Why Break-ups hurt so much

I don’t think breakups hurt as much as we think they do.

At least… not for the reasons we imagine.

People often tell me,

“I miss them so much.”

And I always wonder…

Do you miss them?

Or do you miss who you believed your life was about to become?

Because when we first meet someone, something very subtle begins to happen.

We don’t just meet a person.

We meet possibility.

The possibility of finally feeling chosen.

Finally feeling safe.

Finally feeling understood.

Finally feeling wanted.

Finally having someone who stays.

Without even realising it, we begin writing a future.

We’ll travel together.

Grow old together.

Raise children.

Build a home.

Laugh together

Slowly…

the person standing in front of us becomes much bigger than they really are.

Not because we know them.

Because we begin placing pieces of ourselves inside them.

Our hope.

Our loneliness.

Our longing.

Our unfinished dreams.

Our quiet belief that perhaps this time…

life will finally feel different.

I sometimes think this is why the beginning of love can feel so intoxicating.

Not because we’ve met someone extraordinary.

Because, for the first time in a long time, we can see a future where we no longer have to carry our longing alone.

The tragedy is that while all this is happening…

we’re often not really meeting each other.

We’re meeting what the other person has come to represent.

An escape.

A home.

A second chance.

A witness.

Someone who will finally love the parts we struggle to love ourselves.

The person slowly disappears.

The possibility becomes everything.

And perhaps the other person is doing exactly the same with us.

Two people.

Each quietly falling in love with the future they imagine the other person will deliver.

This is why breakups can feel so unbearable.

Yes, we lose a relationship.

But something else shatters too.

The conversations we had already imagined.

The children we secretly named.

The ordinary Sundays that never happened.

The version of ourselves who finally believed,

“I’m going to be okay now.”

That is the grief people rarely talk about.

The relationship ends.

But what collapses is an entire future that had already begun living inside us.

And suddenly…

we are standing in front of something we had managed not to look at for a while.

Not the absence of another person.

But the longing we had quietly handed over to them.

Maybe this is why healing after a breakup feels so confusing.

We think we’re trying to let go of someone else.

Often…

we’re trying to let go of the life we had already started living in our imagination.

And perhaps real healing begins the moment we stop asking,

“How do I stop missing them?”

and begin asking a much gentler question.

“What was I hoping this relationship would finally give me?”

Because sometimes the greatest loss isn’t the person.

It’s discovering that we had asked another human being to carry dreams that had been waiting for us long before they arrived.

This is the work I find myself returning to again and again.

Not helping people simply move on from relationships.

But helping them gently separate the person they loved…

from the life they had quietly built around them.

Because only then do we begin to meet our longing for what it has always been.

Not proof that we lost the right person.

But an invitation to understand the parts of ourselves we had hoped someone else would finally rescue.