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A good friend of mine - let’s call her Kate - has a problem that I’m not sure she’s aware of.
Right now, she’s in a relationship with a guy she claims to be in love with, who she swears even her mother loves so much that she’s imagining what her grandchildren will look like. They’ve been together for about three months and he’s already practically living at her flat.
Now, rewind back three and a half months. Kate’s sitting on the couch in front of me in tears with puffy eyes, wrapped up in a blanket, telling me how devastated she is that it’s actually over with Sam and how much she’ll never love anyone the way she loves him. They’ve been with each other for two years and have a house together - that they now have to sell.
Rewind back again, to just over two years before that. Yes, you guessed it. She’s in the middle of a messy break up with Mike, her high school sweetheart, who has confessed to cheating on her.
Now, Kate is not a needy, co-dependent person. She’s one of those girls who was outgoing at high school, quite sporty, had heaps of friends and went against the tide of students who left for University to start her own business.
Looking at her, she’s pretty, bubbly and confident, with no apparent insecurities. And yet, when I gently ask her the longest time she’s been single, she can’t recall a time period longer than two weeks between relationships since she was fifteen.
This isn’t a rare thing; I have numerous friends who bounce from relationship to relationship without much thought and I have often found myself wondering a few months into one myself, whether or not I should have given myself some more down time.
There are many reasons why taking time out is a healthy move at the end of a relationship. Consider these ones...
There’s a common saying that it takes half the length of your relationship to get over your ex partner. (So it would take a year to get over the break up of a two-year relationship.) If this is true, a couple of weeks between each person is not enough time to process, understand and heal from an emotional blow.
The faster we leap from one relationship to another, the less able we are to understand exactly what it is that we’re looking for. In the quick search for someone to replace the last person and help us recover from the heartache, we settle for someone who isn’t ideally suited to us. With time, once the initial buzz of infatuation wears off, we come to this conclusion and it ends… only to lead into another new relationship, which we use as a band-aid to cope with the loss of the old one. Do you see the cycle?
You often hear psychologists saying that your 20s are the most formative years of your life and the time where you begin to truly ‘know yourself’. How you can truly know yourself when you're always in a relationship with a guy?
Let’s be honest, we all like the security of being in a relationship. It feels good to have someone to cuddle up to, to tell about your day and to make you feel special. When we spend an evening with friends, it’s nice to have an ‘and partner’ to bring along with our bottle of wine. But are we taking enough time out between relationships to spend time with ourselves?
Before jumping into something with the next guy you are attracted to, I would suggest taking some time out for you. There’s no time limit on this – for some of us, a few months is more than enough but for others it might help to extend it out to a year or two.
Being alone can be a scary feeling after the security of a being in a relationship, but with a little time, it is replaced with a renewed sense of self-confidence. You begin to realise that not only do you not need a guy to feel good about yourself, but you actually like your own company and accept who you are without needing the constant approval of a partner.
The time to think allows you to work through any issues you might have from past relationships and ultimately helps you understand a little bit more about yourself and what you want so you (hopefully) don't make the same mistakes again.
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that I’m not sure she’s aware of. 
Now, rewind back three and a half months. Kate’s sitting on the couch in front of me in tears with puffy eyes, wrapped up in a blanket, telling me how devastated she is that it’s actually over with Sam and how much she’ll never love anyone the way she loves him. They’ve been with each other for two years and have a house together - that they now have to sell. 
Looking at her, she’s pretty, bubbly and confident, with no apparent insecurities. And yet, when I gently ask her the longest time she’s been single, she can’t recall a time period longer than two weeks between relationships since she was fifteen. 
are attracted to, I would suggest taking some time out for you. There’s no time limit on this – for some of us, a few months is more than enough but for others it might help to extend it out to a year or two.