Feeling alone and dealing with it when no one is available for you...

Ending a relationship usually leaves a large him-shaped gap in our lives. As you've found out, interacting with friends is a good way to help fill that gap, even if sometimes they're not available. How else might you fill the gap?

* Reach out. Make some new friends and acquaintances.
* Stay busy. Take up a new hobby, join a new club, go to the gym, volunteer.
* Shake things up. I've found that I can help get over mild dips of depression by changing a few things around. Take another way to work or school. Have something completely different for lunch. If you usually listen to rock, try jazz or classical. If you usually read fiction, try some non-fiction. If you usually watch horror films, try an old comedy or documentary.

If none of these seems to be helping, you may be nudging into depression. The best move then is to go see your doctor, or perhaps look into seeing a therapist.

Lex

 

Okay, here's the thing, two weeks is nothing. After a two-year relationship you can reasonably expect to take months to recover. Especially if this is your first, or even an early, relationship. So the fact that you haven't started to get better isn't all that surprising or disturbing.

That said, the end of any relationship brings with it an increased risk of depression, and that's something you need to watch. Make sure you're engaging in good self-care, and that you have strong support from your friends and family.

I push a theory from time-to-time here that a relationship serves three purposes, two of which can be met by friends and family: emotional affection, physical affection, and sexual affection. The first is fairly simple, there is a strong friend- and familylike aspect to any romantic relationship. The main problem is that people (especially men) are usually much closer to their romantic partners, more able to open up to them, more able to trust them, spend far more time with them, than they do with friends or family. But it is entirely possible to build a very close and emotionally affectionate relationship with a friend or family member.

Physical affection often gets overlooked, but it's significant. Most people have a strong need to be touched, far stronger than their sex drive. A need to cuddle, to feel someone else's hand on their body, to be held. Depending on where you live, the subculture to which you belong, and your gender, the extent to which it is acceptable to receive physical affection from non-romantic partners varies. Different parts of the world are more accepting than others (I imagine it's a lot easier here on the West Coast than it is in the Midwest or East Coast), different subcultures are more accepting than others (drama nerd subculture tends to be more accepting than business professional subculture), and women can more easily receive and give physical affection than men can without it being perceived as sexual.

Sexual affection can, in theory, be received from friends, but that rarely seems to work out in practice. That is probably best pursued in relationships but, for most people, it is probably the least important of the three forms of affection.