I’m the one who did it last. If we communicate ever again, it will be him. Not me.

No Contact is the human equivalent of drug abstinence. The withdrawals from a relationship mimic the effects of heroin. You can’t do a little bit of heroin to take the edge off. It’s all or nothing. Since Jon was the first person I fell in love with for over a decade, I experienced (and still am experiencing) heartbreak, unlike anything I’ve felt since I was in my twenties.

I did a lot of research to understand the why of the pain when we ended things but I still hurt months later. Dudes fall for me. I don’t fall for dudes. Genuinely missing a person and the relationship is foreign to me. Even when I separated and moved out from my husband 11 years ago, I didn’t feel this.

I will never understand how anyone can be in love with two people at once. I understand loving, but not being in love with two people. I go balls-in when I’m in love; there’s no chance I could fall in love with someone else at the same time.

I learned a lot about love addiction. While I’m not codependent, everyone experiences love addiction to a certain degree. Unfortunately, like a drug, withdrawals make you go out-of-your-mind berserk. Like straight up, batshit crazy, crying in pain like you’ve been stabbed but your body refuses to go numb.

Surprisingly, I also learned that I’m a hell of a lot stronger than I’ve ever been. Perhaps because of all the changes I’ve made in 2020, I’m able to rationalize the pain. Even when it hits me out of the blue and I start crying, there’s another part of me that can step back and say, “you’re grieving the dream of you two. While you may think you’ll never feel that way again, you will. Trust the process.”

I think maintaining a level of rational thought, no matter how tiny, is critical after a breakup. I’ve had quite a few epiphanies about him and our relationship. These were things that I wouldn’t have seen had we stayed together; things that would have hurt me down the road. Clinging to rational thought allows you to separate the dream from reality.

In my research, I also learned that the one who focuses on working on themselves long after a breakup is usually the one who was most loyal. Also, women tend to focus on reassessing themselves and healing whereas guys are apt to just move on without processing anything. For them, their patterns keep repeating.

This year, especially in the last six months, I’ve transformed in ways I didn’t think possible.

I’m like the latest version of Tony Stark’s armor. While his first Iron Man suit was impressive, each iteration makes him more powerful and adept to take on adversity. This analogy not only shows that I’ve watched way too many Marvel movies during quarantine, but that I never gave myself credit in the past for being a pretty good model of a human.

My knee jerk reaction was to start dating everyone and anyone right away. Being on a fetish site, I have an endless list of guys to bang at my disposal. I had all sorts of threesomes and crazy shit lined up. Plus a lot of dinner dates.

Until I realized: I don’t want any of that. I need to stop doing what seems like a solution on the outside. Deep down, I believed the quicker I got tons of post-marriage dating and fucking done, then Jon and I could be together. Or at least, I could move on as quickly as he did.

It’s not a competition. This is me running my own marathon where I make up the rules and selectively choose who runs with me — if anyone at all.

I bailed on all the prior plans with other guys (coronavirus is a great excuse). It’s been a relief to focus on what I want instead of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone for the sake of getting over someone.

It’s time to do the tough work the right way. The healthy way. I’m not burying the pain or redirecting it elsewhere. Time to suck it the fuck up and face it head-on. If I don’t, I risk hurting others.

Only once have I immediately rebounded after a relationship and it was downright awful how it impacted the other guy. In turn, my rebound relationship was filled with four years of drama because I didn’t take the time to reassess and regroup before moving on with another long-term love.

My old habits would have had me playing the past with Jon on loop. And love addiction would have only played the good parts to make me hurt. Love addiction would also have played the bad parts to also make me hurt. This is where the No Contact order comes in.

No Contact isn’t just not contacting them as the name implies. This means nuking all texts, emails, and anything else you might have. I had a few things that were reminders of him; I tossed them out. I almost got rid of a particular dress that he ripped taking off of me before sex; then I remembered how much I like that dress and I’m not wasting a perfectly good afternoon date dress that another guy would appreciate.

I hated deleting Jon’s texts and emails. I even forwarded him one before I deleted it from my inbox and sent folder. The trick is to do it all when you’re in a frenzied mood. Ironically, it’s when you’re most crazy is when deleting things is easiest because you don’t second guess anything.

I’m finally beginning a true No Contact endeavor. While there will always be a part of me that wishes the phone notification is a text from him, I’m assuming by January 2021 I’ll be a blip in his memory. I don’t say that with self-pity. It’s just the nature of what happens when you fall in love with someone else.

This is my accountability. I’m on Day 2 of For-Real-This-Time-I’m-Not-Going-To-Contact-Him No Contact. There’s the edgy shakes, the bouncing of the knee, and the moments where I’m not breathing. I blame the dream for ruining my No Contact because it was so vividly real. Prior to that, I was doing quite well.

For anyone else going through this, here are some nuggets of wisdom I’ve learned in my research. They don’t all apply fully to my situation but I felt like putting them here as a reminder to anyone else who can use them.

It wouldn’t have gone any other way. You can replay something in your mind in different ways but the results would have been the same.

There was a time when you didn’t even know that person. And you were just fine. They weren’t even a thought in your mind.

If you’re not their “person”, then you’re just not their person. It’s not that you’re not prettier, funnier, or more engaging…it’s just that you’re not their person. You are not their person if they chose to walk away. In my case, it’s not so much the walking away that’s an issue. It’s how he could fall in love with someone else while still engaging in behaviors with me.

People who move from relationship to relationship are extremely insecure or scared to be alone and can’t handle it. Or, they’re narcissists who don’t think they need to reflect and change; they jump into the next relationship thinking they’re perfect.

Sometimes you need to let that shit hurt so you remember what it felt like when you pulled yourself up off the fucking ground.

“You’re going to miss the person you created them in your head to be. And you’re afraid to let go not because you’re going to lose them but because you’re going to lose that dream of them turning into Prince Charming somewhere down the line. You fell for the potential of what you wanted them to achieve. If you look back, you’ll realize that they were so bad that when they were doing the bare minimum you were jumping for joy, thinking they were going above and beyond. But that’s okay because once you separate the dream from the reality, that’s when you can fully let go of that person.” (This is verbatim from Katie Florence, the full video is hilarious.)

He may love you. He probably does. He probably thinks about you all the time. But that isn’t what matters. What matters is what he’s doing about it, and what he’s doing about it is nothing. And if he’s doing nothing, you most certainly shouldn’t be doing anything. You deserve someone who goes out of their way to make it obvious that they want you in their life. Straight forward healthy love.

Never, ever beg someone to be in your life.

The person who stays single the longest after a breakup tends to be the most loyal of the two. It takes an average of 3 to 5 months to heal from a breakup. If that person moved on before that time, then they were fake with you or they’re fake with the relationship they’re in now.

I do want to make something clear: the breakup was mutual (if anything, he says I’m the one that dumped him). I wasn’t blindsided. Also, I’m not worried about ending up single or lonely. I trust that once I can enter the world of the living after vaccination, I’ll find guys who will give their left nut to spend time with me. I’m concerned that I won’t fall for them and it will take years before I have this feeling again.

My hurt stems from how quickly he fell in love with someone else while I not only allowed myself to feel hope each time he messaged me, but I also let it delay my post-breakup self-growth. Never lose yourself trying to hold on to someone who doesn’t care about losing you.

No Contact. Say it with me, Mandalorian style: this is the way.