In the few weeks of mourning common to the wake of Valentine’s Day, I’ve seen far too many people wearing broken hearts on their sleeves. It’s a phenomenon I’ve been guilty of myself, and a common problem I desperately hope to reduce in popularity.

My age group, at the least, and the general public at most, has a tendency to let a relationship determine personal value.

Not a day goes by where I don’t encounter a person with a broken heart, or hurting, trying desperately to make something happen that won’t.

Too many times I’ve seen people abandon who they really are, leave behind their strengths and wither away to nothing over a failed relationship.

I’ve been just as guilty as the next person. In the past, if I couldn’t resolve conflicts or make my guy be happy only with me, I concluded it was my faults.

I would refuse to give up and move myself to some dream world where extreme incompatibility and the pain that person caused me didn’t matter. If I couldn’t change things, it wasn’t the fault of destiny or even reality, but my own inadequacies.

While day after day, things were done that hurt me, I didn’t accept that it was life happening; I truly believed if I were patient and giving, things would, in time, turn around.

Although I always tried to keep my main goals- education, a career, success- in mind, much of the attention I should have been directing toward those goals was being put toward the not-so-much-greater good: a false sense of love.

And while, yes, these times spent with people we care about are: very significant, they can’t be taken for more than what they are: experiences.

It’s OK to be disappointed when something that so much effort and care was put into doesn’t work out. That’s fine- curl up in bed with boxes of tissues and watch sappy movies for a couple days, decorating the floor with empty Haagen-Dazs containers. Don’t answer your phone, shower or change out of pajamas. Fill a shoe box with old love notes, photos and dried flowers.

But then snap out of it. Whoever you are, wherever you are, you’re too good for this. Those three days you spent wallowing were three days you could have been finding happiness being you or going out on the prowl for someone more suitable.

The truth is relationships don’t always work out. It’s a fact of life. Another fact of life is that there are millions more people out in the world, thousands of which each of us could find attractive and hundreds of which we could find at least temporary happiness with.

We don’t need to expect permanence. It’s time people liberate themselves from this need to cling desperately onto the things that hurt us.

There truly are plenty of fish in the sea. There’s no need to settle for one who can’t swim happily by your side.

When relationships don’t work out, it isn’t so much a reflection of the people in them as it is a Cupid’s arrow mis-fire.

I promise, as soon as you let go, a year from then you’ll be thanking yourself for moving on and allowing yourself to find something better. It worked for me.

Time’s going to heal those wounds, a more suitable fish is going to swim by and, in the mean time, you can become more comfortable with the things you love about yourself.

After all, it takes truly loving yourself before you can love someone else.