What Should You Do After a Breakup?
Published May 11, 2026 on serval
What should you do after a breakup? It’s a question that everyone wants to ask, but one that rarely leaves our mouths. Surely, it’s easier to type, so we search Google and Reddit, and soon our social media feeds become flooded with sentimental text posts tinged with motivational hope. We click ‘Add to Cart’ on self-help books that we couldn’t bring ourselves to a bookstore for. We search for answers in playlists and friends, mental health amateurs and experts. This question is one only brought up in the pitfalls of uncertainty, instability, and change.
Google says that you should try the “333 method”: 3 days of intense emotional release, 3 weeks of active reflection, and 3 months of intentional rebuilding. Reddit says, “Try going for walks, doing audio journals, being around close friends, and crying it out.” The self-help books get tucked away on a shelf, hopefully after they get read, but not always. Our friends give us mixed advice derived from their first or last heartbreak. The mental health amateurs and experts give heavy-handed guidelines of Do and Don’t. The songs that weren’t sad before play on repeat through our headphones and our car speakers as we walk or drive, trying to ignore the emptiness beside us, where that person used to be.
We have been made to feel like there are right ways and wrong ways to be sad, and more particularly, there are right and wrong ways to break up. You should get out of the house, or you should stay home to reflect. You should talk to your friends, but you shouldn’t talk about it for too long. You should go for a walk, or you should go back to therapy. You should call them, or you should block their number. You should start seeing someone new, or you should never date again. You should delete every photo that you have of them, or you should look through every photo and let yourself be sad. If there were a one-size-fits-all road map for breaking up, we would probably be a lot happier to do it.
Someone asked me the question:
What should you do after a breakup?
My answer was: Whatever you want.
My answer was: Whatever you want.
It seems too simple to be helpful, but this is the advice I have given to myself every time that a connection ceases. When exiting a relationship, via great escape or leaving claw marks, one of the biggest changes is that you are no longer expected to do or be something for someone else. Nobody is relying on you. Yes, that is not always what we want, but if you are willing to see that as a positive thing, it can transform the way that you end your relationships, be it romantic or a friendship. You are leaving a version of yourself behind and receiving a new kind of freedom to do anything that you want in return.
My first breakup was a devastating one. I thought that surely I was going to die without this person, and in the weeks, months, and years after, I recognized just how many things I would not have gotten to do had I still been in the relationship. He hated going out, so we rarely did. In the months after we broke up, I never said no to dinner with my friends or even acquaintances. I went to concerts, parties, the movies, sports games, karaoke bars, strip clubs, farmers’ markets, events, and museums. Of course, most of the time I wished that he were there with me, until I remembered that he wouldn’t be. We would have argued about me going, and I would have stayed home in hopes of just being with him. The more that I realized this, the more that I valued the re-established freedom in going wherever I wanted, and the more I enjoyed the reality of being there alone. I still missed him, I still listened to sad songs and thought of him, I still came home from places and cried. I looked through old photos, and I wished things could have been different, until I remembered that they were, and this new life began to outweigh my old one.
My next breakup didn’t fit the same mold. It wasn’t devastating; only hard and necessary. Severance was handled between us in a much different way than I was previously used to, so any breakup rules that I had made for myself were useless here. That is when I truly embraced the “Whatever you want” mentality. Two months after we broke up, he invited me to come with him to Miami. It was a trip that we had already planned and one that we were both looking forward to. All of my friends argued that I couldn’t go, because it was too soon and too messy, “backsliding” is what they called it… But if I wanted someone to tell me “You can’t go to Miami,” I would still be in my first relationship. I knew how I felt about him and our breakup; I knew that I wanted to go, so I did. Looking back, it was an unorthodox thing to do, but it was the right thing for me to do, and I have never once regretted it.
It’s not to say that I’m advising everyone go to Miami with their most recent ex… But it is human nature to look to others to guide your own thoughts and actions. When true step-by-step advice isn’t available, here’s what I did sometimes feels like the next best thing. Each time that one of my girlfriends goes through a breakup or an impending breakup, we all relish stories that we couldn’t tell before. We admit to the things that we did, what we wished we did, and what we were once too ashamed to admit was done to us. When we beat the dead horse that is our past relationships, it’s almost always triggered by a familiar feeling or in an effort to reassure the collective and unavoidable experience that is heartbreak. It doesn’t matter if it is years past when we viscerally felt crushed by a crush or emotionally battered by a boyfriend, we can always meet each other on the astral plane of “When ____ and I broke up, I ____.” And whatever we fill that blank with is never wrong.
In between my two biggest romantic breakups, I had a profound friendship breakup after I thoughtfully ceased contact with my best friend of seven years. A friend breakup is an entirely different territory from a romantic breakup. It’s a different companionship to miss; it’s a different bond to mourn, but the ‘whatever you want’ advice still reigns supreme. There were people that my best friend didn’t like, whom I didn’t like in solidarity, and once apart, I realized that wasn’t an opinion of my own. I arrived at parties without my permanent plus one, and once I got past the discomfort of arriving alone, I realized how much more room I had in my life to make new plus ones. I wore things my best friend would have remarked as unwearable. I dated people my best friend would have deemed undateable. Once we were living entirely separate lives, no longer speaking every day and sharing our every opinion, I came to recognize how much of what I wanted differed from what my best friend wanted, and the many ways that we had constantly tried to change each other. I very happily became more of the person that I wanted to be and less of the person that my best friend wished I was.
The truth is that in every breakup, you have left each other’s lives for a reason. If you were supposed to be with this person, you would be. If it fit perfectly and required minimal compromise and discomfort, if both of you were happy and certain, and this relationship was prospering, it probably wouldn’t be ending. Certainly, there are things that you didn’t like about them, and there are things that they didn’t like about you. There are things that one or both of you felt that you couldn’t have while in your partnership. Over time, you innately felt less like you, because you are not just you in your relationships; you are you with someone else, depending, opinionating, and imparting on you.
I have always found it ironic that the person I am when someone meets me and falls in love with me is not the person that I will always be while we are in each other’s lives. The only thing in life that is certain, besides death and taxes, is change. Accepting connection, in partnership, love, and friendship, will change you. Experiencing life with another person inevitably shapes you to become more this, more that, and ultimately, less of the person that you were when you were chosen and chose them back. For better or for worse, you will both be different. You might outgrow each other or the person that you were when you arrived, and you might come out on the other side of it as someone that you have not yet met. I believe that the answer to “What should you do after a breakup?” is whatever you want, because re-establishing your own wants is the most effective way to remember who you were, while becoming acquainted with who you are now.