Nothing hurts more than having your heart broken by the one you love. It often takes months or years to recover from relationships and sometimes lives are changed forever. While everyone has their own way of coping with break-ups and other difficulties in life, here are a few to help get you back on track. The last thing you want to do is to fall into a destructive or un-productive pattern or habit.

1. Learn to Forgive Yourself

While it’s easier said than done, the first thing you need to learn is how to forgive yourself. Whether you or your partner is at fault doesn’t matter: No one is completely faultless in a break-up. Perhaps you caused the termination of the relationship or you had to end it because of your partner’s differences. There is always a little feeling of guilt, sadness or even self-pity. When you forgive yourself, it’s easier to forgive the other person and move on with life.

2. Focus on Getting Back on Track with Your Life

Break-ups, divorces and separation often leaves the feeling of confusion and loneliness. Suddenly, everything your life revolved around is gone and you have to start making decisions of your own. When your sense of identity and self is left with the other person or in the failed relationship, it’s natural to feel lost. Start by making a list of your passions and what you enjoyed independent of the relationship and slowly start taking steps to getting back to those passions. Write down goals, keep a journal and do something you enjoy for an hour every day. Soon enough, you’ll feel reinvigorated and your identity will be more clear which will make the next relationship that much better.

3. Take Care of Your Health and Start A Fitness Program

Instead of letting your health take a downward spiral with drinking or eating your emotions, start an exercise regimen. If you were already active while in the relationship, keep up with it or try tweaking your workout routine to keep from getting bored. By taking better care of your health and body, your emotional well-being will follow. Exercise will give you more energy and confidence. You will look better and develop a new discipline for whatever lies ahead of you.

4. Learn to Accept What Went Wrong

Whether you initiated the break-up or your partner did, a dangerous habit is ignoring the problem and repeating the same mistakes. Your friends will encourage you to forget about him or her, distract yourself and go out to bars and hit the town. While it’s fun to go out and do these things, it’s unhealthy to completely forget about the relationship itself. Mentioning your ex or an instance in your relationship will sometimes elicit distracting thoughts from your friends. “Forget about him/her. It’s over and it’s time to move on! We hate to see you dwell.” Well-intentioned as they are, they couldn’t be more wrong. Dwelling is one thing, but letting the relationship and all its joys and faults sink in is sometimes the best way to move on. Take the good, learn from the bad and don’t make the same mistakes in the future. Ignoring it and distracting yourself is a recipe for relapse and disaster. Allow yourself time to think about it or write things down, but don’t dwell. Set a specific amount of time to this and stick to it. Soon, you’ll find yourself coming to grips with what happened and where things went wrong without feeling remorseful or bitter.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Meet New People

“It’s too soon.” That is a phrase we always hear from our well-meaning friends and family, but in reality only you know when the time is right. If it’s too soon, you’ll find out eventually. But don’t be afraid to meet new people or you might be missing out on opportunities to make a new friend or a future partner. You never know who you’ll meet, what kind of influence they might have on your life (friendship, love or even career opportunities). When fresh out of a break-up, there is a natural tendency to hole up or close yourself off to others. It’s the metaphorical wall everyone talks about when they sense another person who is guarded and jaded. You don’t have to release details about your life, but go out and make new friends and you’ll find that many of them might have a lot in common with you.

Of course, these are five small things you can start doing to cope with a break-up amongst a sea of other methods of coping. The key to it all is making it out of the recovery phase without hurting yourself (physically or emtionally) too much and by learning from the mistakes made. Learning is the most important part of a break-up and it makes future relationships sweeter.

1. Put Yourself in the Other Person’s Shoes

When you try to see things from the other person’s perspective, you see the argument in a different light and keeps your point of view from getting skewed. In turn, it might help mitigate your anger and give you more tools to fix the issue. Whether you agree with the other side or not, nothing makes you look worse than spouting off and making it apparent that you haven’t listened to a single word that your partner said.

2. Control Your Temper and Keep Your Voice Calm

Once your blood gets boiling, your rationale goes out the window and everything you are blurting is nothing more than a reflection of your anger. Keep your cool and wait, if you have to, before speaking. Take some deep breaths and don’t let your anger get the best of you. When you become upset, you raise your voice and start speaking faster until it gets to the point of yelling. Screaming isn’t going to drive the point home and instead of getting your feelings across, you’ll end up firing off at someone who’s either not listening or doing just the same. Keep your cool, lower your voice and you will be heard.

3. Avoid Insulting or Belittling the Other Person

Are you trying to solve a problem or issue or gaining the upper hand and making yourself out to be the saint? When you insult your partner, you’re doing nothing but worsening the situation and whittling away the respect they have for you. It shows just how wrong you are if you can’t come up with anything better than personal attacks. Remember that you love the other person and you’re trying to fix the problem, not complicate it.

4. Learn to Respect the Relationship

This one might sound a little strange but when a conflict is going nowhere because neither one of you will back down, it’s time to remember why you’re together in the first place. Fighting is often inevitable in most relationships, but we fall in love and get into relationships anyway. Why? Being in love and in a relationship feels good and it makes us happy. When you find someone worth sharing your love and intimacy with, and they feel the same way for you, give that relationship a little respect. Don’t throw it all out the window every time you have a disagreement because it’s an unhealthy sign that you just don’t care about the relationship anymore.

5. Know When to Keep Your Mouth Shut and Know When To Speak Up

Sometimes pride gets in the way and we don’t know when to fold. If you’re not hearing or understanding the other person, maybe it’s not because they don’t make sense – maybe you just aren’t giving them a chance to express it! When your partner is trying to make a point, give them a chance to get it all out. At the same time, if you feel like you’re being lectured, speak up! Don’t allow yourself to be left out of the conversation because enabling the other person to push you around is just as bad as doing the pushing. Keep it fair – plain and simple.

6. Stick To the Issue at Hand

You find yourself arguing about the workload at home, then you complain about the family gathering you arranged and cleaned up after and suddenly you’re whining about the in-laws. Whatever the situation might be, don’t let the issue at hand stray because it will never be resolved. You’ll end up arguing everything under the sun and once all your differences are out on the table, you’re too exhausted to solve them all. Stick to the topic and fix that first so it doesn’t become a recurring issue.

7. Remind the Other Person How You Feel About Them

If you don’t care about who you’re with, you’re probably not going to care enough to argue with them about anything. Indifference kills relationships. There are often moments when you can show your partner that you care and that you want to fix the problem. By remaining calm during an argument, you’ll find that the other person might be receptive to your touch or your embrace. How cheesy is it when you see someone on TV interrupt another mid-sentence for a kiss? You don’t have to do exactly that, but holding their hand or putting an arm around them during the less intense parts of a fight works. It shows that it’s not all about the fight, but how you feel. Sometimes telling the other person that you love him or her is all you need.

They do not love that do not show their love.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.

From Love’s Labour’s Lost, nothing could be more true than the preceding verse. True love is never smooth; it is full of imperfections and tinted with confusion. Love can definitely be a devil during those rough times when things aren’t going quite right or not as you expect it. The string of sweet moments are always peppered with frustration and pain. But we put up with it because love can be equally sweet.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.

Short but sweet, nothing drives the point home more than one of Shakespeare’s oft-quoted lines. On one side of the coin there is the not-so-sweet side of love and relationships, but the other side is equally intense. It is the other side that we live for and that we recognize as love. Sometimes, nothing lifts you up more than feeling loved or giving love. Who doesn’t wallow in that euphoric feeling of making up after a bout of bitterness?

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar
but never doubt thy love.

And of course, who can forget Hamlet? In these lines we see how love can be irrational and based entirely on faith. Forget what you know to be true and put your faith in love. How can love relationships ever work without trust? As cliche as it is, trust is truly the foundation of a solid relationship. When it comes to love, seeds of doubt almost always reach full bloom unless it is worked on and resolved.

Whether talking about the pure joy love can bring or the deep sorrow it sometimes inflicts, we’ll be keeping an open mind and growing together and learning to cultivate love and relationships that will last a lifetime.