Photograph: Picketphoto.net

“It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.”
—Henry Rollins

I read that quote the other week, on a day when I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about “him.” Actually, my thoughts turned to several hims (him sounds better than ex, doesn’t it?). Lately, masochistic memories have been running through my mind on an incessant loop, like that awful tune “This Is the Song That Never Ends.” It’s been more than a year since one ill-fated relationship ended, six months for another, and as I mulled them over for the 400th time, analyzing what went wrong and what I could have done differently, I wondered if these thoughts would ever go away.

One of my hims broke up with me in a terrible way—one of the worst, most vitriolic breakups of my life. But six months after we parted ways, we sat down and made amends, and I felt that I’d finally closed the door on that relationship. It doesn’t mean that I don’t still think about him—I do—but I now have a feeling of calm I didn’t have before. To bastardize inspirational author Eckhart Tolle, “Life hands us whatever breakups we need for the evolution of our consciousness.” Closure, acceptance and peace with an ex means we’ve learned what we needed to learn from that relationship.

While I was eventually able to gain some wisdom from that breakup, more often than not, lingering bad feelings mean we haven’t learned anything. It seems the most torturous relationships end abruptly—we quit cold turkey. You know, when things go from 60 to 0: One minute you’re best friends and the next, you’re more distant than strangers. You would think that distance would provide finality, but it’s impossible to move on if you wonder endlessly about how they’re doing and have no other way than Facebook of finding out. The harsh reality is that the love and memories don’t go away, even if the relationship does. So I posed this question on my blog: How the hell do you get over an ex?

“She had it all. How do I find closure for the future that we never had?” asks Morris, a 26-year-old graphic designer, who is having trouble getting an old girlfriend out of his head. “But why force yourself to forget? The harder we try, the worse it’ll get, and soon enough, you’ll realize you’re comparing everyone else to that person inch by inch, and it becomes an endless cycle of nostalgia.”

One reader, Cary, was insistent that the only way to truly get over an ex was the most clichéd: find love again. “When we do fall in love completely and without reservation, all the dust that still swirls around the old flames will settle and the air will clear.”

Or will it? One reader wrote, “I was just starting to date a guy in college and still not over my former crush, and I asked my mother, ‘Mom, is it wrong for me to be dating Brian when I’m still not over George?’ My mom, who has been happily married to my father for 35 years, replied, ‘Of course not. I’m still not over Wayne Jordan. But don’t ever tell your father I said that.’ ”