Finding love again

Finding love again, following the end of a long-term relationship, can seem a daunting, if not impossible, task. It’s not only that we don’t know where to begin; there’s the thought of the love and stability we’ve lost and the hurt that comes with break-up. A part of us might well be wondering if we want to risk engaging so emotionally with another person again. Will we find anyone, dare we get our hopes up, and what if we fail? These are among the concerns we may have. Nevertheless, someone to love is out there - if we choose to find them.

Choosing the time

For the first weeks and months, sometimes even years, a new relationship will probably be the last thing on your mind. You’ll want to lick your wounds and go through what is actually a grieving process, where we mourn and come to terms with the loss. It may be time to go out with friends or to cocoon oneself with TV reruns and the curtains drawn. For more on this process, click through here.

On the other hand, while a serious relationship might be out of the question to begin with, many of us do look to sex as a short-term fix for a variety of issues. Rebound sex can be fine if it’s right for who we are and so long as we know exactly why we’re doing it. Equally, the people we have sex with also need to know the score - when we don’t want even the merest suspicion of fresh commitments – for their sake as well as our own peace of mind.

In a positive light, rebound sex can help remind us we can still attract other people who like us just because we look good and flirt well and seem like pretty good people. It can remind us sex is fun, that it doesn’t have to come as part of a whole relationship package, and that love and sex are different. It can help us to get a perspective, even when we know we’re only shelving our feelings for a little while we sort through the issues we need to deal with. It can kick-start a certain open-mindedness whereby when we meet new people, we are distracted from thinking of the love lost. If you tick all of those boxes, casual, rebound sex could be for you.

When you need to watch out for is when you start to view sex as a substitute for love and when you don’t really want to be doing it. Casual sex is not good when it is too needy and too desperate an attempt at avoidance. Then the few hours’ or minutes’ escapism is going to leave your feelings crashing down harder than ever. If you’re asking yourself whether it’s a good idea to go along with casual sex, the answer is probably no.

Building confidence, enjoying opportunities

Fairly obviously, you’re not quite as young as you were the last time you were single and looking forward to potential relationships. It may be that last time you’d never had a long-term relationship. If so, you would then have been open-minded about new lovers. Now you may not be able to help reading your experience of years of togetherness into any new person you meet - along with the risk of break-up. It may be you were considerably younger then and believe that while flirting and playing the scene was appropriate back then, it could look conspicuously foolish now. It may be that, generally, life has become less throwaway, less implicitly secure, and you feel you need to be careful now with how you manage your time and resources – including your emotional resources.

Some things may well never be the same again. If you don’t feel comfortable bopping away on the dance floor with a bunch of ‘kids’ who seem to be about half your age, then, quite simply, don’t. (Of course, if the dance floor is still fully your thing, then get to it!) Use your networks of friends instead. Throw a party – and tell your friends each to bring someone fit you don’t know. Heck, hold an audition in your head.

It’s possible as well that you might be comparing your looks – or rather your worries about your looks – now to your sense of how you were then. (Time passes: there’s wear and there’s tear.) Don’t. For starters, it’s pointless. In terms of maintenance and make-overs, you can do what you can do and no more. Beyond which, people can and do improve in so many ways with the passing of the years. While you may lose the soft-focus innocence, you achieve more and more in the way of knowledge, definition, confidence about who you are and what you want and what the shape of your life is and should be. Experience, in sex and in life as a whole, is an attractive quality. A lot of people would far rather be having sex with a partner who has learned sexual skills than with a blushing virgin. A lot of men prize women who push back and get on top. A lot of women want the man who lasts and really knows what to do with it. And with experience comes a touch of class.

Meet the kids

What, then, if there is a living legacy (or legacies) to your now past-tense relationship? If your kids are still kids, and you’re the one with custody, there’s a clear need to balance their needs and wishes with your own.

For starters, they’ll be hurting from the break-up like you are. Mummy and daddy and their togetherness constituted the bedrock of their lives. It’s scary when that seemingly permanent, taken-for-granted, togetherness breaks up. The human reference that was emotionally secure is exposed as insecure. There’s bewilderment. There’s the fear that if one parent can leave them, so may the other. There is, in addition, a tendency for the children to blame themselves for the break up. There’s a lot of careful explanation and emotional holding that needs to be done.

You can manage the story of the break-up to your children in a way that’s age-appropriate and help them to know that they are secure and that you and they are going to be okay. An issue arises when you’ve met a new person and you’re wondering how he or she and your children will get along.

Should you bring him or her home to meet them? Probably not while you know it’s just casual and no clear future has developed yet. It is difficult for children to accept the new situation where their parent is entering into a relationship with an outsider. Children, and this includes teenagers, can be unconsciously jealous and consciously ‘moral’. This ‘morality’ actually only expresses their own point of view, and their own view of mummy and daddy’s sex drive and emotional needs - but can nonetheless be absolutist. While your relationships are in their early days, there’s just no need to rock the boat in terms of their needs and even their prejudices.

What though, when there is that someone who might well be sticking around awhile? This needs careful management. Obviously, don’t spring him/her on your kids with the announcement this is now New Daddy/Mummy. You didn’t bring your children into this world for you to abuse them emotionally. That new person is your friend. Introduce them gradually. Perhaps you’d like to begin this with a lunch or dinner party with other friends present. Allow your children over time to put two and two together. It’s no great matter if they realise what’s up pretty much instantly. You can maintain the process as a staged one - and thereby give them time to get used to the idea before making a more open acknowledgement. Meanwhile you should stay being exactly the loving and supportive parent you have always been for them – and get your new friend to join in with activities and gradually establish the thought he or she might actually be likeable. That way, when it is time for the talk, even though it may not be instantly rosy, you’ll have done a lot to ease the way for your new partner’s acceptance.

Stepping out

Preparing yourself psychologically for love again is by far the most important step in putting a failed relationship behind you and – months or years later – coming around to contemplating another. A lot of this is about reclaiming and enjoying your independence. It’s about becoming ‘I’ and not ‘we’, doing things because you – single - enjoy them and not because it’s what you - plural - like to do. There’s a grieving process, sure, but then there comes a day when you wake up and realise that’s over and done with. That’s the time to start getting out there, to begin relishing the thought of love and sex. It’s the time to call your friends to arrange fresh lovers, then flirt their socks off. Summon your resources. Take a reality check on all your powers of seduction. Feel yourself as full of sexual possibilities and face your future.