[Nic]

Don't have any "breaking up" experiences so "closure" is a foreign concept. Read something a friend of mine wrote that seems appropriate though.

Letting Go

"Letting go requires you to respect and love yourself enough to deny another person continued access to you when that access causes you to respect or love yourself less than you should.

Letting go requires that you accept the other person exactly as they are in that moment. Accept that they are who, what, and where they should be and that their life is about them, not about you.

Letting go requires that you come to terms with your different levels of apology. It's inevitable that you won't get the relief you're hoping for if/when either of you apologizes. Apology isn't just a set of words. It's a process that develops into something over time. It can't happen in any timeframe but its own.

Letting go requires living in the world that exists rather than in the world you wish existed. Don't allow false hope to lure you into a fantasy world, especially if you have experienced the hope-loss-hope cycle with that person before. Don't invent a fictional future where the other person will magically turn back into the person you met and fell in love with if some set of parameters changes. Live in the moment you have and stay away from the past and the future. The past is over and the future isn't any of your business yet.

Letting go requires being honest, no matter how ugly that can get. Don't spend time idealizing. Human beings aren't fantasy creatures. If physical or psychological harm is being done to you, walk away and stay away. Period. Don't go back thinking that you can love the problem away. You can't sweep something huge like that under a mental rug and think it won't grow into something bigger there in the dark.

Letting go requires acknowledging that your experiences, both during and at the end of the relationship, were different. Neither of you can move on if you're busy holding the door open between you for the purpose of sustaining an ongoing round of arguments or grief sharing.

Most importantly, letting go requires believing that no matter how intolerable things might feel in the moment, it's just a moment. Life goes on. You can't get caught up in the fact that it's going to go on without the person you love(d). You can't get caught up in how quickly or slowly they move on compared to you. Things are just going to go on differently, that's all. Not badly. Just differently. It takes some getting used to but, chances are, you've survived harder things."