Looking for Comfort in All the Wrong Places

Posted by Madeleine Harrington for BounceBack.com

I'd like to address the stage in a break up before the rebounding, the very initial emotions, the time somewhere between denial and potential temporary insanity. I'm talking about when you are at your most vulnerable, when the notion of moving on is a hardly formed blip on the horizon, and you will do practically anything in your power for a small piece of comfort.

Related: When Everyone on Facebook is Happier than You

I speak from personal experience, but I think that this segment of life, of breaking up, is universal, the sense of momentarily losing one's self, where grief knocks down intuition and sets a place for self destruction. This is the time, might I add, when we are capable of making an impressive number of mistakes. We yearn for comfort, for someone to understand us, so much so that we would jump into the embrace of the doorman, if he happened to be the first person who showed any hint of physical empathy.

The sexual encounters we have during this time are not conducted with the hope of finding a potential husband, but rather something equally unfathomable and even more intangible: finding our happiness, or if we're starting at entry level, our sanity.

So what happens when this strange comfort comes from a friend? My on-and-off boyfriend and I have broken up more times over the past two years than I can count on both hands, every time being just as damaging and strenuous as the former, and every time I am consistently guilty of falling back into this unstable and vulnerable woman I strive so hard not to be. The brunt of this "crazy me" is always taken out on my good friend, or at least that is one way of looking at it.

What I'm trying to say is every time I am upset about my break up, I sleep with someone who, on a better day, would play the role of friend. If I've learned anything from the way I've conducted my love life in the past year or so, it would be that this dynamic benefits no one, and at the end of the day, every character in the situation is much more wounded than before.

While my boyfriend and I have recently gotten much more serious, I rarely see my "friend" anymore, because the situation has become too fragile for everyone. It's hard to collect a conclusion from one's own personal experience, since I'm still working on it at this very moment, so it is difficult to decipher who started what, who is using who, and who I should be blaming.

But I'd like to think that I can tell when I'm happy and when I'm not, and walking away from that situation, the answer was certainly the latter. And it doesn't matter who was most culpable, since when it comes down to it, we all make wrong decisions every single day of our lives, because the fact is that every one of us is pretty crazy, yet no matter what has happened, we deserve to be happy.

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More articles on BounceBack.com:

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Is It Okay to Have a Relationship With Your Ex's Family?


Madeleine is a graduate of SUNY Purchase who believes that good writing starts with telling a story you feel uncomfortable talking about.