Scared You’ll Never Get Over Them? WATCH THIS

As she put it in her email, she can hear him having sex in the next room while she's trying to get over him.

We have an email, gang. Ooh.

Mmm.

This email has sailed its way across the globe. A very special missive because if you remember a couple of weeks ago, I said, where do we get our least listeners? And I pinpointed that- which is a.

Piece of data everyone's looking for when they're trying to build a podcast.

Very useful. And we looked at, you know, some of the smaller countries where they come from. We found that there was one month where we had one listener from the Democratic Republic of Congo. And lo and behold, that one listener has emailed in, Matthieu.

Well, can I just say, if we are gonna have a listener from the Democratic Republic of Congo, I'm at least glad that they are a loyal listener. Not a one-time listener. 'Cause I'll be honest, Steve, we can't afford to lose a listener in the Congo. Not at this rate.

Well, it depends on what the email says.

Okay, yeah, that's true. Okay, is it a good email?

It could be. I am so done with this podcast. Let's, well, subject line, it says, Dr. Congo listener, it's me. Hey, Matthew. I laughed out loud the day, the other day, catching up on old episodes and hearing you all speculate about a tour in Congo based on your one subscriber. As your audience of one here, I can promise that 100% of your fans so far would be in attendance.

Love it.

I start, I started listening after a very sudden breakup some months ago with someone I had a passionate and fast-moving relationship with. One day, I was the man of her life, and the next day, when I had to travel some weeks for work, something didn't click, he's quoting it her words, and it was over. I've since moved back to Europe, and she's still in Congo. We're both nomadic, humanitarian aid workers, and building a stable relationship in our line of work is very challenging. I was ready to build our castle to use Matt's metaphor, But she left the job site with a short text message to pursue an ex-boyfriend halfway across the world. I went no contact, but she resurfaces again and again with offers of friendship whenever I come back for work trips here in the Congo. Although I've communicated several times I can't be her friend and she should only reach out if something changes for her, she still keeps tabs on me. Anyway, I'm back in Congo now and listening to Love Life in the gym today after she resurfaced again last week to ask for a drink, while also communicating that a future for us will never be in the cards. Another day trying to learn your biggest lesson. If she didn't choose me, despite the incredible chemistry, that makes her the wrong person. If you have a couple of words of encouragement, I would be grateful. Love you all. Keep up the incredible work. And that's from Loic.

I love it. And I was going to say Loic at one point you said you'd moved to Europe and I was terrified that Al one listener in the Congo was actually no longer in the Congo.

But it's okay, he's back in the Congo.

Good to hear you're back. Well, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that you're going through that. And when you look, it's hard enough to try to move on from somebody when we are grieving the relationship and the loss of that person in our lives, but it can feel near impossible. When that person doesn't actually make it easy for us to move on. Now, I was going to say, when that person doesn't let us move on, but that would have been a trap. And it's a trap a lot of people fall into, is this idea that someone isn't letting me move on. We choose to move on. We must never, ever give that power to somebody else. And there will be situations in life where it is extraordinarily difficult to move on because of the situation we're in. I'll give you an example, Loic. Do you want to hear one that's harder than what you're dealing with right now in terms of someone having someone not making it easy for them to move on? We had an email from someone who is in college who was seeing a guy really liked him. They were hitting it off, hooking up, seeing each other regularly. And at a certain point, she was monogamous with him, but he was no longer monogamous with her and had started saying, basically, I wanna be able to do my thing. And so she continued to kind of see him while he was going out and having like one-night stands, and it would make her deeply unhappy. And eventually she said, I can't do this anymore. You know, we have to stop this because this is just making me feel awful. Well, that was fine, except they, along with a couple of other housemates, had signed a lease on a place for a year. And so he was not only living with her, but his wall was the adjoining wall to hers. And as she put it in her email, she can hear him having sex in the next room while she's trying to get over him. There are situations in life that make it extraordinarily difficult to move on. And one would argue that that one is up there. Aside from the fact that let's even look on the bright side of that, you weren't married to him for 10 years. It's kind of college romance. So to that extent, I'm not minimizing the pain of it, but there's a much worse situation you could have found yourself in. That being said, very, very, very, very difficult. But even in that situation, You cannot delegate to somebody else the responsibility of helping you to move on or letting you move on. You can't give that power to another person. Even in that situation at college, you could say, My mental health is more important than staying in this house. So I'm going to make it my number one mission to find someone I can sublet my room to. And I'm going to do that. You could say, I am going to beg one of my other housemates to swap rooms with me and even offer to pay a bit more just so that I can be in a different room in this place, because I cannot be in the adjoining room with this person.

Or you throw on, every time things start to get hot and heavy in that adjacent bedroom, you throw on Rick Astley and you Rickroll them on repeat. Blair it. You leave the house and you just, you ruin their mood. That's not bad.

I mean, also a possibility. Why Rick Astley?

Get creative.

Rickroll, you ever heard, I don't know, Rickroll, you're still doing this. Yeah, but it was like, you know, the thing to do about five years ago was to just, oh, open up this link, somebody sent over a great song, but it wasn't a great song. It was Rick Astley.

Wait, how does the song go, Steve?

Never gonna give that one. Yeah.

Yeah, never gonna give you up. Can't believe Audrey's never been rickrolled. Wow. I think it's a good song. It's good.

That's probably why you've never been rickrolled, is it wouldn't work on you.

I thought the song got popular.

You know, like, I remember, I can't remember the name of the person that sent in that email about living in the room next door, but you really, you have options. We tell ourselves, like, I'm stuck in this situation. but there's always options and there's always ways. And by the way, you could also, if let's say for whatever reason, she absolutely cannot leave this room. And in the email, she didn't say that. She said, I really love this room. Right? Like, I really don't wanna move room. I really like my room. I've got it set up the way I want it and so on. Even if you could not leave that room, then you can still stay to your, you can tell yourself a different story. Like, hey, I don't have to, unlike other people who are going, Are they off thinking about me? Could something still happen? Who knows? You don't have that problem. You can be like, They're literally with someone in the next room. I am going to move on with my life. I am not, this, what could be more of a visceral, in my face, representation of the fact that this is the wrong person for me, then I can hear them in the next room with somebody else. This you could argue that one thing it gives you is you are robbed of the fantasy of the fact that it it might still be something or that this person is is is this incredible person that you've made them out to be. So and in the case of Loic in Congo, I would say You don't have someone in the next door room. You're allowing someone to reach out to you because you either still have them on your social media or because you haven't told them, hey, no, stop texting me. I am moving on and you've made it quite clear that you want me to move on. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. And I don't want you to be texting me anymore. that's how to stop someone. And if you're not saying that, then you have to ask yourself, Loic, why am I still holding on? Because that's a version of still holding on is not telling someone that because you're hoping that it might lead somewhere. Your job is to take ownership of your own breakup and you're moving on. And you do that by setting boundaries now in the wake of the breakup. As I said, I'm sorry you're going through this, but the sooner you actually break ties with this person, the sooner you can move on and find something else that is going to make this less and less relevant in your life. Before you go, I have a free video for you to watch over at movonstrong.com. if you right now keep obsessing over somebody that you are struggling to get over, maybe because part of you wants them back, but so kind of know that might be a terrible idea, but also part of you wants to move on, but you don't know how because you don't feel strong enough. Go watch this video. I promise you it's going to help. The link is moveonstrong.com and it's free. I'll see you there.