“There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“Time heals all wounds.”

“Get over it.”

You’ve heard ‘em all right? Russell Friedman and John W. James say jaunty phrases like these are the worst words of advice for handling a breakup. “The attempt to soothe is always well intentioned but rarely helpful,” say the authors of Moving On: Dump Your Relationship Baggage and Make Room for the Love of Your Life.

Despite its oh-god-not-another-one-of-those-books title, this is one of the best relationship books to have crossed my desk in a while (and trust me, a lot of them cross my desk).

Rather than spend a lot of time splicing, dicing and trying to spice up the failing relationships we’re currently in, Friedman and James, founders of the Grief Recovery Institute have applied techniques they’ve used to help clients deal with death to help people deal with the one thing they rarely do when they enter into a new relationship: That is, properly say good-bye to all the other crappy relationships that have gone before.

“A breakup is the death of a relationship,” says Friedman. “And just as when someone dies, you’re suddenly robbed of all the hopes, dreams and expectations you had for the future with that person.” Then we drag all that disappointment, anger and resentment (because of course, the relationship death was all the other’s person’s, right?) into our next relationship. After a few rounds of this, it's no wonder so many of us can’t make the damn things work. In fact, says Friedman, the 50% divorce rate is nothing compared to the 70 per cent of relationships that fail outside of marriage.

Friedman and James partly blame our society’s discomfort with feelings of sadness.“By the time a child is 15 years old he or she will have received more than 23 thousand messages that sad or painful feelings should not be communicated to others,” they write. 

Pet fish dies? Don’t worry honey, there are plenty more fish in the, er, pet fish store. Hurt son? Suck it up and get over it. All that stuff we learn about feeling bad or sad gets packed into the suitcase and hauled into adulthood and into our relationships.

Relationship ends? Don’t worry; you can get a new one. Heart hurtin’ like someone’s shoved it full of broken glass? Suck it up and get over it.

But the new fish/relationship isn’t a replacement for the old one, say the authors. Relationships aren’t replaceable or interchangeable. Each is unique and need to be experienced, completed and mourned differently.

And that old, “time heals all” bit? Friedman and James liken this advice to expecting time to fill a flat tire with air. To take the analogy further, imagine you continue driving on that flat tire while you’re waiting for time to fill it up again. It would make driving in a straight line really hard and eventually, you’d destroy the rim and the wheel.

So just like you need to take action to fill up your tire before you can more forward (like call a tow truck or use a jack and fix it yourself), we need to take action in order to refill our emotional flat tires and move forward into healthier, happier relationships.

The action the authors suggest is something they call the “past relationship review,” an exercise that forces you to formally review past relationships and be honest with yourself about the good, the bad and the ugly of each one. But the process isn’t just an intellectual one. “We know people who can recite a doctoral thesis on what happened and who did what to whom but still aren’t emotionally complete,” says Friedman.

Their suggested process, if done honestly and openly, allows you to “complete” past relationships by forgiving your exes for their shit and apologizing for your own so you don’t end up dragging all that “unfinished emotional business” into subsequent relationships.

But he was a bastard and I’ll never be able to forgive him, you say. Forgiving doesn’t condone the person’s behaviour, says Friedman. Not forgiving, however, makes it impossible to move on. “Not forgiving keeps you in prison and not them,” he says.

In fact, forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person. “It’s only for you, to set you free,” says Friedman.

Which is why the authors are so adamant about the fact that none of this process be shared with your exes. They mean it. This is strictly a personal exercise. Suddenly calling him up to tell him you forgive him for being such a jerk isn’t going to inflate anyone’s tires.

Friedman likens the process to scraping old paint off a house to prepare it for a fresh coat.

And, once you’re ready for it, they’ve got some great advice for making that fresh coat last.

For more info or to order the book, go to relationshipbaggage.com.