"Good-bye." What a strange way to start a book. But that's where our usefulness to you will begin: when you say that very significant "good-bye" which means "Finally, it's over. This is the end of an us. I am not going to go back there again. I can't. Or I won't."

After that, a door closes for the very last time, or a telephone handset is placed back in its cold, hard cradle, leaving only stillness and that ache of a final good-bye. It's too soon to be tempered with any faint flecks of hope that it's now time, perhaps, to begin to move on.

For those of us lucky enough to become adolescents without suffering the loss of a friend, or a parent or other close family member, the end of our first romantic love often introduces us to deep emotional pain. No matter how many more times we may face that same pain again, as emotionally healthy persons, we know that pain is the irresistible partner to our losses in love.

Now, judging by the fact that you're reading this book, you've come face-to-face with that same pain once again or perhaps for the very first time. So you've purchased this book to help you to tip the balance from desolation to hope, all in just thirty days. Don't expect a perfectly linear process; you won't necessarily feel better with each new day. There may be times when your recovery will hurt. If you've ever suffered from frostbite and then come into a much warmer place, the first thing you experienced was pain before your normal feelings returned.

Who This Book Is For

THIS BOOK'S METHOD is intended for those who have suffered the end of a love relationship, and who want to make a more effective recovery. It doesn't matter whether it was you or the other person who decided to withdraw. It doesn't even matter if you've left your old lover for another. If you've shared a deep and special intimacy with someone, and now that intimacy has ended, you will suffer a loss equal to all of the meaning that relationship once had for you. And if you can't learn from your own mistakes, which played a part in that loss, your mistakes will pursue you in hauntingly familiar ways.

Your loss may provoke a wide assortment of negative emotions. Your specific feelings will depend on the way you parted. Shame, grief, fear, loneliness, rage, jealousy, vengefulness, scorn, and humiliation, felt alone or in combination, are just some of the dark side emotions. But so long as these emotions haven't gotten the best of you, so long as you know that your pain will pass in time, we can help you.

Three realizations will guide all of those who have suffered romantic loss out of their pain:

• "My once primary romantic relationship is now really over."

• "The end of this relationship is causing me emotional pain."

• "I want to make this pain come to a healthy and productive end as soon as I can."

Notice that healing first requires you to accept that your intimate relationship is over.

Done. Ended. Finished.

If you believe you can end an important romantic relationship by immediately becoming "just friends," our first piece of advice is to forget this idea. When the romantic commitment that underlies a loving relationship dies, it almost always takes time for the person who feels "dumped" to recover his balance.

Who This Book Is Not For

SINCE YOU MUST acknowledge that your relationship has ended to make use of this book, you must face the truth. This book is not for people who want to cheat on themselves. You can no longer afford to occasionally be intimate with your ex. You certainly can't continue to live together (the horror stories told by people who make this mistake really would curl your hair). Don't use money troubles as an excuse to continue to live together. Get out, now, while you still can. Put away that ring, the "cute couple" photo, or any lingering references to the two of you as a couple. That means no late-night phone calls to each other just " 'cause I'm lonely." Or worse, making those anonymous calls where you dial just to listen to your ex's voice saying, "Hello? Hello? Hello?" (Click.)

The longer you put off facing the pain, the more difficult that pain will be to deal with.

And if you catch yourself secretly stalking your ex to get another glimpse of the one you've lost, get professional help soon. Stalking is a menacing form of potentially dangerous aggression. It is in no way an expression of love.

This book should not be the only remedy sought by people with deep and abiding emotional wounds. We include those people who are:

• Addicts, to sex, drugs, or alcohol. Don't forget that denial is easy for an addict to hide behind. If in doubt, we urge you to ask a nonuser friend or relative who knows you well if you have an addiction problem. And this time, try very hard to listen, and, if need be, to get the help and support you need so you can learn to give and receive love in a healthy way in the future.

• Abusers, or victims of abuse. If you have inflicted physical harm on a lover, or been abused by another, you need additional help.

• People with depressive or bipolar conditions. Anyone who has had a long-standing history of periodic or chronic depression is highly susceptible to relationship sabotage.

• Anyone who feels irrational urges to harm himself or another person, or who has urges which threaten to become uncontrollable.

At the very least, we urge any readers who fall into one or more of these classifications to seek help from a group of people with similar problems. Our award-winning website at http://www.byebyelove.com contains a full page of listings of national organizations that can put you in touch with others who share these challenges. It also can help you find experienced professionals who can help you come to terms with your pain. For those who can afford it, personalized professional help, whether just talking with your family doctor or in the form of brief or extended psychotherapy, is also worth considering.

Why You Need to End Contact

IF YOUR RELATIONSHIP truly is over, you've got to give yourself a chance to recover. The person you've parted from is like a drug to you now. Another "hit" will only maintain your addiction. Accept that it's over, now.

For some, facing the need to end contact with their ex will happen in painfully protracted stages. This is particularly true when a parting may lead to divorce. The full price of such endings may take a lifetime to pay. Misgivings and second thoughts are natural, and often wise. But when a final parting is clearly the only way for either party to actively pursue the prospect of happiness, a complete break is the best and often only way. Forget about scripting a perfect parting -- there's no such thing. When it's time to end it, just do it, and move on.

Do you want to have a chance to develop a new relationship with your ex someday? That's possible. A significant percentage of all marriages that result in divorce conclude with remarriage to the same partner. But before that can happen on a stable and enduring basis, you've got to give both of you a chance to recover a fresh and independent perspective. Stay away while you heal. The only circumstances under which you should maintain contact after parting is for the sake of any children parented by the two of you, or to negotiate the division of mutual assets. If you have worked together, see if you can find new employment, or get reassigned to an area where your exposure to each other will be kept to a minimum. Whatever you do, do not look for excuses to make any unnecessary contact.

When will you heal? It will begin when you're able to pass more than an hour, ideally a full day, with no thoughts of your recent loss. And if your ex is really a decent person, you'll have fully recovered when you're able to forgive as well as forget.

This book can help you to do that on a timely basis. You'll be well on your way to this goal in thirty days if you do what we suggest.

What This Book Promises

WE DO NOT claim that our method can relieve your pain on a fixed schedule. Grieving and growing happen differently for everyone, and for every relationship that ends. Of course, it's not wise to attempt to suppress your feelings for the sake of meeting anyone's emotional timetable for your recovery.

However, most people in good emotional health who use our method can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel within roughly a month of ending even lifelong relationships. Perhaps you'll still continue to ride an emotional roller coaster after that time, but the dips and peaks should no longer have the power to make you sick to your stomach.

Even without our method, your status as "poor victim" will usually begin to lose its effect over your friends and family by the end of a month. The ebbing of their expressions of sympathy will decrease any incentive you might otherwise have to cling to the idea that you're a martyr or perpetual victim. For most people, one month is often enough time to begin the natural progression through the customary stages of grieving and healing. Naturally, this may not be the case if an untimely death caused your loss, or if complex and heated dealings with divorce attorneys are necessary to protect your rights.

Exceptions aside, by using our book your recovery prospects will get even better. If you carefully employ our methods day by day, you can enhance your mental and physical health for the rest of your life. You can come out of your current suffering enriched with powerful new insights. You may even discover a remarkable new strength and resilience, thanks to the willpower that you will have exercised as never before.

Why Our Method Works

OTHERS WHO WRITE about recovering from relationship losses usually focus their counsel only on the emotional aspects of healing. You will find that the advice offered in this book is dramatically different. Our focus will be broader. And we've tried hard to make this book easy to read, and use, even by people who are distracted by powerful feelings of emotional pain. We promise that you won't find any maddening happy talk, "poor you" boo-hooing, or obscure psychobabble in these pages. The text at its core teaches down-to-earth, practical ways to turn your negative emotions into fuel for an important spurt of personal growth.

Our advice to you differs most because it's holistic. We're going to give you a host of tools that will help repair your body as well as your spirit. These tools will help you to conquer your greatest enemies at this time. These enemies are stress and despair, which can lead from a slump into clinical depression.

Many of the drug-free methods we outline for beating stress and depression have been scientifically proven as almost sure cures for the blues. Other methods we'll teach you have been proven down through the ages to be powerful ways to elevate your spirit. Some can carry you to the highest reaches that human consciousness can attain.

We don't want you to just settle for freedom from pain. We'd like to lead you to better ways to experience everything in your life.

How to Use This Book

TO GET THE most from this book, you need to understand the way we put it together. Our counsel comes in two forms, offered by two authors, each in his own way.

Howard Bronson has authored a primer that provides a series of meditations and reflections on your process of grieving and growth. Day by day, Howard's counsel will guide your emotions through an evolutionary process that will help you to distill your pain into insight, and finally into forgiveness and wisdom.

Mike Riley has developed a series of tips that prescribe self-enhancing behaviors dealing with everything from what you eat, to how you sleep, even down to how you breathe. The tip on making your own plan of action on page 22 is one you should read right away. It will explain how to use the other tips in greater detail.

The book was organized into a thirty-day period because this reflects the way we live our emotional lives. Each month is a bit like a novel. You can also see a month as a full cycle, led by the moon into a circle, complete and whole in itself. You don't have to turn to the zodiac or other New Age imagery to see the month as more than a metaphor. Just ask a woman about the power of her menstrual cycle. Or consider the implications of humans having an underlying biological mating cycle that lasts roughly thirty days.

The two most important themes that unite all of these pages are that, first, we ourselves are ultimately responsible for all of the people who enter and leave all of our days. And second, that knowing when and how to take action is the key to resolving all of our conflicts. We're here to help you decide which actions will be most helpful in leading you out of trouble.

You can use the book in addition to your work with a psychotherapist or support group. But most of our readers will use only this book and the counsel of friends as the foundation stones for their do-it-yourself recovery programs.

Basically, the best way to use this book is, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, simply one day at a time.

Why Turn to Us?

ONE OF THE most common challenges we've encountered in the course of our preparation of this book goes something like this: What qualifies you guys to give anybody advice on how to recover from the collapse of a romance? It's an interesting challenge in several ways.

For one thing, most of the people who have asked us this question seem to assume that there are special qualifications required to offer others counsel on better solutions to life's emotional problems. We don't agree with this assumption. And in fact, most people act in ways that suggest that they don't, either.

Think about it this way: When you find you have an emotional problem, seeing a psychotherapist probably won't be the first thing you do. Before taking such an expensive step (which bears no guarantee of success, in any event), you are more likely to review your problem with people whose judgment you trust. And those trusted figures may even include a newspaper columnist or media personality like Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Dr. Ruth, Dr. Joyce, Dr. Laura, or even an Internet scribe like Lynn "Breakup Girl" Harris.

Which brings us to another interesting challenge to our authority in this field: we're guys, while most of the popular figures who offer counsel to people dealing with the pain at the end of a relationship are women.

If your family is like ours, family members may have already suggested that you "ask your dad" about your problem. If he is like our late fathers were, his counsel would be peppered with pragmatism. Though loving, his perceptions are less likely to be overburdened with sympathy, giving his words a sense of balance and objectivity.

That's exactly the note we sought to strike here.

So if you ask us why we qualify to assist you, we'll tell you that we think we qualify at least as well as most of the leading lights who now offer advice to the lovelorn on a regular basis, for a variety of reasons:

• We each have survived long enough to have experienced any number of successful and failed romantic relationships in our own personal lives. Riley just turned sixty. Bronson is only a decade younger. Thanks to the sexual revolution and its inevitable consequences, we've both had the opportunity to closely observe literally thousands of our friends' and associates' romantic relationships blossom and wither. We have both thought deeply about those experiences, and we both like to believe we're a little bit wiser as a result.

• We have both maintained our faith in the prospect of finding and maintaining love relationships that can enrobe our spirits in warmth and joy. Riley feels fortunate to have found such a person in Elizabeth, his mate of twenty years. Bronson is still seeking his answer. Riley respects the increasingly joyful, responsible, and creative way Bronson is now going about his quest for the last love of his life.

• Both of us failed at our first marriages. Our divorces were less unpleasant than hot acid baths, but far more instructive. We've learned enough to know the incredibly high emotional prices we paid for each of our many mistakes.

• We're both fathers. We have kids of both sexes ranging in age between adolescence and adulthood. We're proud of the fact that these people respect us enough to frequently ask our counsel when their own quests for love lead them into a romantic blind alley.

• We're both experienced journalists who have spent years reporting on developments in psychology and other social sciences. We both have served as writers and editors for an audience of doctors and other health care professionals, including psychotherapists and psychiatrists of every persuasion.

Validation and Valediction

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT us. We look forward to helping anyone who is willing to invest a modest amount of time and energy in acting on our counsel. Portions of our method have been tested by time, or on thousands of people in clinical trials. And for those we have counseled with our methodology, all who used this counsel to any significant degree have said that they feel better as a consequence.

If you'd like to share details of your own experience with using our counsel, we'd appreciate hearing your comments. Send anything you care to share with us to the following Internet address: webmaster@byebyelove.com. And any time you might wish to get a refresher course or our latest tip on recovery, please visit our website at http://www.byebyelove.com. We'll be waiting there for you.

In the interim, you have our sincere best wishes for a speedy recovery of your ability to give of yourself freely and wisely, in love and in life.