3 Tips for Keeping Your Past Out of Your Present
In a perfect world, every breakup would be amicable, everyone would be patient and loving and wed all remain dear friends with our ex-lovers. Wed look back fondly at our romantic time together and they would get along with our new boyfriends and girlfriends and everything would be just swell.
Unfortunately, life doesnt work like that and most of us are painfully aware of this. Having said that, I do this it’s possible, most of the time, to be friends with your ex. Provided they aren’t impossibly immature and provided that breaking up was handled with maturity and honesty, I’ve never seen a reason otherwise. It can and does happen after a buffer period of limited contact.
Whether you remain friends or if you simply don’t care to ever see them again, it’s always a good idea to handle your past relationships with care when it comes to being involved in a new relationship. When you make peace with your past, you prevent it from muddling your present and putting up roadblocks to a happy future.
Here are three tips to be mindful of when wading through the complicated waters of past and present relationships.
Stop comparing
Our brains know that each relationship is unique, just as every person is unique. Logically, we know this. Even so, it’s a constant struggle for most of us to not compare our current partner to partners or situations of the past.
While there will probably be similarities, making any assumptions about what is happening right now, based on prior experiences, is a pretty terrible idea. Keep your eyes open for the red flags you know about, but give each unique relationship a chance to be its own thing. Comparison is a direct road to dissatisfaction and misunderstanding.
Learn when to let it in
There are times that you might have to let a bit of the past back in so that you’ll remember what mistakes you may have made in the past. And learn from them. Be careful though, you don’t want to beat yourself up over them, nor do you want any negative feelings associated with that particular relationship to overwhelm your current one.
Be compassionate
If youre friends with an ex and are incessantly chattering about the funny thing they said the other day or the French class the two of you have talked about taking, dont be surprised if this kind of stuff is met with unease and even suspicion by your current significant other. Granted, they should listen to and trust you but remember, they arent in your head.