Millennial Muddles: The Heartbreak Handbook: Millennial Muddles, #1

By The Millennial in a Muddle

You know the feeling. You're flying high in the clouds, finally dating someone who seems to 'get' it. He's the polar opposite of all the other f*ckboys who've been messing you around lately... until, inexplicably, he isn't. 

Gone are the messages, the spontaneous appearances at your doorstep, the compliments and the attention. What's left is solid, cold rejection.

Everyone tells you to just 'get over it'. After all: you were kind of dating, but you were never really 'together' now, were you? So you suck it up. You hide your pain from everyone with 'real' problems. You start bullying yourself into believing that you had totally gotten the wrong end of the stick; that this was all somehow your fault anyway. Maybe you even start to think you're a little crazy for being so upset over something so seemingly inconsequential.

But you are not crazy. This has hurt just as much as you think. 

Thing is, this guy has triggered you twice. Firstly, because he has broken your heart. Secondly, because he has come to represent every rejection you've ever faced; every belittling thought you've ever had about yourself.

It's time to clear this mess up, and that's why I wrote The Heartbreak Handbook. 

When I was going through my own heartbreak, I couldn't find anything that really understood where I was coming from. There was nothing talking about the break down of 'situtationships', that modern, non-committal phenomenon. Nothing talking about how hard it is to deal when every social media app tells you whether or not he's bothered to read your message. There was nothing that acknowledged quite how much I was hurting, even in this hellish, undefined limbo.

So if you are going through a break-up and wondering how to finally get over the guy that left you heartbroken, here it is.

The Heartbreak Handbook is arranged as a series of vignettes. Each one speaks to a different facet of the process of getting over somebody, and the many realisations I had along the way.

Among many other thoughts and suggestions, it includes:

- Why 'situationships' really suck
- Why it's OK to acknowledge how much pain you're in
- What to do when they get in touch with you (and when you're desperate to reach out to them)
- How to stop blaming yourself
- Knowing that you need to create your own closure 
- Why this was never really about them so much as it was about you
- How to finally let them go and move on with your life 

There's so much more included in the book; take a look for yourself and let us know what you think in the reviews below.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Millennial in a Muddle
• Release date: Jan 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386269120

Book preview

Introduction

If you have picked up this book, it is probably for one of the following reasons:

1) You have recently (or not-so-recently) been left reeling from a break-up of some description, which has left you at a total loss over how to move on.

2) You didn’t strictly go through a break-up, so you’re not entirely sure whether you’re even allowed to be heartbroken, even though you certainly feel that way, or,

3) You are one of a small number of family and friends who have bought this book out of sheer pity for me.

If the latter, then thank you for your support, but please bear in mind that:

Yep, I am doing OK thank you, despite the emergence of this confession and

No, I haven’t met ‘anyone nice’ lately

This book is most certainly for you if you are looking around at the charred remnants of what had once been a perfectly nice flame, and asking yourself a few torturous questions we must all ask ourselves at one time or another. These questions are probably something along the lines of:

What the hell just happened?

What did I do wrong?

Why didn’t he want me?

Why can’t I just get over it?

This process is made even more unbearable, if that’s even possible, if you’ve just emerged from a ‘situationship’ as opposed to a relationship. This is a modern phenomenon which probably has more in common with Stockholm Syndrome than it does with love, and which makes you question everything from your self-worth, to your sanity. It’s the hideous state of dating where no one makes any commitments and yet the person willing to commit is given juuust enough encouragement to think that one day, it might become something real. We’ll dive into the problems with situationships a bit later, but for now, suffice to say that ending a situationship is no easier or less confusing than being in one.

I’m here to reassure you that if this is the situation you’re in, then you’re allowed to feel heartbroken. How do I know? Because my situationships have been far harder and far more upsetting to move on from than previous, genuinely caring, relationships. Admitting to myself that I was heartbroken felt like I was entering into the game he was playing: trying to make my emotions seem ‘hyper intense’ and ‘too much’ when in fact, they were perfectly normal, given the circumstances.

So why read this book? So that you know you’re not alone. So that you can finally start shifting some of that blame you’ve been carrying on your own back for far too long. So that you can stop crying yourself to sleep over a guy you know, rationally, doesn’t even deserve a second thought. Ultimately, so that you can ease some of that heartache and get back on an even keel after all this time.

There’s no such thing as a linear healing process. To this end, whilst the book loosely follows the arc of healing and resolution that I have come through these past two years, it is also arranged in a section of vignettes, which can be read independently of one another, hopefully ready to meet you wherever you’re presently at.

Part 1: Beginnings

How I Got Here

Many months ago, I was sprawled out across my sofa, doing my best impression of a beached whale, and sobbing my way through yet another bag of Cadbury’s Mini Eggs. This ran the risk of putting on even more weight on my tummy and being accused of looking ‘pregnant’ by certain sympathetic females in my life, but I couldn’t even begin to care. My friend was on the phone, coaching me through my misery and taking her cue from none other than William Shakespeare.

He sounds like an Iago, she said, her voice dripping with disdain, citing my most recent disaster of a f*ckboy’s silver tongue and manipulative game-playing. This is why I love her, by the way. There I was, a chocolate-gorged mess, and she's on the end of the phone comparing the guy in my love life (though this is a pretty generous term) to one of literature’s most notorious villains.

Iago, I thought, with venom. Another bloody army man. I took out my rage on another sugar-coated pacifier.

But you are no Desdemona she resolutely continued, and proceeded to give me a: ‘you are not a victim’ speech. It might have been the most high-brow low-point of my life.

It’s true I was no hapless heroine in the way that naïve Desdemona might float about, prey to the whims of men, but I was certainly feeling pretty bloody victimised. So how the hell did I get here?

The Prevaricating Swede

My appearance as a beached whale had its roots in my first ever situationship, which I blame entirely on the prevaricating Swede (the nationality, not the vegetable).

The Swede was my first hint that situationships suck. Given that it never really went anywhere, he took me a bizarrely long time to get over. This guy was a Ghoster-turned-Zombie extraordinaire. To the happily uninitiated, let me rob you of your innocence:

Ghosting is when a guy drifts out of contact without any warning or indication that he was losing interest. There’s no polite I’m afraid this isn’t for me - nope. He’ll just freeze you out so that you’ll never completely know whether he’s gone for good or whether he’s simply busy. Nowadays it’s wisest to assume that he’s a dickhead that deserves to be deleted from your contacts after about a week to ten days’ of no contact.

A Zombie is the next stage of a Ghoster’s evolution. This is the part where they suddenly, miraculously, return from the dead with no prior warning. But they’re not there like Jesus, wrapped in a crisp white sheet to Share The Good News, although much like Jesus, they also don’t actually stick around: they just want to kind of float in and out of your life as and when suits them, with no mature conversation around why they left in the first place, what motivated them to come back and what, if anything, they want in the future.

I never actually confronted the Swede about his disappearing acts - we were nowhere near close enough to warrant me expecting more, and I’m certainly not one of those people who is controlling and needs to know someone's every move, so I felt I had no choice but to suck it up. In this vein, I chose to tolerate and ignore it as best I could.

After a few months of him disappearing then instigating contact and meeting up, we had crossed the threshold of absolutely-nothingness into nearly-somethingness. We had been on a small handful of dates. We’d even had an actual conversation which involved actual real words, deciding that we had a good thing going and we should let it unfold. He instigated that bit, FYI.

This was clearly a mistake: within a fortnight he was avoiding my messages once again and