When you have been in a situation where you have developed a bond, an investment, and intense feelings for someone, but they happen to leave, there will be a pull within you trying to catch what is running away.

There is naturally a level of co-dependency with the other person that makes you feel deeply connected. This goes beyond the sex. It can be experiences, thoughts, feelings, hobbies, or even past endeavours.

You feel they are part of you; their little quirks you cherished made you feel whole. They live your day-to-day life through their physical presence or the digital back-and-forth, and then cold turkey, it goes away, and you have to deal with it.

Leaving you on your own, having wishful thoughts of what could have been, what the future held for you both, all of that is now gone, drowned by your tears of despair or the dread from their absence.

You feel that no one understands what you are going through and that getting up in the morning to attend to your daily tasks is like an insurmountable mountain. You are walking with a knife stabbed in your core.

You know you love that person with all of your heart, but for some reason, this does not contaminate the other person, and you previously threw all of this energy at a wall, throwing it back at you and hurting you by the same token.

But do you really love that person? All of the above is just what that individual did for you when it comes to how you feel, and now that the withdrawal symptoms are kicking in, you are only focusing on yourself.

Loving someone is selfless; you want them to do well whether you are associated with it or not. Of course, you would prefer to be part of the picture, but it does not have to be.

You can love a person from afar. In some circumstances, ex-married couples still love one another after the separation; it is not that they still want to be together, but there is that warmth towards one another. No hard feelings are present, and there is cooperation in raising the children.

Granted, more often than not, spite, bitterness, and other negatively skewed feelings follow up, making the breakup and its logistics a living nightmare.

Why is that? At least one of the parties did not accept the harsh reality that once a glass is broken, you won't be able to drink the beverage from it.

You can either put the pieces in the recyclable bin or refuse to remove the parts from the floor (here, your mind), making it the right weapon for self-inflicted wounds.

Loving someone is the greatest gift you can give. It may be appreciated or ignored by the other party, but this should not drive you to dwell on what is not anymore, for you to try to rekindle the flame desperately.

Regarding dating, relationships, and breakups, anything that feels forced is unnatural and does not achieve the desired outcome.

For men, there is always that feeling that the investment you put into someone must yield a return.

For women, there is always that feeling that giving what they consider the best years of their lives must lead to a specified outcome.

In both cases, you must not expect a return when you contribute to someone else's life. Not only does this make the interactions much freer and more flowing, but more importantly, it won't feed the eventual resentment when or if the failure happens.

You can be genuinely happy to be free of the burden of someone who does not appreciate you and what you provided to them. You then can wish that person the best without feeling the need to even out the hurt.

The problem was not the other person; it was you. You set expectations too heavy for them to bear, and you felt emotionally spent because of the unnecessary pressure.

Knowing this, you have a choice ahead of you. It is understandable that the nature of all relationships is covert contracts, no matter how hard we try to manage expectations, as we all have undisclosed desires.

Two options are going forward when dealing with new prospects:

1) Emotionally close yourself from the above natural process of building expectations from a relationship and towards another person as much as possible. Otherwise, you will feel part of an unchartered adventure, where the raw and chaotic nature of the forever fleeting feelings take over Reason, bearing the above negative feedback loop once the breakup occurs.

2) Choose the overt contractual set-up and fronting the transactional nature of the relationship to know from the onset what is expected and what both people have to deliver, avoiding any misunderstanding and building trust at the expense of anxiety-driven passion and its associated toxicity.

2) were how relationships were built in the past, and 1) is how most modern relationships function.

Should you choose 1) as a path, do both yourself and the other person a favour:

Detach yourself from the eventual disappointment of the relationship's failure, forgive yourself for making the wrong investment, and let go of the pain, anger, and despair. You are not the relationship you were in. If you decide to believe you were, you must find yourself again.

You are lost now because you were already lost in the relationship. The crystallisation of the breakup now only makes it more evident.

When you are back up, you realise that the former person you thought was just incompatible with you despite your original belief, and you can follow your own path and have spare love to share with who you formerly called your other half. It does not have to be reciprocated, but you won't care anymore. You will feel good about yourself.

Please realise that the person you met at one point in your life may change throughout the relationship, or you may change when it is not the both of you. Forgive yourself for not seeing how the dynamics would have changed, here, ushering the end of the union. You could not have, and neither could they. Life has a way of reshuffling its particles, which may make no sense now, but an objective and detached outlook once years have passed enables you to look back clearly through the rearview window—trust time to heal your wounds and improve your vision.

If you find yourself wondering whether you should go back to them and are willing to try again because you have existing and tangible responsibilities such as kids, you must enter the fray again without the resentment you already built and go there, allowing both of your energies to flow again unburdened by the past while having established a mutual understanding of how the previous reasons for the breakup cannot reoccur. You have to accept that it won’t be the same as when you first started dating one another, but it is also natural, as relationship dynamics change over the years and decades. It is about what the bigger picture is and where your priorities lie.

It is a fine art to know when it is too late when trust cannot be reignited, and when there was an overreaction in light of your respective stories.

Should you decide to move on, it is about taking away all of the power they held over you while you were distressed, killing them mentally with kindness, and wishing them the best without you, as there will be someone better suited for them than you.

Should they ever come back, you will realise that the detachment you have eventually achieved helped you get over the idea of what you had to reach the reality of what it never could be.

All that matters is your peace of mind and alignment with your view of your future in a bright light, where what is to come makes more sense thanks to what you have been through and healed from.

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