Why Are Short Relationships Sometimes the Hardest to Get Over?

A couple of days later, I was with a friend in the sauna of her gym. It was hot enough that the pages of my book crinkled and sweat rolled over the bridge of my lips. “I still like Brian,” I said, a bit out of nowhere, my legs swinging underneath me. 

She nodded as if it was okay that I felt like that, and her nonchalance made me question why I found it so hard to admit. I guess it’s because, in the grand scale of relationships, what happened between us was objectively very short: too small a thing to mourn.  

I also didn’t want to do the thing where I lodge an ex in my brain as the internal judge of my actions. As if they’re there watching and laughing when I’m on the sidewalk on a night out, with my bag open and all my cards everywhere and my dress riding up, thinking, “I knew she wasn’t worth it.” 

I don’t want to dwell. I want to move on, get up, and grow up, like an Ariana Grande lyric rather than a Lana Del Rey one.

But nothing is too small to feel crap about. And what is small, anyway? Even if a relationship is short or casual, it can still mean something. I’ve like-liked a lot of people, but I haven’t felt the same sureness I did with him very often at all. The thought of me and him made sense in my head. It’s understandable that, when it didn’t work out, it would hit me hard. 

After admitting my feelings to my friend, I felt so much better. It made me realize how impossible they are to change. You can accept that you’ll be happier without a person, that now’s not the right time, that one or both of you did something wrong, but you can’t talk your way into actually going off them. You just have to wait. 

In fact, there’s only one way to speed up the process, and that’s to keep on living your life in a way that makes you happy. To leave the party when it stops being fun, to lie on the grass and look up at the sky until the clouds start to bend and morph into shapes you can’t believe were made by chance, sitting on people’s knees and snogging them in public even though you should be self-conscious. And just by living, you’ll get to a point where that person matters a lot less than they used to.