Time heals all wounds, but you don’t have to sit around and wait.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying “time heals all wounds”. In many cases, this is completely true. But, it is often hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel during a post break up fog. If you’re anything like me, you just want to feel better immediately. (And often put off ending things with someone because you’re too scared of being vulnerable, hurting, and actually going through the process of healing).

Let me make one thing very clear: I am all for grieving. I think the grieving process is one of the most powerful processes to go through. Grief can remake you a new person and make you stronger than you’ve ever been. But I personally do not like wallowing. I think it is okay to wallow around for a while and feel sorry for yourself, but I personally don’t like feeling like life is happening to me, I like feeling like I am in control. So, generally, after a few days feeling like no one will ever love me again, I like to take control of my life again. You need to take responsibility for your own happiness. Remember that your worth is not determined by other people, but by yourself!

It’s true, time does heal most wounds. You slowly forget about your feelings for the other person, you just eventually stop caring. But, the wounds don’t heal without a little help from good old self improvement and distraction. If you sit around and wallow and wait to get over someone, you won’t just magically get over them, you’ve got to work at it. Be proactive, use your heartbreak as a tool for improving yourself, not as an excuse to fall apart at the seams and spend your life surrounded by dirty tissues and Uber Eats bags. (Unless that’s what you want, you do you.)

Here are five things you can do to be proactive and productive in your heartbreak:

1. Write
   Feel your feelings, write it out. If you aren’t a confident writer, try journalling. Writing about the things that you’re grateful for, or things that went well that day. Write about the things that are hurting you, and how they are making you feel. It can be really cathartic and will make you feel better. Start a blog, write a book, poetry, the options are endless! Pour your time and energy into being productive in a new project.
2. Read
   If you are having a bit of a day where you just want to escape the reality of your life, open a book. I highly recommend fantasy as you can’t run any further from your problems than into the pages of a fantasy novel. Read a biography of a celeb that you like, make yourself feel inspired. I recently purchased a book about how to deal with energy vampires and I literally cannot wait to pick it up. Reading improves your mind and can also give you so many things to talk about with other people.
3. Listen to podcasts
   It is good to be silent sometimes, and be alone with your thoughts. Really get to the crux of what you’re feeling. But also, sometimes your thoughts can be overwhelming and you just need to listen to people crap on about shit. They’re a lovely distraction, and good company on the way to work. There are some great dating and self improvement podcasts out there as well, as well as a plethora of true crime and comedy. Literally something for every mood you could possibly be in.
4. Start a workout regime
   Exercise releases endorphins, endorphins make you happy, HAPPY PEOPLE DON’T SHOOT THEIR HUSBANDS. You’ll feel better about yourself which will make you feel better in general. It also gives you something to do if you’re feeling mopey and missing the time you used to spend with your other person. It is also a productive way to channel any anger you might be feeling.
5. Surround yourself with friends and family
   These are the people who will always love you. Assuming you didn’t push them all aside when you were in a relationship (and you better not have done that!). Go out, dance, laugh, do things that YOU want to do! Be around people that you love and who love you. Spend time nurturing the more positive relationships in your life.

There are obviously many more things you can do to stem the bleeding of a broken heart, but these are my five favourites.

Comment down below if you have any insights 🙂

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The Stresses of Being Freshly Single

Being single for the first time in a long time is fucking tough. People can tell you all they like that things will work out, it’ll all be okay, etc. And they’re right, it will be. But in those first few weeks of being single it can be hard to see that. Your whole world has changed. If you were in a relationship for a really long time, there is always a period of discovering who you are as a person on your own, when for so long you were a part of a unit. In other posts, I will talk about the awesome things about being single, but real talk, when its fresh, it fucking sucks! There are many plights of being freshly single, and today I am going to talk about a few of them.

Finance

Going from a two income house to a one income house is INCREDIBLY stressful. I’m lucky that I know how to budget and I had savings, but I know how financial situations keep people in shitty relationships for so long. That’s why I strongly encourage friends of mine not to merge finances with their SO. Financial independence is so important. This somewhat links to my next point.

Moving house

When I split up with my ex, after a brief stint staying with my friend, I ended up staying in the house we built together for about 3 months. We eventually sold it and I came out of it with a pretty healthy profit, but I put all that money away. I was a single girl with a dog, and many landlords don’t look too favourably on people with pets. Um, I’m sorry but my giant lazy dog does a whole lot less damage than some children do!
I definitely did not want to spend my time in a house full of so many memories. It was easier for my ex who could move in with his parents, but for me I had to find someone to live with somewhere I could afford. Luckily, a friend from work was moving out at the same time as me and my dog and I moved in with him, and that worked out really well.
On top of all that, I had to move a 4 bedroom house full of stuff basically on my own. I know I am meant to be a strong independent woman who doesn’t need anyone, and I am like that now, but when I was freshly single I didn’t feel that way. It was so stressful and I felt like I had no one to turn to. I was lucky to have the help of my family and friends. These people will always be there for you, don’t take them for granted.

Shopping for One

If you have been in a couple for a long time, doing simple things like grocery shopping for one person can be super stressful. Some thoughts I had while grocery shopping in my first week of singledom:

• “What the fuck do I even like eating?”
• “How many bananas is too many bananas?”
• “Do I even like this brand of deodorant, or did I just buy it because he liked it?”

Especially if you have just had to move out and you have to buy all the basics and start new, shopping is so hard. Which leads into my next point.

Cooking for One

I still don’t have this one figured out. If I am cooking only for myself, I do one of two things:

• Cook a massive batch of food for an army and eat it for lunches across the course of the week, OR
• Eat single portions that come from the freezer.

Thank fuck for Uber Eats.

Going to Events Alone

Now this one can be fine for some people, in fact, I actually preferred going to events on my own. But the thing that really pissed me off was going to family events and people asking where my ex was, and when I told them we weren’t together anymore they would look at me so pityingly with those big eyes and be all, “Oh honey, are you okay?” YES. I AM FINE. I CHOSE THIS. IT IS WHAT I WANT.
Once, a few months after the break up when I was finally getting back into the swing of who I was and being myself, I was going to the first birthday of one of my friend’s babies. A married couple who were best friends with my ex were going to be at the party, and my friend told me that the wife had said to the husband, “be nice to her today, we have each other but she has had to come alone.” (That was very convoluted but I trust it made sense.) That really fucked me off to be honest. It was as if they thought I was brave for attending an event on my own. Smug couples can GTFO please. Like I have said previously, I don’t value my worth on whether or not I an in a relationship, but it really felt like these people were. Ok, this got salty. I’m sorry. The crux of the matter is that I am happy to go places alone, but I don’t like the way I get treated sometimes for being on my own.

I think I might stop this post here. There are many other things I could talk about, like self confidence and diving into dating apps but I want to save those for another post.
What are some other things about being freshly single that suck?

Let me know in the comments! xx

My Break Up

Lets flash back to 2018, year of the break ups. So many people I know ended serious relationships last year, myself included.

My ex and I got together in late 2013, towards the end of university and not long after he had ended a very toxic 4 year relationship where his ex was trying to force him down the aisle. Looking back, I think at the time he thought I was the answer to all of his problems, he was single, he liked me and he didn’t want to be alone so we got together. I wasn’t getting what I needed from the casual relationship I was in, he was interested in me so we got together. When I think about our relationship, there were A LOT of signs that it just wasn’t meant to be, but in typical me fashion, I ignored them.

I hope I’m not coming off sounding like it was a terrible relationship, because it was great for the most part. I think in the beginning I was just blinded by love and it took until the late stages of the relationship for us to realise we wanted very different things in life, and that we moved too fast in the beginning.

We moved in together when we had been together only about 4 months. Looking back I cringe when I think about this. That was WAY TOO SOON! We played house for a while before we settled into a routine that became our life. I started going out less and less, we started to put on weight, we became homebodies. Now this is fine for some people, but I am not generally that type of person, I love going out, I love socialising, I love trying new things, but I stopped doing most of the things I loved aside from reading (which was something I could do at home).

We got a dog, which livened things up a bit (and changed my life for the better, she is the love of my life). I was starting to feel trapped, and wanted to travel more, we went on a couple of overseas holidays which paused the trapped feeling for a while, but as the famous saying goes, you can sweep feelings under the rug but eventually you’ll trip over them.

The first feeling that things weren’t right anymore came in April 2016 when we attended my best friend’s wedding. For a long time, his family had been asking about marriage and kids, and at that time I still thought we were on the path of society’s expectations so I would always say “soon, probably in 5 years” or something similar. I always thought I wanted kids, but I was beginning to realise that maybe I only wanted them because I thought I had to have them. Anyway, back to the wedding. We had an amazing time dancing and drinking, but at one point in the evening he said something like “I can’t wait for our wedding”. I wasn’t even that drunk, but I went into the bathroom and threw up, then had a panic attack. I hoped it was just a freak coincidence, but any wedding talk or engagement parties we went to gave me intense anxiety. But, I had already been with this guy for 3 years, and I didn’t want that time to have been a waste of my life, so I brushed over it and ignored it.

Not long after this, we decided to build a house. Having a common goal and a distraction from my anxieties, things were great for a while. The house was a really fun project, and I was genuinely excited. We were building in a small town outside of the city but not far from our places of work, because when we got together we both had a love of the show Escape to the Country and had hoped to eventually make the tree change.

About a week before we moved into the new house, I was having crippling anxiety and crying myself to sleep every night. I could only describe this as cold feet, but I didn’t want the last year of building and 4 years of relationship to be a waste, so we made the move.

The first couple of months were lovely, I loved the town and our dog was so happy.

But we were basically glorified room mates. Not even glorified, we barely had sex at all.

One day, we were walking our dog in the morning and his temper snapped at something ridiculous, and he got up in my face and yelled at me in the street at 6am. This was the beginning of the end.

I started staying at work late so I wouldn’t have to be home with him, the thought of him touching me made me feel physically sick. I curled further and further into myself.

Eventually I rang my mother to talk about it. I didn’t ring her for a while about it because I honestly thought she would encourage me to stay with him, since we had been together so long. In the back of my mind, I think a part of the reason I stayed with him was because he was (at that time) my best chance at having kids, and I wanted my parents (who are a bit older) to have grandkids. And I expressed this to her.

But, my mums advice made me feel like a weight had been lifted, “Just because you have been with someone for a long time is not a good enough reason to stay with someone… I don’t care if you have kids, have 100 dogs if you want.” This made me feel lighter than I had in months. But I was still too scared to say goodbye.

After some deliberation, I decided to give it another chance. I gave him an ultimatum: get some counselling about your anger or I’m gone. I honestly think I almost wanted him not to get it so I could walk, but to his credit, he went. I don’t want anyone to think he was a bad guy, he wasn’t. He literally would do everything for me, but this in turn made me lose some independence.

For another couple of months, things were on the improve, but then I started feeling trapped again. Yes, we were living in a really cute town and on paper our life was lovely. But, the town was so far from my friends and family and I felt so isolated. I could barely go out without having to go and stay with someone in the city and having planned it weeks in advance, and it took me ages to drive anywhere to see anyone. My happiness was deteriorating quickly.

I started feeling like maybe if I went and did some solo travel or worked overseas for a while that would cure my feeling of entrapment. But, when I floated the idea in bed one night, the response was, “well, if you want to work overseas, when are we going to have kids?” This was the moment I realised that I didn’t want kids yet, for years at least if at all. That did not go down well. Finally, I realised that we just had different visions of the perfect life, and I had spent so long trying to fit into his version of a perfect life that I had forgotten what my own version looked like. It was like I had been caught in a haze and ignored my own desires for years.

We drifted apart quickly after that, arguing more than we ever had and barely speaking apart from that. One night when I went out and another guy caught my eye and I actually considered hooking up with him, I knew that it was time to call it quits. We argued again one night and we agreed to take a break, and at the end of that break we ended things for good. We sold the house, I got the dog and moved in with a friend, he moved back in with his parents.

Its’ been over a year now, and I will talk in another post about the plights of being freshly single and my process in getting to where I am today, but I can say that even though its been a process, I am more myself now than I have ever been.

Some things I learned through this experience:
– Just because you’ve been together a long time, doesn’t mean you have to stay together.
– Don’t have children just to please other people, you’re the one who has to raise them.
– It is better to be single and alone than in a relationship and miserable. Your happiness should not come from whether or not you are in a relationship! There are more important things in life!
– Don’t lose your own identity in a relationship.
– Don’t waste time if you’re not happy, you are stopping both people in the relationship from finding true happiness.

This was probably very rambly but oh well. That’s the story of what caused my break up. In long term relationships, it is rarely one instance that causes a break up, it is a myriad of things. I lost myself, and now I am finding myself again. I hope that if you are in a situation that you’re not happy with, you can find the strength to fix it or leave it. It will all work out for the best.

This is ME! (A single pringle, not Keala Settle)

Hello there, and welcome to my blog, The Single Pringle.

This is a blog for anyone who wishes to peruse it. I really want to explore the experience of people dating in the modern world.

Not only this, but I really just want people to be happy. I want them to realise their own strength and worth, and that it is better to be single than it is to be in an unsatisfying relationship. I want people to realise that you are strong enough to be on your own, and it is never too late to leave a relationship if you have done everything you can, and you’re still unhappy.

Here’s a bit of my story.

Get some popcorn, sit back and relax.

Or you know, just do whatever you were doing before, don’t let me tell you how to live your life. Realistically this post isn’t that long so you may not even need a snack.

I’ve been a serial monogamist since I was young. I was always in a relationship, and if I was on the way out of one, I normally had an idea of who I would go after next. It sounds terrible, I know, but when I was younger I really valued my worth by whether or not I was in a relationship, and I do not think I am alone in this.

I’ve had my fair share of heartbreak over the years, cheating, being blindsided, not feeling good enough. I felt that to be in a relationship meant that I was good enough for someone, so I must be good enough, right? And like I said, that’s how I valued my worth.

I have somewhat followed Taylor Swift’s dating life and patterns and relate to her songs on SO MANY LEVELS. Especially “The Man” from Lover. I will definitely be covering this topic in more detail.

I also fell into the pattern of thinking that I must have a relationship, get married, have kids and live the white picket fence lifestyle that has been so coveted for so many years. Alas, that is changing and with that, modern dating is evolving.

About half way though last year I was on that path, I had been in a pretty steady relationship for about 4.5 years. The relationship was everything I thought I wanted, but my life was a constant rut. He started pushing the kids issue, I wanted to travel, and the long and the short of it is that I realised I wanted more than the path society sets out for us at birth, he wanted to hold me down and I bailed.

I will go into this in another more in depth post, but basically, I was properly single for the first time in a long time. The last year and a half I have been exploring myself, learning who I am on my own and growing as a woman who is independent, financially and emotionally. I’ve also been exploring the world of modern dating, and I hope to share some insights about that. I’ve learned so much, and I feel like I give pretty decent advice (even though I might not always take my own advice).

I have had a lot of experience in dating and relationships, and I’d like to share my thoughts and opinions on that.

I want people to realise that whatever path you choose, its fine as long as it is right for you. I want to help people navigate the world of dating and to understand that being alone and happy is better than being in a relationship and miserable. And also realise that the relationship with yourself is the most important relationship of all.