This reminds me of a great movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In it, Jimmy Stewart plays a guy obsessed with righting a wrong — he feels responsible for the death of a woman. So he does what any guy would do in that situation… he makes a new woman dress up in the dead woman's clothes, and marches her to the scene of her death. Logically! This is how you can tell when someone is too burdened with baggage to begin a new relationship: They won't let you choose your own outfit, figuratively speaking. Anyone who wants to mold your identity is still fanning some old flame. They don't want possibility, they want the past back.

I think it’s a typical but unhealthy response to rebound from heartbreak by opening your heart up to new love. When I get over-eager and try to force that recovery process, it’s a setup for disaster. When I’m still aching from heartbreak, I know I’m needy and need attention. Men with baggage are, as Hannah puts it, “emotional suckbags.”

Lessons of the heart come to a slow boil. And as patient as I try to be, sometimes that boil takes way too freaking long. Often I get sick of all that wistful nostalgia and just want to open that baggage and dump the contents out the window. But when I take time to reflect on how a relationship fizzled out, I learn how to love better and how to trust myself more with another person. Hanging onto heartbreak hurts, but it also heals. I think there's always a moment where I just snap out of it, and instead of looking at the problems inside myself, I'm looking out at the party around me.

Hannah’s advice to women with their sights set on recovering men. “You basically have to decide how much bullshit you’re willing to put up with. Pay attention to your breaking point, and if it gets too stressful, walk away.” There are always other fish in the sea, and many of them don’t even have rusty hooks stuck in their lip.