Ouch! Para sa mga iniwanan!!!

Naturally, when someone leaves you, you feel as if you've been rejected. You have been. And it doesn't really matter what the reasons are, you're going to feel terrible. Broken-hearted.

The reason you feel so bad may actually have more to do with your future fantasies than with present day reality. When you lose someone, you aren't just losing that person for today, you're losing the fantasy of spending the rest of your life with that person.

You feel disoriented and generally awful because you've become used to having the other person in your life, to thinking about him or her, and futurizing about your future together.

You've become addicted to the pleasure you got from them.

We all want to control the source of our pleasure, and when that source is taken away, our first instinct is to try to get it back. Don't. Instead, take steps to get over the person as soon as possible. Like grieving, it's a process which you work through in stages. Follow the steps in your heart to make the process go as fast and as painlessly as possible.

Meanwhile, your friends will probably urge you to keep busy and get involved in new activities. It's good advice, but you may feel too miserable to follow it. I'm going to give you two reasons to try, and then give you a secret for doing it.

First, don't give your ex the satisfaction of hearing that you're moping around so he or she can say, "See, who'd want to be stuck with that sad sack?" Second, although it would be admittedly terrible timing, Mr. or Ms. Right could pop into your life right now, and you wouldn't want to be so busy carrying a torch for your ex that you'd miss the opportunity of a lifetime.