The Reason to Rebound

They say that as one door closes, another opens. They also say that when you’ve split up with a partner, you should give yourself time to grieve its loss. I had to wonder, were ‘they’ perhaps generalising a little too much? Surely everything depends on individual circumstances.

One of my best friends, we’ll call him Simon, recently split with his partner. He didn’t feel the need to lock himself indoors for exactly half the duration of the relationship--that’s how long ‘they’ say it takes to get over someone properly--Simon felt that one and a half years would be too long a period to stay indoors. I had to agree.

On our first encounter since the split, a delve-in-deep conversation was likely to occur, but due to being in company, the content was monitored. Post-break-up discussion can be violent, and we understood that others in our lives not aware of each scenario that had taken place internally over the past three years, may be caused to run scared.

We did, however, discuss rebound, and the possibilities of introducing this powerful ingredient into the recipe of loss of relationship recovery. I, on one hand, love the concept of the rebound. If, like Simon and I, you are prone to returning to situations that are bad for you, the rebound can take you so far out of the said situation that not only do you completely forget its existence, you wonder what its relevance was in the first place.

On the other hand, the last time I rebounded, mere minutes after a VPB (Very Public Break-up), I somehow landed in a one-and-a-half year relationship. I still don’t know how it happened. I’m very aware that I didn’t chase this person, and so I think that the lack of chase perhaps has from time to time made me wonder how this person is here, opposite me, in life. It’s sort of like going out for drinks, becoming incredibly drunk, and finding yourself at home in bed. An ingredient is absent, and yet the final product tells you otherwise.

Either way, I entertained the idea of a rebound for Simon, but did not encourage it. Simon, in his mind, knew that there were other future relationship prospects outside of ‘the situation’ but his heart did not allow his mind to validate this thought. I got to thinking, “why, must the heart be honoured with such authority and opinion?” A rebound was the only way for the heart to be brought in sync with the mind, I concluded.

Three nights later, as Simon documented his weekend to me, sitting in the theatre during the interval of Julius Caesar, I realised that a new door had opened, but more importantly, that the one behind him had finally been closed.