Why can't I move on?

Teenage love is difficult to get over for two reasons. 1) it’s more intense than pretty much any other feeling you’re ever going to have for the rest of your life, and 2) it bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to real love. Teenage love is overwhelming, all-consuming, and based nowhere near reality. It’s infatuation inflated to gargantuan proportions, based more on the fact that you love the love than that you love the person. This is why so many moronic high-school sweethearts run off, get married, get pregnant, realize they can’t stand living together, and get divorced.

I know, I know, the standard response is, ‘You don’t understand. I love everything about her, really!’ I’ve been there. But if you really loved everything about her, you’d also be loving the fact that she wants nothing to do with you or your undying devotion, which pretty much obliterates the ‘everything about her’ argument before it even gets off the ground.

The reason you can’t get over this person is because you’ve wrapped so much of your own identity up in that relationship. So you’ve got this gaping hole where she used to be and nothing to fill it. And so you’ve placed yourself in the same category as the desperate girls who mention on the first date how eager they are to get married and have kids. When you define yourself as one half of a person, you’re not going to have a lot of luck getting over the loss of a relationship. It’s time to really, REALLY start living for yourself, not for the hope of being in another relationship or regaining the one you’ve lost. Start anywhere. Sign up for a book club, take pastry classes,collect comic books, who cares, just figure out who you are before you start thinking about foisting your broken self off on other people.