Ivy Edward’s Break-up Survival Tips

By Brionee Fenlon
Related Categories: With Love Extracts, With Love Home Page, With Love News, With Love Posts

If you missed them over the past few weeks, we’ve put together a full blog piece featuring all 10 of the Break-up Survivial Tips by Ivy Edwards – written by Ivy’s author and creator Hannah Tovey.

1) Drink wine. It’s not like it’s going to run out. If you drink champagne, drink it fast, before the bubbles die. You want the fizz to go straight to your head – deal with the consequences later. Treat yourself to Waitrose-branded prosecco. You deserve it. When drinking wine, go for something a bit higher-end than Echo Falls, you’ll feel much better for it in the morning. Don’t mix colours, you know how that ends up.

 

2) Block them. You’ll go on Instagram thinking that it’s fine to check their feed and see all the fun things they’ve been up to since they ripped your heart out of your chest. But without even knowing it, you’ll be two years deep and you’ll accidentally ‘like’ one of their photos. What will you do then? You’ll crawl into a deep, dark hole of shame. A Shame Hole, if you will, one that you’ll spend the next forty-eight hours trying to scramble out of. Don’t do this to yourself – block them.

 

3) Get rid of everything. You’ll be tempted to keep the odd Valentine’s Day card, polaroid photo, or maybe that ridiculous, overpriced cartoon drawing you got of the two of you sitting in that square in Florence, on your last holiday together. You’ll have forgotten that you argued before you sat down, or that you screamed, ‘Why do we always have to go where you want to go!?!’ at them because they made you spend yet another two hours in a sports bar just to watch their favourite, mediocre, regional rugby team. No, all you remember is that moment when the little Italian woman handed you your drawing, and you both laughed and commented on how cute you looked. You didn’t look cute, you looked stupid. So yes, throw everything away. Tear it up into hundreds of tiny pieces. Then go to a forest or nearby park that doesn’t have strict fire rules and set everything alight. Then, go for a wine.

 

4) Have sex. Getting under – or over, whatever your preference – someone is integral to the healing process. Ideally, this person would be someone removed from your friendship group, so that you don’t have to endure any awkward social encounters further down the line. Also, they would be a good kisser, but I appreciate that it’s hard to find that information out about a person until you’ve kissed them. Remember that even though you’re desperate and drunk, you can still make positive choices. So, don’t rebound with your friend’s brother, or mother, or co-worker, don’t convince yourself they’re the one and above all, don’t forget to use protection.

 

5) Go ‘out out’. Grab a few select friends and go get bladdered. Go somewhere where they play ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ all year round, and the last song of the night is always Take That’s ‘Never Forget.’ Buy cheap tequila shots, partake in some awful dancing, and make a new friend in the bathroom. Tell this new friend your life story, share a few tears, swap numbers. Never, ever use said number.

 

6) Write hate mail. Write down every little shitty thing they have ever done. Maybe mention that it’s annoying that they don’t know how to use a washing machine, or that they’re approaching their thirties and still call their mother Mummy. Maybe that they think it’s acceptable for men under the age of sixty to wear red trousers, or that they hardly ever go home to see your parents with you, but make you feel obligated to go see theirs all the time (it isn’t your fault Mummy is unhappy, is it?) Maybe you’d have preferred them to go down on your more? (Of course, you’d have preferred this.) Write it all down and then send it – to yourself. Do not send it to them.

 

7) Blockbusters are your friend. You know who isn’t your friend? Richard Curtis. You’ll be sitting there enjoying all the posh accents and romance; Hugh Grant will be lulling you into a false sense of security, and then, without even knowing it, you’re sobbing your guts out, snot streaming down your nose, wondering if you’ll ever meet anyone ever again. Ditto, any track by Adele, and be wary of YouTube – there’s too many small animals. Stick to blockbusters. Terminator is an excellent shout. Linda Hamilton’s acting will make you feel much, much better about your own failures.

 

8) Channel J Lo. Your confidence is at rock bottom, and whilst the odd night out is going to help get some juice back in you, all that neat liquor won’t be good for you in the long term. If you want to channel J Lo, you need to do the boring stuff like eat well, read and exercise. Do this for you, not your ex. They don’t give a shit.

 

9) Don’t overthink. You’ll be coming home from a night out, kebab in hand, thinking about all the things you could’ve done differently. Maybe you could’ve shown more interest in their work, or their friends, or that dog they lost when they were eight but still bring up every other week. Maybe you could’ve been sexier, funnier, smarter, had less hair around your nipples, not vomited in front of them after a big night out, not let them see you wee, not worn underwear with holes in them. But that’s not the point. You did everything you could, and they still didn’t love you. That’s on them, not you.

 

10) Stop being a dick to yourself. You’ll wake up feeling like the world has ended, that you’ll die alone. You’ll check your phone – no, they haven’t called. You’ll get mad at yourself for checking your phone. You’ll tell yourself that today will be different, that you won’t spend every minute looking down at the screen, waiting to see if they’ve contacted you. They won’t be contacting you. You’ll cry, and then you’ll get mad at yourself for not being able to last a minute of the day without crying. STOP THIS. You’re doing the best you can and that’s much better than you think.

 

 

Copyright Hannah Tovey 2019