How Do I Let Go of My “Perfect” Relationship and Move On?

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I’ve been a long-time reader, and your writing on oneitis has been especially helpful to me. That said, there’s one part of it that I still struggle to fully understand.

I broke up with my “perfect” ex about two years ago, and I can’t seem to shake the feeling that any relationship different from what I had with her would automatically be worse. Intellectually, I know she wasn’t unique. I know there are plenty of women out there who could share similar traits, values, or chemistry.

But emotionally, I get stuck.

When I imagine being with someone who doesn’t recreate the specific feelings or dynamic I had in that relationship, it just feels… not worth it. It feels like I’m settling for something I know could be better.

I’ve seen this play out in practice recently. The last girl I broke up with was, on paper, a really nice person. She never did anything wrong, and we matched well in many ways. However, she was different from my “perfect” ex, and she didn’t make me as happy, even though we didn’t really have any problems.

How can I stop my brain from translating “different relationship” into “inferior relationship,” even when I logically know better?

Thank you for your work,

Keep The Change

This is easy, KTC. You aren’t looking for another relationship, you’re looking for a replacement. That is, you’re looking for one that you can slot perfectly into place, that will feel exactly the same as the previous one did. The problem is: you can’t. You know you can’t. It’s like a parent hoping that they can replace a pet before their kid gets home from camp; the relationship with that pet was about the relationship with that pet, specifically. Even if they got a clone, it would only look the same; everything else would be “off” in large and small ways.

So it is with relationships writ large. You can’t find another relationship that will feel exactly the same as your last one did, because your last relationship was the sum totality of so many different things. It was about who you both were – before you got together and while you were together. It was about the world around you, the lives you were living, the responsibilities and obligations you had – or didn’t have – then. It was about that very particular time in your lives, those precise circumstances that are now in the past, never to return because time only flows one way.

Even if you got back with your ex, you still would feel weird, because this wouldn’t be picking up where you left off; you’d be starting a new relationship with someone you’ve dated before. It wouldn’t be the same, in no small part because of that past. It might be similar, it might be worse, it might even be better… but it won’t be the same.

That’s what’s fucking you up about this. It’s an expectation problem, and you know that those expectations won’t be met, simply because it can’t be the same.

The problem, ultimately, is that you think your last relationship was “perfect”, and you want that back, and you can’t. In fact, as much as I hate to say it… that relationship wasn’t perfect. No relationship is. But as long as you elevate it to such great heights, you’re giving yourself permission to hold onto it and, critically, to not move on.

This isn’t necessarily surprising. Part of why it can be so hard to let go of an ex, especially if you’re someone who’s prone to oneitis is that you think the problem is your ex. In reality, it’s more about what your ex – or the relationship – represents. It’s not just that they were “perfect”, but why it feels like they were perfect. Often, it’s because they represented who we could be; they were the avatar of what we hoped our life would be, with them in it.

If you saw them as a symbol – a reward, for being who you “should” be, for example – then what you’re really hoping for is to get back to the place where you felt like you were still that “ideal” person. Instead, they’re no longer in your life… and thus you can’t be that person any more. You can’t have that life.

If you saw them as being the only person you could love, or the only person who could love you, it’s the same story. They’re a person, but they represent your last and only bulwark against loneliness and despair; your relationship with them ending means that you’re now doomed to die alone, unloved and unmourned. So you don’t miss them so much as you fear the doom of being alone, forever.

The same thing with the relationship being “perfect”. If it was “perfect”, then you can’t be happy with anyone else. There isn’t even a point in trying, because how can you be expected to go back to Earth after you’ve seen heaven? It’s said that after Jesus brought them back, Lazarus never smiled again…

So, I think what you need to do is take some time and really think about what it was about your relationship with your ex that you loved. Not the things about them, but about the relationship itself. What is it that you miss, besides just a generic “everything”? What about that relationship was “perfect”? Were there truly no areas of friction or discontent, no places where you weren’t 100% happy?

The point isn’t to retroactively shit over your old relationship or your ex, it’s to recognize that it wasn’t perfection. Nothing can measure up to a “perfect” relationship, because “perfect” relationships aren’t real. The golden light of nostalgia affects our memory like Vaseline on a camera lens, giving everything a soft focus that blurs away all the little “imperfections” – the flaws, the frustrations, the conflicts, and the fights. It’s a sweet way to remember an ex, sure… but not when that fantasy of the relationship is keeping you from moving on. Not when you’re trying to find a replacement for something that didn’t actually exist. Not when you’re condemned, like the rest of us, to date mere mortals and not supernatural beings of pure imagination.

Your relationship with your ex was amazing, I’m sure… but it wasn’t perfect. Nothing can be. If you can recognize that your relationship with your ex was just that – your relationship with your ex, not the ne plus ultra of relationships – then it becomes a lot easier to recognize and accept that otherrelationships can be just as good. They’ll be different, sure, but that’s good. if you could just fit another person into the slot and have the same relationship… well, your ex was never really a person, so much as a battery that made the whole thing run. And how good could a relationship be if anyone could make it run exactly the same way?

It’s those differences that make relationships special. We are a novelty-seeking species after all; we get used to anything, so new experiences set off the sparks in our brains that release all the happy chemicals.

Every relationship is gloriously different, because they’re about the individuals in it. That process of mystery, novelty and discovery, getting to this new person and learning new things about them and about ourselves, doing things we’ve never done before or seeing them through new eyes… that’s part of what sparks the NRE at the start of seeing someone new. In learning about someone new, you learn about yourself, and often discover new sides of yourself that you may never have dreamed existed.

And yes, there are aspects of you that’re waiting to be unveiled. Nobody is an island, and none of us leave relationships unchanged. We are all the components of our past relationships – foods we learned to love, music we were exposed to, movies and books and TV we watched for the first time, even little turns of phrase or ways of behaving. All of these are the ways our exes change us and make us new and different. A new partner and new relationship is an opportunity to see even more sides that you may never have realized existed… sides that are no less meaningful simply because they were brought about by another person, rather than your ex.

So take a little bit of time to think about your “perfect” relationship and be willing to see it as realistically and completely as you can – the good and the bad of it. Give yourself permission to grieve it – not just the dream of perfection but what it truly was. Then give yourself closure and let yourself look forward to the new. When you do meet someone new, the goal shouldn’t be to slot someone into the empty whole marked “girlfriend” so you can get back to your perfect relationship… it’s to discover who this person is and who you are when you’re with them. I promise you: the right relationship will make you as happy as your supposedly “perfect” one. It won’t be happy in the same way, but that’s what makes them beautiful. It’s the differences that make each one special… and perfectly imperfect in its own way.

Good luck.

***

Dear Doctor NerdLove,

I wrote you two times (once here; I can’t find the second letter), so let’s make a trilogy out of it.

Current situation:

– 36 years old, employed, overweight.

– Suffering from moderate depressions, which get worse over the winter.

– Trauma from being sexually taken advantage of by another person, mommy issues (violent alcoholic), bad relationships (they tried to control me).

– Lonely.

Solutions:

– Get more exercise to lose weight. I know that, I plan to do that, but I don’t do it. It doesn’t help that I work in shifts and my sleep schedule is kaputt. So, changing the job is part of the plan.

– Depressions: got medicated and therapy. I can live with it and do my job in a good and reliable manner. For the first time in my life, I earn real money. I can’t handle it, but I get help for that from my father now.

– I got two cats for the loneliness and I love then very much. I even let it happen, that they love me back and I can feel how it changes my brain chemistry. Literally, I can feel the process in my head, when I cuddle with them.

The point is, what I learned is that you need to be active and relationships are something you find in the outside world and something that happen. I was very lonely and desperate but with the cats I feel loved and I genuinely love them back, without being afraid that I may not be enough or that something is wrong with me. Back then, it was all about desperately making the loneliness go away and I’ve even broke the hearts of three women. Not proud of that, but it showed me how this goes two ways.

On the other hand, without the desperate want for love I kinda lost my drive to pursue a relationship. I mostly tried online dating, since I live in a little town in the middle of nowhere, where there is no active party scene (not my scene) and the hobby community is very small (Tabletop gaming in my case). To be honest I’m used to being overlooked, getting a pass and one time a woman told me to my face would be boring without the beard. She didn’t mean it in a mean way, but it still haunts me.

I believe it’s stories like this and age that makes it harder for me to motivate myself. At university everyone was young and poor and I was afraid of being a loser that still lives with his parents. Now I’m a loser that still lives with his parents and I give less fucks, but I still feel that want to connect, while knowing that age and working is everybody wearing down. Online dating isn’t an option anymore, because most profiles are fake or they live on the other side of the world, so we probably won’t meet anyway. The only solution is getting out there, meet actual women, get my heart broken and break a few till it sticks. Because I have my problems (see above), but I know people that are worse and they find partners.

So here is the question: how can I hype myself up that a relationship is something worthwhile? How may I lie to myself, that it is something that makes yourself feel good and isn’t only something that gives you tax cuts and makes sure that you’re not alone in your old age, because you’re both too tired to change? How can I think of it something good and not just another unpaid shitty job, were you do all the work and she doesn’t even like you?

I have to admit, I’m a pessimist at heart and the future looks grim, with the environment being as good as death and humanity just running towards its doom. But I know suicide isn’t an option and I love my cats very much. I can change my medication and do sport and change my job, but where can I start with finding at least some literature to make me think, that I can build something that … I don’t even know what it could be. Maybe just being loved and desired by somebody and actually believing it. Or just coming home and somebody is glad to see me.

Just something.

Thanks

Grim Future Guy

There’s a lot here, GFG, especially when we combine it with your previous history of sexual assault and all the rest. I’m not surprised at how much of a number that will have done to you. Nor am I particularly surprised that the current state of, well, everything can put you off, well… almost anything, really. I promise you: you are not the only person looking at what’s going on right now and is literally too depressed to fuck.

No, seriously, it’s a major problem for a lot of folks right now. A lot of people are having hardcore mental health issues because of the accumulated stress and pressure of just trying to survive in these unfortunately increasingly precedented times.

But depression is quite literally part of your problem. As in, it’s the second thing you list as part of your situation. Speaking from experience, a lot of what you’re describing – that sense of pointlessness, the lack of motivation and interest in things that you would normally be interested in – are classic symptoms of clinical, chronic depression. Depression, after all, isn’t just “the blues”; it’s often more like grey numbness and apathy, where everything feels pointless if it feels like anything, and it’s hard to work up the effort to care even slightly. Hell, it’s even difficult to muster up the energy to activelyshit on yourself, as opposed to just waving a hand in the general direction of your supposed flaws and say “yeah, that stuff.”

I think this should be your first priority, more than anything else. There’s a lot in your letter that I’m not going to address, in part because so much of it is being exacerbated by the fact that you’re dealing with depression. Trying to talk you through not feeling like a loser because you live at home is the dating equivalent of putting a bandage on a sucking chest wound – it’s trying to treat a symptom rather than the most likely underlying cause.

(You’re not, and multi-generational families are incredibly common, and getting more common with Gen-Z and Alpha; trust me, there’re more folks living like you than not…)

But even if these problems exist independently of your depression, your depression is still the higher priority. Depression makes everything harder and bleeds into almost every aspect of your life. Once you start getting that under control, I think you’ll find that the rest of it starts looking significantly different than it does now. And even if those problems are still in play after your depression is managed, they’ll be much easier to fix.

Dealing with depression requires a multi-pronged approach. Depression – as in the chronic condition – is often chemical as much as it is psychological, and the best treatment modalities tend to approach it from different angles simultaneously. I highly recommend that you take that approach yourself – working on both the physical/chemical side of things and from the psychological side.

The most obvious starting point is medication. While I know antidepressants have a reputation for unpleasant side-effects, the latest medications are far, far better and more broadly tolerated. Wellbutrin, among others, doesn’t have many of the sexual side effects that a lot of SSRIs have, for example.

Exercise should be another prong in how you treat your depression. Multiple studies, including a meta-analyses published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and another published by the Chochrane Library respectively have found that moderate exercise is helpful in managing symptoms of depression. While both studies point out that this shouldn’t be taken as an indication that exercise alone is an effective treatment, it does suggest that regular vigorous exercise in addition to other forms of treatment is helpful. Since you already want to up the amount of exercise you get, it sounds like a good way to motivate yourself to get started.

Your sleep schedule is another thing that needs to change. You mention that you’re doing shift-work. Shift Work Sleep Disorder is a real condition, and it is known to exacerbate depression and mental health disorders. I’ve linked to a piece that talks about ways of managing SWSD, which will hopefully, help, but I think one of the bigger changes you might want to make is to look for work with more consistent hours if at all possible.

It’s not just about getting seven or eight hours, it’s getting seven or eight hours regularly, consistently and around the same time. If you’re having to change your sleep schedule constantly – a few weeks working the graveyard shift, a few working the standard 8-5, a few working evening – then I’m absolutely not surprised your mental health is taking a nosedive.

The last thing I would suggest on the physical side of things is to look into getting yourself a (suitably named) SAD lamp for the winter months. Not only will this help with the side-effects of your disrupted sleep patterns, but if you have seasonal affective disorder and the gloom of winter is messing with your head, 30 minutes or so of 10,000 lux light first thing in the morning (within an hour of waking up) makes a huge difference. There’re quite a few people on Reddit and elsewhere who have recommendations for ones that’ve worked for them; the Yale School of Medicine has a few they recommend as well.

On the mental side of the equation, it’s time to talk to a counselor. I recommended this to you when you wrote in during the aftermath of your abusive relationship, and I stand by it. You really should be talking with someone who is familiar with depression and abusive relationships – emotional as well as sexual. You mentioned that your mother was a violent alcoholic; that’s almost certainly lingering in the background and tangled up with the sexual abuse from your previous relationship. Talking with someone who can walk you through the ways that you’ve been hurt and how to heal is going to be massively important.

Now, notice that I’m not telling you how to get hyped up and eager to get back out on the dating scene. That’s because you don’t need motivation, so much as you need to not feel like shit. Again, speaking from experience, I can tell you that trying to force yourself to do damn near anything when you’re also dealing with depression is a nightmare. Even with all the motivation in the world, it feels like you’re trying to push your way through something thick and viscous. Trying to force yourself to go out, and to be social is already going to be hard. Combining that with the way depression screws with your head and lies to you isn’t just trying to play on Nightmare difficulty, it’s like you downloaded mods to make it an even bigger challenge.

Getting your depression under control will make all the rest much, much easier. You won’t have to fight to muster the energy to care, nor will you have to constantly push back against the voice in the back of your head telling you that there’s no point to it.

But just as importantly, you don’t want motivation. Not really. Motivation in and of itself is poor fuel for improvement and change. While motivation is great for getting started on a project or inspiring you to make a change, it doesn’t last.

If motivation is all that’s getting you out of bed and to the gym or the therapist’s couch, then you’re going to fall off the metaphorical wagon as soon as it runs out. And it will run out. Much like why folks abandon and forget their New Years resolutions, motivation doesn’t last long even when everything is going well. When you’re using it to fuel something that takes a lot of time, discipline and sustained effort, it burns out even faster. And if you’re dealing with depression on top of all of that?

Yeah, nah. That’s a bad idea all around. You’re more or less guaranteeing that you’ll bail on all of it at once.

So, I wouldn’t rely on trying to find “motivation” to go out and meet people. What I’d suggest right now is that you take the motivation to improve your general quality of life and treat your depression, and use it to start building routines that will help keep you going. Going to the gym sucks, but making it a routine – going every three days at 3:30 PM, for example – turns it into just part of your schedule; it’s a lot easier to maintain when it’s just something you do, instead of waiting for the burning desire to lift heavy shit repeatedly.

Personally, I find it’s helpful to have things that I reserve for whatever routine I’m trying to build. For example, I love my TTRPG actual play shows, but I make a point of only watching or listening to them when I’m working out. If I want to find out what’s currently happening in Araman or Exandria, the Aguefort Adventuring Academy, or The Court of Fey and Flowers, I need to be exercising. If I can’t make it to the gym, t’s easy enough to put in my headphones and head out for a walk or do some body weight exercise routines at home. I may not want to get on the elliptical or do my Romanian deadlifts and goblet squats, but it’s that or get further and further behind in my stories.

Going to therapy is also helpful in this regard; it gives you someone you’re being accountable to, and paying for services is a pretty hefty motivator to ensure you’re actually getting your money’s worth.

Once you start getting your depression managed and you’ve been working with your therapist about the pain you’ve been living with… well, that’s when you’ll be better positioned to go out and build more of a social life. Not, mind you “go out and get a date”, but “build a social life that can lead to dates”. As I’ve been saying for years now: the best way to meet people who are right for you is to be out in the world around other people – people you would want to hang out with, whether you wanted to date them or not. Having people you care about and who care about you, who are on Team You, is a hell of a lot better for helping you be on the look out for love than hoping to brute-force it through inspirational quotes and philosophical texts.

But that’s for the future. For now, the best thing you can do for yourself is to love yourself enough to recover and improve. Do that first, and the rest will come much, much more easily.

All will be well.

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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.