I realized recently that my attitude towards relationships has matured.

If you think back to your previous relationships in your teens, in your 20s, even into your 30s, many of them may have been wrought with drama. I recall a phrase that I often heard people use when talking about the end of a relationship: “I just want closure”.

What I’ve come to realize are a few golden rules (or guides if we don’t want to sound as strict about it) when it comes to transitioning out of a relationship.

ONLY YOU CAN GIVE YOURSELF CLOSURE

Talking to the other person won’t give you closure, only you, in your own mind, can decide that now is the time to close this chapter of your life and move on. Having your previous partner list the reasons that you weren’t right for each other can’t be helpful to get you to where you want to be.

At the end of a relationship, especially if you have spent an extensive amount of time together, sometimes you can’t trace it back to one reason why things started to unravel. It may have started when you realized the other person’s daily life habits are very different from your own. Or it was when you met the parents and you couldn’t make a connection with his mom. Or it could be because they love the outdoors and you are more of a hermit.

Who knows?

My favourite saying for this is “when 2 people want to be together, they just need one reason — love. When they want to be apart, there find many reasons why they aren’t right for each other.”

LETTING GO OF SOMEONE THAT IS NOT RIGHT FOR YOU IS FREEING YOURSELF

Whatever time and effort you’ve invested into a relationship is a sunk cost. While this perspective stems from my business background and may make relationships sound more like a transaction, at the end of it you need to see how dragging on a relationship that isn’t working for both parties (or even if one person wants out) can’t add value to anything in the long term.

Of course, you should spend the time talking through it with your partner to identify whether the misalignments in the relationship are a dealbreaker or challenges the fundamentals of what they believe and value. If it is, is there a way to navigate through it together? There is an art to having this conversation because you also need to be fully aware of when to end the conversation if things really aren’t working. You may reflect on this in hindsight and say, oh, maybe we ended our efforts too soon, we should have done this or that to try to correct our route. Sometimes, you just need to make a decision, and you should not fault yourself for having the courage to make a decision.

Sometimes people just want to do their own thing and there is nothing wrong with that. I compare this to when I travel with my friends and we split up to visit different spots we each want to go to. They want to visit the floating market and I want to go shop indoors at a mall; a relationship is likely more complex than this, but you get the idea. Would you resent your friend for not going shopping with you? Probably not. They just want to do their own thing, so let them go.

Letting go of someone that isn’t right for you, or vice versa if they think that you are not the right partner for them, is freeing yourself for, hopefully, bigger and better opportunities ahead.

YOU CAN PART ON UNDERSTANDING NOT ON HATE OR RESENTMENT

As you mature in your perspective towards relationships, and for the ones where you have invested the effort to really understand where the other person is coming from, you come to an enlightened realization that you CAN part ways with an in-depth understanding instead of ending things on bad terms with hate or resentment. This was probably my largest learning as I have matured and now I can start believing it when people say they parted on amicable terms.

What if you started believing that you are both great people, but just not the right person for each other? They could be a better partner for someone else, and so can you. To be honest this is something I learned as I grew my business when it became obvious that I had made a hiring mistake, placing a new hire in a role that was not right for them. When it was evident that they weren’t a fit, I quickly let them go, because I know that they would be great somewhere else, contributing to another company, instead of wasting their time here in a place where they weren’t happy.

The same is true in a relationship. Why keep someone in it when they don’t want to be there? Breaking it off before resentment sets in is a better decision than holding on.

GIVE YOURSELF SPACE TO REALLY GRIEVE THE END OF A RELATIONSHIP

Don’t dive headfirst into another relationship or as in popular movies, run off to another country for a breather. I’ve tried both of these methods and I can tell you from experience you end up carrying your relationship baggage straight into your next relationship.

The odd thing is, the best thing you could do for yourself is to face your fears, your perceived faults, and reflect on your role in the relationship. I say your ‘perceived faults’ because you shouldn’t beat yourself up over how a relationship went, or blame yourself for the fact that it ended. What you can do is reflect on what you could have done better, recognize if there were any points where you could have addressed issues earlier, or if any forks in the road were due to your past trauma.

If you need a good cry, cry.

If you need some retail therapy, change up your wardrobe (and donate old clothing).

If you need a few months or even a few years, it’s your life and you get to choose how you navigate your life. There’s no set formula, but at the end do the day, just do what makes you happy, which brings me to my next learning.

MAKE YOURSELF HAPPY BEFORE YOUR NEXT RELATIONSHIP

Before committing to another relationship, you want to make sure you are happy. I mean happy BY YOURSELF. Your happiness doesn’t depend on your friends or your partner or anyone else around you. Only YOU are capable of making yourself happy and it is no one else’s job to make you happy. They are not responsible for your happiness.

Since this is an important point, let us repeat that again in capital letters.

NO ONE ELSE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR HAPPINESS.

Only when you are happy alone, basking in your own contentment, should you enter into a new relationship. This way, you are able to give and contribute to the relationship, instead of the other more common way, where people enter into a relationship looking to take something.

This is probably the most important lesson because if you are fully happy and content with who you are, what you do, and everything that is part of your identity, you will have a much clearer picture of what you want; when you have this crystal clear picture of where you want to go, you will also figure out more easily who you want to bring with you as a partner. This is what I believe to be the basis of a healthy relationship.

I hope these lessons help you through any relationship struggles you may be going through. Remember that there is no right way. Remember that no one is at fault for having their own opinion (life is hard!) Most importantly, remember that you are FABULOUS and worthy of love.