Advice for the Lovelorn

This past Saturday my daughter and her boyfriend of 19 months split up.

Since then we’ve all been trying to help her through it.

My husband offered her this bit of advice, “Don’t start dating again until August.” (She’ll be attending Martin Luther College by then.)

My advice came in two parts.

1) Focus on all you’ve got. (And then I listed off all she has going for her, and quoted Philippians 4:8 & 9.)

2) Take care of yourself: Eat, drink, and sleep. (I knew she’d never start feeling better if she was starving, dehydrated, or sleep-deprived. I’m a mom. I worry about these things.)

Her older sister told her that in a good relationship each person brings out the best in the other person. Then she said he did her a favor by ending it, and that she was too good for him. (I thought that too, but I didn’t want to say it.)

Then on Tuesday a friend who knew nothing about my daughter’s break up, recommended the “Ask Carolyn” column in the Trib. A few days later I googled Ask Carolyn, and eventually came upon the following article. Obviously, the situation “Devastated reject” wrote in about wasn’t exactly like my daughter’s. But I forwarded it to her anyway. I thought Carolyn’s reply was loaded with sound advice.

Here’s what the article said:

Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend of seven years left me for a 20-year-old (we're both 26). Throughout it all he has tried to be kind and reassuring to me, but I can't seem to reconcile that with the wholesale rejection of everything I have been to him, everything I am and everything I could have been. We've had a tumultuous history, but we always worked through our problems and I really thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.

I tried to reason with him and lay out our entire history, and while he agrees it has been worthwhile and that he was happy with me, it's still not worth it to him to give up this new girl. I don't know if he's saying kind things only to make me feel better or if it's an outright lie. I'm so confused about the last seven years now.

I'm trying to take things day by day. I keep trying to remind myself that I did my best, and I can't force him to love me. I just get overwhelmed with these feelings of worthlessness, though, and I feel like I'm losing everything. What else can I do? - Devastated reject

If you're worthless because one person doesn't want to date you anymore, then pretty much everybody on Earth is worthless.

A persistent sense of helplessness means it's time to get screened for depression. Until you reach that point, though, don't discount your inherent power to put this loss into perspective.

Every one of us gets rejected almost daily. X will choose not to sit with us, Y will choose not to call us, Z will ignore something we post on Facebook. Minor rejections all, but they're the ones adolescence teaches us not to think about, because dwelling invites complete social paralysis. And that acquired reflex of prioritizing and blocking-out is important.

Different people have different thresholds for rejection, but, just by living from one day to the next, we all leave behind rejections of all shapes and sizes, sometimes without even noticing we've done it. Someone says something unkind behind our backs, and we learn by accident; a potential employer sends our resume to the shredder, or an admissions committee says uhhhh . . . nope; our friend/love/relative realizes s/he isn't happy, and we are identified as one source of that unhappiness.

It's normal to feel hurt, and painful memories rarely fade completely. But it's also normal for a combination of time, careful thought and a well-populated life to work in concert to put these emotional injuries where they belong. Specifically - and rightly - they become the opinion of one person, blended in with the opinion/companionship/reward/satisfaction/enrichment of everyone else you know and everything else you do.

This is the process you need to undertake, consciously. Look around you, and form this phrase in your mind: "I am looking at people who all have been rejected, in ways that would make them wince to this day." Then watch them shop for groceries, hold hands with partners, peck at their laptops in coffee shops, drive their kids to lessons, jog or walk dogs to their digitized personal soundtracks, draw breath after breath after breath.

You two became a couple as teenagers. That at least one of you would grow away from the other over seven years was a likelihood just shy of a certainty. Grieve the loss, yes, and learn from it; envisioning a new future takes time. But in the meantime, stop blaming yourself (and/or, ahem, the new girl's youth) and place this whole disappointment in the "[Stuff] happens" file. It's the fattest one in the drawer.

Good advice, wouldn’t you say.

Well, it’s been almost a week since the break-up and I’m happy to report my daughter’s doing just fine. I’d like to think it’s because of all the great advice we’ve given her. But I suspect the real reason is that my daughter has been blessed with some of the best friends a girl could have. Within hours of her break-up they were there for her. And all week they’ve been showing their love and support in the form of kind words, sweet gifts, and lots and lots of hugs.

Here’s a little music to end this week’s blog. I’m dedicating it to all my daughter’s friends.

She loves you, and so do I!