One of the psychological issues you will have to overcome when you move on from someone is the desire for coherence. You have not invested that amount of time and energy in such a fruitless endeavour, and when the opportunity to go back where you left off with that person, you will be driven by the desire to fix it, forgetting why it was broken.

There is also the fear of starting everything from scratch with a complete stranger, having to entertain a thought you have a hard time coming to terms with: "Will I ever be able to be vulnerable or, at the very least, expose myself to a degree where a bond can develop?"

These are frightening prospects.

The answer is in creative destruction, an economic concept introduced by Joseph Schumpeter, which can be summarised as the process where new innovations and technologies replace older, outdated ones, leading to the destruction of existing economic structures while simultaneously creating room for new growth and progress, essentially arguing that this dynamic is a key driver of economic development under capitalism.

In terms of personal growth, for a person to grow, former false idols must be destroyed, whether they are ideas, people, or processes. The company of your ex is the same as that division of the enterprise that needs to be sold off to another buyer in the market when it is not the whole enterprise itself which should go into bankruptcy or get bought by a competitor at pennies on the dollar. If one does not do so, he will sink with the ex, where it is clear that the association is more a source of counterproductive differences and issues that cannot or won't be addressed.

A company, whether an ex or an enterprise, is a great story that we want to remember. Still, even some of the most iconic companies, such as Kodak, eventually became irrelevant despite being a tale of a particular time in your life that has now fallen into disarray in the current environment.

We start in a relationship at respective baselines, and meeting the requirements at T=0 does not mean you will later on at T=1. Like two stocks in your portfolio within the same industry, you will have one that outperforms the benchmark and one which is a laggard. This happens in the strategies these companies respectively undertook. Did they jointly decide to take on a gamble to take the next turn, or did they start dissociating because of differences in vision? Sometimes, the aggressive and forward-looking bets regarding growth prospects may be wrong, and conversely, the conservative ones could also prove fatal.

It is when two individuals start making decisions independently, either through competitiveness or dissensions, where the consequences have sources that go beyond the actions taken. Nevertheless, it does not alleviate the issue at hand; the path of growth was individually chosen, which logically ended in a breakup. Sometimes, it is because one is moving forward and the other is not; sometimes, both are moving forward, but the paths have no ramifications towards one another.

When you come to that realisation, it is about having faith in the future to better move away from the past. It does not mean the past did not exist, but it does not make sense anymore to you. You had good times and not-so-good times. You learn lessons about yourself and realise you were not as the finished product as you thought you were. If it does not resonate with the other person, it is not your fault nor theirs; it is just a mismatch of the roadmap, and the course of your life has taken different paths. Where you were the arrow, and your other half was the string to the bow, they became the burden you had to carry to the top of the hill, maybe not in their mind but in yours, which is eventually what matters.

It is expected to evolve, and it is not a process in which you have full agency. It is a byproduct of your experiences, what you learn from them, experiences you were responsible for, or where you were collateral damage.

It is the creative destruction happening within you. It is a natural process. The same process as when you grow up. Sometimes, it happens even without you especially seeking it. The forces existing around you made that event happen, and there is no point mentally whipping yourself over an outcome you did not have as much control as you thought, whether it is in terms of your personal development or your union with the other person you called partner.

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