Are you ready for the moment when you need to first look upon the face of your ex, the first time you will do so after your breakup? Are you ready to see him/ her every time you go out with your friends, or go out to the theater or practically anywhere else for that matter? And what happens if you both have the same circle of friends and family, what then? Are you prepared to deal with all of this, not to mention the possibility that your ex might find a new love to take your place, or the fact that you will most likely have to fend off questions from well meaning people? Are you ready for all of this? This is what you have to ask yourself when you finally emerge from the self imposed cocoon of despair/ destruction/ introspection that you have put yourself through soon after your breakup.

So alright, I’m the first person who would advise you against wrapping yourself up in a cloak of misery and wallowing for weeks on end about your unhappy life. I’m more likely to advocate introspection or maybe even a complete cleansing of your mind of such negative thoughts. But the problem is that most of us are drawn to misery and despair like moths to a flame and we not only wallow in it, we tend to wrap it around us like a well loved cloak and refuse to let go of it. Putting aside the fact that you want your ex back together with you, and putting aside your doubts, insecurities and despair, there is something that you can do to make your life at least marginally easier. Unfortunately, for some people this might be the hardest task of all. If your relationship ended not on a sour note exactly, (or in other words, if you broke up for the normal reasons of falling out of love, being incompatible, or one of you not willing to commit), then you will have a midway chance of having had a amicable breakup. And this is a good thing. This means that even though you broke up, there aren't exactly hard feelings between you.

Well, of course there will be some hard feelings, after all you just broke up, but there’s a good chance that you can go talk to your ex and they won’t spit in your eye! If this is the case, you can look to smoothen things out between yourselves. This can make the transition easier for you to handle, especially if you don’t like to field questions from everybody. You can iron out little details and decide on things so that you can both handle the people issue without having any embarrassing moments creep in. This little session of yours, if you can wrangle it, will also be able to smooth out any rough edges you might both be feeling, and also show your ex that maybe there is still something left in your relationship after all. Think of this as your healing time, the time when you both need to step back and look over things, assess the situation as it were. If you play your cards right, you can even use this as the first building block to getting your ex back.

Who knows, your ex might even be looking to do the same thing. It doesn’t matter who left whom, if you’ve been together long enough to have feelings for each other, you can be sure that those feelings won’t go away easily just because you broke up. Sometimes, it takes losing someone to show us how precious that person is to us, and in some cases this can even be a blessing in disguise. If you feel this to be the case, if you feel that your ex is also making tentative forays to win you back, and if your initial “peace” meeting is going well, you need to look at closing the deal as soon as possible. Once people learn that there’s another sucker let loose on the singles market, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be people beating a path to their door – in this case, they will be beating down a path to the door of your ex. If you both want the same thing, if you both want to get back together again, and if you both still care for each other, then stake your claim now, before someone else jumps the queue and your perfect opportunity is lost for all time.

... continued in the book