Moving On
The Phantom Anniversary
When you first become a couple, you bask in your anniversaries: a week, a month, six months, a year since your first date, first kiss, first whatever you as a couple deem important. Ultimately, though, you settle on one special day. If you’re married, it’s generally your wedding day. Not married, it could be your first date, or the day you moved in together.Once the relationship ends, so do the anniversaries. Married 19 years and then divorced? You only had 19 anniversaries. With someone for a couple of years before breaking up? You only get two.
But time continues to pass and the anniversary dates still pile up. Children of divorce wistfully note what would have been their parents’ 25th or 50th. And the broken-hearted mark phantom anniversaries. "We had our first date two years ago today," they, fresh off a breakup, might whimper to a friend.
The best way to mark a phantom anniversary depends on where you are along the breakup scale, which of the phases of mourning you have attained. Still in denial? You might be tempted to make contact in some way. Angry? Perhaps a hang-up call. Depressed? Well-meaning friends advise getting drunk and having a good cry. Note: none of these is wise.The final stage of grief is acceptance, and once you’re there, that phantom anniversary takes on less meaning. It might never be just another day, but at least it can spark happy memories rather than despair. The trick is getting there.
Here are some suggestions for handling a painful phantom anniversary:
- Keep busy. Schedule meals with friends, an event you enjoy that your ex wouldn’t have liked, or even a couple of business meetings to prevent you from wallowing.
- Don’t reach out. Your former love is probably as aware of the date as you are. Don’t set yourself up for rejection by using the anniversary as a way of testing the waters or expecting to share a moment. If it's over, it’s over.
- Avoid the obvious. Stay away from places that meant a lot to you as a couple, especially the sites of your first date or wedding.
- Don’t reminisce. Love letters, emails, even calendar entries are great time-wasters for the lovelorn. It’s easy to get caught up reading these messages from the past and imagine yourself right back in your lover's arms. If that's not where you're going to end up, why torture yourself?
- Purge. If you haven’t removed reminders from your sight lines, now is a good time. (Actually, better to do this before an anniversary so you don’t end up breaking suggestion number 4). Take the gifts from your lover off your desk, the ticket stubs off your bulletin board, the photos off your MySpace page. Replace them so you don’t just see the emptiness.
- Don't self-medicate. Hoping the day passes in a blur is unhealthy. You're not trying to pretend the relationship never happened, to banish it from your mind. The healthier approach is to accept awareness when it rears its ugly head, then move on to the other things you're doing. Get drunk or stoned and you'll lose this kind of control over your own thoughts and actions.
- Plan for the next one. Modify your "Love List," that manifestation of who you want in your life. Sign up for a dating service. An anniversary is an appropriate time to think about what didn’t work for you last time around and plan to avoid it next time.
Moving on is a process, not a single moment. You can help your own process or bog it down by the way you approach it. Nothing heals like time, and you can spend it being miserable or eagerly anticipating your next chapter. A phantom anniversary is as good a time as any to mark the beginning of something new instead of the death of what once was.
By Laura
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