>You can absolutely kill the past, in fact it's a necessary thing in the modern world. The trauma doesn't come from the act of killing it, the trauma is generated by the wrong lifestyle and cultural decisions that led to you developing the weakness in the first place.
While destroying your past with a woman is traumatizing, it beats being cuckholded. After all, what are you supposed to do?
"Work through the breakup?"
"Keep in touch?"
"Stay friends after?"
Yeah that sounds great, I'd love to "keep texting" and dance around this stupid little ambiguous zone we're both stuck in because neither of us had the will to just end it cleanly and move on. I would LOVE to taper off your presence in my life like some morphine addict suckling at the metal tube in my gay little hamster cage.
Maybe the wistful melancholy will be a nice consolation prize while I deal with the inevitability of you getting dined, fucked, and situationshipped by a rebound. It's okay though I'll just speedrun fucking a fat chick on Hinge and we'll be "even" as we say happy birthday and wish each other Merry Christmas for the next two years before we stop giving a shit.
No thank you. I believe in the Scorched Earth Policy. I believe in wiping out everything the moment it's over, it's the only thing that has the slightest semblance of dignity. What was there to begin with? A ring on the finger? A child, a family?
If so, good luck to you, you have bigger problems than what a tweet could solve for you. But if not, who fucking cares? Boo hoo you lost several years of your life, next time don't fuck up, you get at most 3 of these before it's over for you and you're just a glorified temporal prostitute playing roulette with your lineage.
Oh you share a home?
Kick em out or leave.
Buh buh buh but what about our kitty and our pupper?
Put em in the fucking pound.
Don Draper's problem wasn't that he was "running from his past" it was that he was a degenerate who couldn't stop himself from compulsively fucking strangers and he didn't dick his wife down hard enough to suppress her mental illnesses.
You can absolutely kill the past, in fact it's a necessary thing in the modern world. The trauma doesn't come from the act of killing it, the trauma is generated by the wrong lifestyle and cultural decisions that led to you developing the weakness in the first place.
The childhood is the first mistake. The childhood isn't real, it's a concept invented in the late 18th century, a product of excess and luxurious experimentation. The idea that children need to spend a decade of their waking memory having little to no responsibility, role or purpose beyond education and play has done irreparable damage to society. It trains human beings at their most mental pliable stages of life to expect that all of life should be one of provision, ease, and idle preoccupation. It conditions you to experience constant increasing disappointment with growing older.
The second mistake is "love." While love is real, true, and deeply important to the human condition, what you consider to be love is a series of delusions fostered by media and a sickened society to make you as sensitive and turbulent as possible. Of the factors that decide who you develop a relationship with, love is the least important. It's supposed to be a consequence of familiarity and proximity developed over time with trust and experience. Yet, the modern worldview would have you believe it's the metric by which all relationships should occur.
The third mistake is the self. This is not the most vividly harmful consequence but its pervasiveness is near universal. The idea of who "you" are is at odds with the reality. You realistically are not one single individual but rather a throbbing mass of consciousnesses competing within a consensus to steer your physical body.
You are the sandwich you ate, the sleep you got last night, the movie you just watched. You're a series of coin flips between how much cardio you get and when's the last time you orgasmed. You're shame, pride, accomplishment, and failure all clawing to try and mantle the forefront of mental preoccupation. You're the weather, you're the moon, you're the magnetic fields, you're the air pressure around you.
The "You" that you were in childhood no longer exists. Aging is the process of shedding your old skins as you gradually adopt new one. Your current form of consciousness and its amalgamated configuration is a conquer who built a home on the corpse of what it usurped.
We used to have rituals built into our tribes and societies to represent when the old you had to die and make way for the adult you. We do this because it's important to put away the childish things so that you may think as a man and not as a child.
Is it right or good to live this way? Maybe not. Children have a spark of divinity that adults have long lost. To play and think their way sometimes endeavors discoveries that change everything. Perhaps the consequencelessness and appetite for pure emotional indulgence is the leftover residue from the spirit world they entered our world from. A place where nothing really gets to die so all there is becomes indistinguishable from play and games. Demons that exist to make you cry, angels that work to make you smile, nothing more beyond that forever.
But we do not live in their world. They must live in the material world and the material world is one of permanently material consequences. We age, weather, and decay. We huddle for warmth and we scramble to survive. Everything we do as human beings is struggling against the violent apathetic chaos of the nature world as we steadily carve a path through the hostility. And we harm ourselves in the process, making thoughtful and thoughtless decisions as to which is the lesser evil.
Marriage and monogamy is not inherently natural to the primate existence. Were we to embrace what felt natural, we'd be hooting and hollering, dancing and beating each other, and likely a few would breed the many while betas hovered around the edges of the pack pilferraping what few squaws they could ensconce away for a moment.
We built a cage of suffering through the preciousness of our partners because we felt it's better to value the one and only person in your life you want to be with forever.
We did this because men feel better knowing the mother of their children has never known another.
We did this because people feel more strongly about caring for their own progeny than someone else's.
We did this because God made exactly two of us, one for the other, and the math always seems to keep that ratio constant.
In working around those desires, we created something made out of glass that cuts you when it's shattered. The one woman for her one man, and if anything should happen to her it's the worst feeling in the world. It's basically death but worsened by the ambivalence that a real death would crush and wipe away.
A constant reminder that your "one woman" is no longer yours and you have to wander around the world knowing she's gone forever and even if you took her back (which is always a mistake), that version of her is dead forever.
So the same solutions we created to lessen the trauma of a long gone childhood are the ones we apply to ourselves. We rip the mask and burn it. That version of them is dead, that version of us is dead. We mourn it, we move on.
If I don't live in the society that chooses my wife for me as a teenager and guarantees at gunpoint that she's a fitting mother for our future children, then being able to kill the past and start over callously is the only thing standing in between you and a reality where men do whatever it takes to make that world real.
To oecolamp's point, I think he's concluding something more reasonable about taking great care in entering a relationship and being completely dedicated to making it turn into a marriage, not some childish idea that nobody should ever break up.
This could and should be fostered by reducing the connotations of courtship from the inflation they've gone through in the past century. Here's how some of this should work:
- You are not allowed to "love" anyone but your wife. You "fancy" someone until you marry them.
- Women must be virgins before marriage.
- If a woman has had sex before marriage, she may either become a prostitute or a nun.
- Both sets of parents consent to a marriage and if either doesn't, the couple forgoes family support if they should choose to elope.
- The couple cannot live together until marriage (this one is huge btw)
- Courtship has a maximum time limit of a year, if a man isn't "ready" he shouldn't be courting anyone
Of course doing all this is impractical and larping your way through it with today's retinue of total used up whores is a humiliation ritual. You won't get any of this and you shouldn't get this until after a great cataclysm. It's just something to remember for whichever of you make it through the ashes to tell your grandchildren when choice finally returns to civilization.
For young men today, please understand this:
There is no reason for you to ever be talking to a woman you've been involved with after your relationship ends. If you're "texting" your ex you are a raped cuckhold who insists on humiliating yourself over false hopes and fancy dreams.
Everything you do during and after a breakup is a choice you make that essentially boils down to "is this worth exposing me to the woman I love being fucked by other men?"
Oh no you two split a lease and you wanna wait out the four months instead of breaking it?
Okay so living with this human emotional nuke is worth like 1-2 months of rent to you.
Uh oh, your loser ass friend group was friends with both of you and you think you can't win them over compared to her?
Okay so board game night and your shitty local bar is worth more to you than your pride and dignity.
Aw jeez you had a pet and you can't bring it to your new apartment and she can't bring it to hers?
Oh okay sorry I guess you need to be tangentially exposed to her getting rebounded by strangers because your retarded dog needs to eat concrete kibbles and takes leash walks to shit from you instead of any other faggot who lives in the city.
Every shitty movie, every mindful podcast, every t-shirt slogan, yum crunch yogurt bar commercial, feminized positivity message, and thoughtful little cartoon you encounter is begging you to be mindful, emotional, in touch, connected, thoughtful, loving, and human.
Have you ever spent a moment ever considering what it feels like to do the opposite?
Have you ever indulged in the rage? Have you ever let yourself feel callous?
Do you know how good it fucking feels to burn it all down to the ground and let the colossal weight of a person, a mass of people, all just go away?
Don't worry you're not going to "lose your humanity" indulging in it for just a little bit. If anything you'll find it. People who go through this long enough or often enough eventually find that truly being alone is the only time anything seems to have dignity or serenity.
Other people are a vacuous cacophony, polluting your existence with mundanity and discordance. Yet it's the hardest thing to maintain for long periods of time. Eventually the biology kicks in and you succumb to the world of other people, like parched lips licking up the morning dew from the tips of grass leaves.
But if you've never even reached this point, you are spiritually obese. You have never known the dignity of solitude because you've monkey branched every relationship in your life, collecting rolodexes of kept-in-touch exes. You fattened yourself with the comfort of persistent human contact and in exchange for that safety you robbed yourself of any dignity you had.
And no, you're not one of the lucky few who never experienced heartbreak, you don't get to claim that if you read this far. Those dudes are husking corn and talking about car engines, they've never even opened a tweet in their lives.