Glorifying the Rebound is Only Going to Hurt You

On finding health and confidence post-breakup

Source: @mccutcheon on Pexels.

In the immediate aftermath of a break-up exists a place that nobody likes to talk about. It’s usually a dark place, riddled with uncertainties and toxic behavior we’re never too proud of. With all of this known, we enter them out of a nature within ourselves we can’t seem to control or make sense out of. We know they’re bad, yet, oftentimes, we’ll find justification in the distraction as if it’s a form of a secret healing process nobody can question.

You’re eager to render bad thoughts and strange feelings out of your mind and body. As human beings, we will look for anything to make it happen.

We distract ourselves in work, or in mindless repetition, or, sometimes, in bad habits.

In the array of those habits exists the rebound.

Here is what Elite Daily says about the value of a rebound:

A rebound has positive benefits because it boosts your confidence and replaces the void from the previous relationship.

The article then goes on to summarize that a rebound is, in essence, an upgrade from a previous relationship.

That leaves us with this fundamental question:

If a rebound is an upgrade from a previous relationship, then what does a successful relationship look like?

The backbone of this entire line of thinking exists in the premise that we require distractions and deviations from awful thoughts about ourselves through the presence and interaction of other human beings.

This is a farce.

It is a protection against dealing with the relationship you were just in. Even then, it’s very bad protection because it is deviating you from thinking about why the relationship was fundamentally broken or why you found yourself in that position to begin with.

There are many strange studies on things like confidence, maturity, and mental health. Yet there is no real quantifiable metric on which to gauge any of these things.