Ear­li­er this week, Tamar Caspi offered dat­ing advice to Jew­ish sin­gles and wrote about find­ing her Jew­ish­ness. She is an advice colum­nist for JDate and has a syn­di­cat­ed col­umn that has been pub­lished around the world since 2008. Her book, How to Woo a Jew: The Mod­ern Jew­ish Guide to Dat­ing and Mat­ing, will be pub­lished by Seal Press on Jan­u­ary 28th. She has been blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

It’s amaz­ing how your first bro­ken heart feels like the end of the world. Until your next bro­ken heart which makes the one pri­or feel like a farce. I can recall how com­plete­ly crushed I felt when my col­lege boyfriend trans­ferred schools and dumped me. Lit­tle did I know at the time that he was doing me a huge favor, but in the moment I was utter­ly oblit­er­at­ed. I didn’t know what to do with myself or who I was with­out him. I kept in touch with his fam­i­ly as a way to feel con­nect­ed to him and as a way to delay hav­ing to deal with what was next for me. I had immersed myself into us as a cou­ple and had not spo­ken to my friends at length in many months. I had to swal­low my pride and call them. Of course they all under­stood as every­one goes through that rela­tion­ship phase at least once in their lives. They allowed me to com­mis­er­ate and I’m sure were bored to death when all I could do was talk about my ex, but they stayed by my side until I got it out of my system.

Final­ly, I had recov­ered. I had got­ten to the point where I real­ized that him break­ing my heart was the best thing he could have ever done for me. I was over him and mov­ing on — just in time for him to come home on win­ter break and call me. Eight times over a two-hour peri­od. Didn’t he know about Caller ID? I was flat­tered and quite pleased with myself. He want­ed me back and I now had the pow­er, but I also had the strength to tell him to bug off. I pon­dered what to do for a few hours, I admit, and even called those girl­friends to con­firm my deci­sion to not call him back. I knew that he was not right for me, and I knew that I deserved bet­ter. He hadn’t set a high bar for the next boyfriend, but at least I knew I would nev­er set­tle for some­thing that low again either. Of course, I went on to have heart­breaks much, much worse than I could have ever imag­ined back then but I learned that I would sur­vive and go on to be stronger regard­less of the cir­cum­stances. This proved itself when my mar­riage was crum­bling. I expe­ri­enced mas­sive heart­break once I real­ized that my mar­riage couldn’t be saved, and so I mourned the mar­riage and gained the strength to leave — part­ly due to the lessons I learned as an inno­cent twen­ty-year-old. I had learned that I would sur­vive, that the bar was set high­er once again, and that I wouldn’t set­tle even if it meant being a divorced, sin­gle mother.