A Useful Tip For Moving On (and maybe even finding new love...)

[acheybreakey]

Hi everyone

I hope that this is helpful to some of you out there, I have found it to be helpful to me. I know that I am not the wisest when it comes to relationships and if any of you have read my past posts you will see that I have allowed myself to be in a very bad relationship for far too long. Still, I have received some very good advice that has been serving me very well and made me feel a lot better about my situation, my most recent break-up and my future so I wanted to pass it along with every hope that it can do the same for you.

 

The first advice I received was from a friend of a friend that is a relationship counselor. She told me to make a list of ten things that I absolutely must have in a partner and ten things that I absolutely will not tolerate. Then she told me to cross out the five least important things on each list and the five that remain would be what is absolutely most important to me. For example, my top five must haves list: 1) Must be intelligent, 2) Must be funny, 3) Must care about the environment, 4) Must treat me with respect and as his equal, 5) Must be able to carry on long and interesting conversations. My must not haves: 1) Must not cheat, 2) Must not lie to me, 3) Must not smoke cigarettes (no offense to smokers out there... I have a long family history of cancer and cigarette smoke gives me migraines. It's not something personal against smokers as people), 4) Must never hurt me physically and must try to never hurt me emotionally (recognizing that sometimes the latter is impossible to avoid), 5) Must not be completely dependent upon me or expect me to be completely dependent upon him.

 

I don't really care what you think of my lists, they are just what I care about personally. I'm sure we all have different values, I just wanted to show it as an example. I've been having a hard time getting over my ex, especially since he has been constantly trying to get back together with me, although he says he doesn't want to have a monogamous relationship anymore o_O... as much as I miss him and still love him, I can look at my lists and see that he has some of the qualities that I absolutely do not want in a partner. And, furthermore, because of the way he has treated me in the past, he clearly doesn't respect me and therefore violates one of the qualities that I absolutely must have in a partner. Realizing this, it has made it easier for me to tell myself that he is clearly not the right person for me and that even though I do love him and want him, ultimately, he will not bring me the happiness that I hope I deserve and this has allowed me to fight the temptation of trying to get back with him.

 

I also fully believe that when I am finally over him and ready to start dating again, that these lists will help me in choosing a new partner. In the past, I have dated people that smoke cigarettes and they have always made me sick and the relationship of course ended up not working out. Likewise, with my last ex, the first time he cheated on me, he begged me for forgiveness claiming he would never do it again. I forgave him only for him to cheat on me again years later (and who knows, maybe he cheated on me throughout our entire relationship and I just never found out about it). Likewise, I once dated a guy that had almost all of the qualities that I must have in a partner, except that we were not able to carry on long conversations very often. We dated for almost two years before I finally admitted to myself that just because he was nice and fun, we didn't click on a much deeper level. If I had these lists back then, I could have saved myself and my former partners so much time and heart break!

 

I hope this is helpful for you

[tinkerbash]

i love this post! you are so strong .. i hope wit time i can be positive like this again!!

[acheybreakey]

I hope so too, tinker bash. Good luck with everything, it just takes time...