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Scientist Dr. Gary Lewandowski recently did a TED Talk about how breakups don't have to leave you broken.

In the video, he talks about how difficult breakups can be and how they can lead you to a loss of self. Lewandowski wanted to do his own research on this, so he went out to see if there were people out there who had benefited from their breakups. He asked the saddest people he could find, which were people who had broken up within the last three months, had been in a relationship for a few years, and hadn't found anyone new yet. He found that 1 out of 3 people considered the breakup to be a bad experience, 1 out of 4 people said it was a neutral experience, but 41 percent said that overall the breakup was a positive experience.

Lewandowski thinks that's because a lot of failed relationships involve one person holding the other person back, and he found that those people experienced more personal growth at the end of the relationship because they rediscovered all the things they'd minimized or lost when they were with their former partner. He gives an example of dating someone who hated going to the beach even though you love going to the beach, so now that you're single, you can go to the beach and do similar things that you love.

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If you're currently mourning the loss of a relationship, just keep staring into that GIF over and over again. It is wise, so wise.

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Lane Moore

Lane Moore is an award-winning comedian, actor, writer, and musician. She is the creator of the hit comedy show Tinder Live and author of the critically acclaimed book How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't. Moore is the front person and songwriter in the band It Was Romance, which has been praised everywhere from Pitchfork to Vogue. She has written for The Onion, The New Yorker, and was previously the Sex and Relationships editor at Cosmopolitan.