“Love hurts” is a timeless phrase for good reason. The more we get attached to the other person, the more vulnerable we become.
If and when the blow comes, it’s rarely possible to come out of it unhurt.
And when that happens, people are liable to act out and look for advice that is less than perfect, just like Reddit user NotSoAppl did.
He took it online to the Unethical Life Pro Tips community to get advice on how to break his ex's heart after she barged back into his life.
More info: Reddit
Closure is hard to find when someone leaves suddenly, and it only gets worse when they come back out of the blue
Image credits: Hsing Chi Fang (not the actual photo)
A poster came to the Unethical Life Pro Tip community to hear how to best break the heart of an ex who returned to his life a year after dumping him
Image credits: NotSoAppl
Image credits: Alan Cabello (not the actual photo)
The community, instead of giving him bad advice, gave the guy funny advice and talked him into his senses, leading to the ex getting blocked
The poster, a young man, had been in a relationship with a woman for 5 years, when she suddenly left him. It’s uncertain whether the woman cheated on him, but from the story we can understand that she left very suddenly, creating a kind of open relationship – giving the OP no closure whatsoever, which likely caused him to be in mental anguish for a whole year, as he mentions.
When she suddenly returned, trying to insert herself into OP’s life and become a couple again, it caused him a lot of grief, essentially regressing his healing journey.
The poster took it to the Unethical Life Pro Tips (ULPT) community to ask for advice on how he could exploit this situation to break her heart in return.
If you’ve never heard about the ULPT subreddit, in the past they’ve come up with gems such as “Save business cards of people you don't like. If you ever hit a parked car accidentally, just write "sorry" on the back and leave it on the windshield,” and “If you glue a dead wasp to the palm of your hand, you can hit your boss on the back of the head as hard as you like and act like you saved him.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s talk about the issue at hand. A quick Google search will show you that there are hundreds if not thousands of questions about what to do if your ex wants back into your life.
To get some more perspective, Bored Panda reached out to Patty Newbold, the author of Assume Love, her website where she shares what she has learned from marriage and her own research and experience with positive psychology, marriage research, and her training as a marriage educator.
For people seeking closure after the sudden exit of a partner, Patty suggests considering what happened when they left. Perhaps things were getting boring or maybe they had been dealing with their own, personal identity crisis. The partner might’ve been a commitment-phobe, who panic when they start feeling committed.
In her opinion, these sudden exits tend to hurt a lot more, because of how unexpected they are.
Image credits: Karolina Grabowska (not the actual photo)
“Once they've shaken off this commitment feeling they cannot tolerate, they almost always come back. They might even leave something in your home to come back for.”
Nevertheless, it’s likely that they’ll leave again, just as soon as you start getting close again.
Phobias are treatable though, Patty continues. If you’d actually like a committed relationship with this person when they return, suggest that they could spend a month or two with a psychologist dealing with this phobia first, before you spend time together. Stay adamant and don’t contact them until it happens.
When the person returns, you’ve got several more options, according to Patty. First, you should examine your feelings. If the pain you’re feeling after the breakup is that of rejection, you should forget it and move on. If it’s caused by the pain of the loss of the person from your life, you could proceed cautiously.
Then, you should turn to the returnee. Do they regret what they did and ask for forgiveness, which may indicate that things could work out. Them feeling less committed than when they left is also a bad sign, for example if they just want to try things out.
One Quora post was dedicated to the question of what to do if an ex wants to get back into your life. And although there are a couple of conflicting answers, the majority of the 23 answers are screaming a pretty unanimous “run!”
People are vehement when warning others about not being forced into a relationship, saying that getting back into a relationship against your own wishes is a bad idea.
Image credits: valakirka (not the actual photo)
Again, another Quora question was devoted to talking about an issue quite similar to OPs - a person leaving them without any rhyme or reason, with them wondering how they can get closure in the situation.
Besides a couple of pathetic answers saying “she just needed more from you” and “you weren’t man enough” (honorable shoutout to them for saying that you should improve yourself by flirting a lot and asking girls for kisses, which is probably how a 12-year-old imagines “adult relationships”), the rest are pretty deep and grounded.
Some say that people who just break up and disappear from their lives aren’t worth thinking much about, because their behavior shows that they probably weren’t very nice in the first place, to do such a thing.
Another commenter shared a really good quip that goes like “reason, season, lifetime.”
A ‘reason’ relationship is something that benefits one or both sides, for example, having friends-with-benefits for a while - you had fun and you may feel better about your body, but once your reason for sticking around runs out, you split.
Next, we’ve got ‘season’ kind of relationships. You stick around for longer than a reason-ship, probably growing along the way, but you still split sometime down the line. Although you may not know whether the relationship is bound to end or not, it’s best to just enjoy it - as spring turns to summer, so does it turn to autumn and winter, thus eventually ending the warm and sunny days, which will remain only in your memory now.
Finally, we’ve got ‘lifetime’ relationships, the things that stick around for eternity (relatively speaking). These are friends that have stuck with you, family, loved ones who are going to be with you no matter what. In the long term, these relationships are the most rewarding and worth striving for.
So if you’re still hurting, there may come a time when you find your lifetime-ship with that one special person and things will change for the better. Until then - live in the moment, savor every breath you take, and just make sure you remember it all, for God's sake!
The poster’s search for advice collected more than 11,000 upvotes in the Unethical Life Pro Tips community. More than 2.1k peeps commented on the post, giving either hilariously bad advice or trying to talk some sense into the poster, hopefully having gotten through to them by the end.
The community provided some super hilarious solutions to the poster's problem
