One of the certainties of life is that along the way you will have to let go of some people, places and things, even when you don’t want to. Letting go requires releasing emotional attachment and moving on in your life.

One of the hardest times to let go is when a relationship ends prematurely. When you’re up against someone who lets you go first, it seems unfair and particularly cruel. You will ask yourself over and over again why is this happening to me? What did I do wrong?

No matter what the circumstances of your breakup are, no matter who is “at fault,” in the end you are going to have to let go and move on with your life. This will feel like a little death, and in truth, it is. The relationship has died, taking with it all the good memories of the past and dreams for the future.

You need to give yourself time to die, to allow yourself to feel the pain of loss. It is important that you go through this time without judging yourself weak or feeling sorry for yourself. If you put off this very important step, you may not be able to let it go for a long time. If you push down and avoid the pain you feel, it will only fester inside of you. It will shake your confidence and undermine your self-esteem. It will drain your energy and can manifest in your body as illness or fatigue.

The practical part of you now needs a voice to balance the emotional. When you have allowed the tears to flow and given yourself time to feel the loss, you need to go deep within yourself and find out what you can learn from your experience. You don’t want the end of the relationship to define the time you shared, it’s important to recognize the positive and hold on to it.

It’s particularly hard to believe that they don’t love you the same way anymore, because you still love them. But if they have told you that it is over, it is better that you take them at their word. It’s time to fully accept that his feelings for you have changed. It is useless to try to reason or argue: you cannot make someone love you. For reasons known or unknown, the man you love has decided that he no longer wants to be with you. That’s painful to accept, but in the end it’s more painful to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you.

You may long for the early days of the relationship when everything felt right and you were both very much in love. You may actually wish you could go back in time and relive that time again. But if it did, it would inevitably end up again at this point. There is no escaping the way things have played out.

There is only one surefire way to ease the pain of a breakup: acceptance. The pain you feel is caused by the part of you that doesn’t want to let go, that doesn’t want to believe that things have changed. This part of you makes you obsessively think about him as if you could somehow bring him back to you. This will only prolong your suffering.

You think you have the power to get him back, but the only power you have is over yourself and how you feel. Being able to gracefully let go and accept what has happened will be a huge relief.

As hard as it is, you have to take your eyes off of him and recommit to your life, to make yourself a priority. The only constant in your life is you, and you are the one thing that you will never have to let go of.