How to Cheer Up a Friend After a Breakup

Helping Your Friend in the Short Term

Listen. Immediately after a breakup—regardless of whether the relationship was six months or six years—your friend is likely to feel confused in addition to sadness. Your friend will likely want to start talking through this confusion almost immediately, and genuinely listening is one of the first and most meaningful steps you can take to show you care. No matter what reason someone gives us for breaking up, we’re always left with questions—“What could I have done differently?” or “Can I still fix this?” It’s perfectly logical for people to be confused about being rejected, especially if they don’t see the rejection coming.

Be patient. It’s always easier to maintain a friend through the good times, so it’s natural for hard times such as breakups to feel straining and frustrating on a friendship. Constantly remind yourself that it’s your job as a friend to be empathetic and involved even if it means listening to the same questions or stories repeatedly as your friend processes the new source of grief. Having patience through the process begins immediately and lasts the entire time. If it helps you, remind yourself of a similar time the friend helped you either through a breakup or maybe the loss of a job. Think objectively about how patient the friend was with you during your more difficult moments.

Help your friend feel understood. Obviously, your friend doesn’t want to feel as though he or she is talking to a wall, so make sure you engage with the stories and questions raised to help make the person feel understood. During your responses, try to avoid empty cliches and platitudes about breakups, though. The last thing your friend wants to hear is that there are other fish in the sea because it invalidates his or her current emotional state. In general, you should say things that both reassure your friend and acknowledge that his or her feelings are valid. Avoid telling the friend how to feel such as telling them to stay positive, and avoid immediately giving advice unless you are asked for it. For example, instead of telling a friend to try to be more positive, acknowledge that the situation isn’t fair. Now is not the time to give your friend advice. Just repeat back what they say to you to show them that you're listening. Validate their feelings by assuring them that it is okay to feel the way that they do.

Avoid bringing up your previous breakups. While you may feel tempted to compare your friend’s situation to a previous breakup of your own, you should avoid doing so in the immediate aftermath of the breakup. We may see this as relating to the person, but you may accidentally cross the line in the eyes of your grieving friend, making it seem like you’re stealing their thunder or making the situation about you. Give the friend time to make it about him or her.

Discourage your friend from contacting the ex. It’s pretty common for someone who has just been rejected to deny the finality of the situation. Your friend may be tempted in the early stages to reach out to the ex in ways that you know aren’t going to help. While you should discourage this course of action when the friend asks, don’t allow yourself to get too involved in the outcome. Your friend has likely made up his or her mind to contact the person by the time the topic comes up, so you cannot allow yourself to get frustrated if the person doesn’t follow your advice. A breakup awakens an irrational part of all of us. Forbidding your friend from contacting the ex is like a parent forbidding a teenager from doing something. Your friend may do it just to spite the voice of reason.

Distract your friend within reason. The emotional effects of a breakup represent a grieving process. It’s not only natural for people to grieve, but it’s also necessary if the person wants to move on in a healthy manner. You may be tempted to immediately begin getting your friend out of the house to bombard the person with distractions from the pain and sadness, but you must allow your friend to grieve instead of constantly making him or her ignore or forget the breakup. Due to this, only use distractions sparingly and within reason. While taking the friend out shopping or to a baseball game occasionally is a good break from the stress of the grieving process, attempting to subject the person constantly to outside stimuli will only prolong the process or possibly even lead the person to repress the emotions he or she needs to work through. Don't try to set your friend up on a date or push them out into the dating pool. Finding a new partner right away may not be the answer for them.

Helping Your Friend in the Long Term

Allow your friend to find his or her own path. Everyone grieves in a completely different manner and over a completely unique time period. Don’t focus on how long the grieving period should take based on the length of the relationship or anything else like that. Accept that your friend will need to find his or her own way and in his or her own time. This process is likely to continue testing your patience, but you simply cannot force the situation to click. It’ll click when the person is ready for it to.

Help with day-to-day details. Grief often feels all-encompassing in a way that may make your friend put off going grocery shopping or keeping up with other errands that we all hate to do even when we’re not getting over a breakup. While you shouldn’t mother your friend completely, offering to pick up some basic necessities or even help with the laundry can mean more to the person than you might think. By offering briefly to take something even so simple and mundane off your friend’s plate, you will help in a way most others won’t even offer.

Keep having fun together. While you should allow the friend to work through the pain and sadness in the short term, don’t feel as though you cannot have fun together in the weeks and months after the breakup. Especially in cases of long-term relationships and cohabitation, being single again can feel a bit to anyone as though they’ve lost part of themselves or their identity. If you and the friend had standing dinner plans on the same night every week or other common friend rituals, resume them as soon as the friend seems ready. These gestures can reestablish a sense of normalcy that helps the friend move on. Remember that getting over someone isn’t a perfectly linear process. Even after resuming fun routines, your friend will still have good and bad days. Resist the urge to push or cajole to get the process back on track. The friend is still seeking a safe, nonjudgmental place in your friendship. This may be the perfect time for you to try out a new adventure together. Sign up for a new experience, like a hot balloon ride, or leave town for the weekend.

Watch the person’s alcohol consumption. While not advisable, we all know it’s perfectly normal give in to a night or two of too much to drink after a breakup. However, as the immediate breakup turns into the long process of moving on, ensure that your friend doesn’t appear to be finding too much solace in drugs or alcohol. In addition to the risks of dependence, a healthy body will help lead to a healthy mind much more quickly, and no one sleeps, eats, or exercises enough when they party too often.

Focus on what helps your friend feel better. Though your friend should not avoid or repress the pain and sadness of the breakup, those feelings often find other outlets in the weeks and months that follow. Channeling negative emotions into positive activities is a process referred to as sublimation. Find out the activities your friend is using to sublimate the hurt feelings and encourage them. The person might be exercising more, taking up painting or an instrument, or even doubling down on working toward a promotion. Offer your friend plenty of positive reinforcement for the productive ways in which he or she has managed the situation.

Let the friend get angry. In most people’s grieving process, anger comes after the confusion, denial, and sadness involved with a breakup. Anger usually means your friend has accepted the rejection and moved past the immediate loss. While your friend obviously shouldn’t be driven to negative or violent action based on his or her anger, being mad alone is not a sign of backsliding. However, discourage your friend from thinking that all women or men are evil or fickle. Not everyone is evil when just one person hurts you.

Dissuade the person from rushing into another relationship. In the absence of being loved and needed by the ex, your friend may seek it in another, ill-advised relationship.. This is a terrible idea for the same reason that offering your friend too many distractions is a terrible idea—distraction versus dealing. Try to dissuade the person from jumping into another relationship if it looks that way, but remember to approach it the same way you approached the person trying to contact the ex. In other words, don’t get so invested that you’ll be upset if the person does it anyway, and don’t forbid it so harshly that you tempt them to do it to spite you.

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