To the Best Friend Who Finally Got Over Her Hopeless Ex,

The only thing worse than going through a rocky relationship yourself is unbearably watching one of your best friends endure one. You can so vividly see all of the bright, red flags. You have to read through the endless screen shots filled to the rim with tireless bickering, mediocre put downs and undeserved forgiveness. You have been the one there to comfort her through all of the heart aches with the aid of G.N.O.’s, ice cream, some T-Swift and just about every 80s movie you could snag off of Netflix. It’s hard to watch after all this is your best friend and her pain is yours. You have to support her but you know she needs to drop that guy stat.

“Teenage girls especially need to learn to be stronger and learn from their mistakes and let it strengthen them instead of letting those mistakes ruin them and make them weaker.”

Those are the words that she said to me, I was proud, but I have to admit that I wasn’t totally convinced. The tears had stopped a while ago, there still had been the occasional rants about the boy who really wasn’t worth her time, but they were always followed by a subtle hint exposing that she still deep down, just maybe, would like to be back with him.

Then she sent me this -

“ (This is what I sent to him) Hey. As much as I really don't want to contact you. I want to thank you.

Thank you for teaching me so much.

You taught me that even though somebody might fight for you, that doesn't mean they will appreciate you once they have you.

You taught me that if somebody cheats on you, they don't love you, no matter how many times that they claim that they love you.

They don’t.

You made me realize how amazing of a girl and a girlfriend I could be. You made me realize things I could improve on, but also that I wasn't crazy.

Thank you for teaching me that I deserve the world, and that you didn't give me that.

Thank you for teaching me to love myself and make myself happy. Because when you depend on somebody else for your happiness, your entire world is crushed when they leave.

But mostly, thank you for teaching me that I deserve so much more than what you gave me.

Yes, you were my biggest heartbreak. But you taught me so much. So, thanks. Hope all is well and your future is full of happiness and parties since apparently that's all you've been doing.”

Those words, they don’t sound like they came from a girl who was ever weak; the truth is, though, they did.

Bad relationships and even worse breakups- we have all been there a time or two. It always seems to effortlessly begin the same and once the fallout arrives, we know the next few weeks or even months are going to be difficult. After all of the fights, the long talks with our best friends and hope for distractions, we often find ourselves … well, we find ourselves okay. Scratch that, we find ourselves way more than okay. In fact, we find ourselves peering into the situation not even as our own struggle anymore. It is as if we are assessing someone else's relationship. Then it hits us, how different we are, how much we have grown since then and most importantly how much we are worth.

And when this happens, when we can finally see what all of our friends have been tirelessly prying our eyes open to see for oh so painfully long, that’s when it clicks. The texts no longer look like bitter rants of the things that could have, should have gone differently; they do not look lonely, confused or even regretful.

So this one isn’t for the childish boys who did our friends wrong, and it really is not even to the friends who helped our girl get through it. This one is for her, for her seeing how much she is really worth, for raising her own standards and being able to take so much good out of something pretty bad.