If you love someone, let him or her go. If he or she comes back to you, you know he or she is yours forever.

If you're going through a rough patch in your relationship, or have just broken up, then sit up, put away those tissues and read on.

We are about to present to you a strange but accurate metaphor in life.

In the epic apocalypse movie, 2012, released last year (I know, a movie about 2012 in 2009? Pfft), the world is coming to a crashing end, but miraculously, some of humanity survives and takes off to a new horizon.

This suggests that the end is nigh, but if you have a plane and a big ship in Tibet, you can survive. It's not the end, but the beginning of something new.

And while Hollywood is full of fantasies, oddities and half-truths, this can be applied to real life - in every relationship (movie), when there is a break-up (the apocalypse) and a make-up (the big ship in Tibet), things will never be the same, but it is the window of new challenges and new horizons opening up, even when all seems lost.

Absence, it seems, really does make the heart grow fonder, and what seems like a closed door need not be the 'do all, end all'. Experts agree.

George Davis, author of Soul Vibrations, believes that not only does absence makes hearts fonder, it somehow leads to knowing who you are as a person, and get a sense of your role in the relationship.

"Sometimes when somebody is around you, you lose a sense of that," explained Davis on relationship site, Betty Confidential.com. "You can either go back to that relationship with more or you can go back to that relationship knowing that you want more out of yourself."

In the same way, authors and relationship gurus have come out to say that 'you never miss the water until the well runs dry.'

They explain that human nature is such that we never appreciate someone or something until it is taken away from us, or we are deprived of what it is that makes them special to us.

"We enjoy these benefits when our mates are around and can easily take them for granted because we have uninterrupted access to them. When our mates are absent, we quickly notice the loss and may appreciate them more than ever," states one expert.

Alex Woon, 27, knows all about missing something lost.

Having had a rocky start to his relationship with now-wife, they endured a seven-year 'underground relationship,' parental objection, physical and psychological separation (fights, detachment, the stress of their parents not agreeing to their relationship) before finally breaking through the obstacles to a very happy ending.

"The first year of our relationship was not blessed by her parents, they sort of misunderstood me and we were sort of forced to break up but then we didn't," he shared. "We had an underground relationship for a few years - during those years, we saw each other bi-monthly because we were studying in different universities."

But their not seeing each other only strengthened their relationship, says Woon.

"We knew we were doing the right thing and because we didn't have a smooth take off, we appreciate each other even more and we truly love each other," he said. "We have faith in each other and our love and trust made our long-distance love a success and ultimately into a happy marriage."

Similarly, 26-year-old Patrick Tan*, and his wife once had a break-up for approximately four weeks. Flattered by attention from another man, she had asked for a break-up sometime in their college years, but she soon realised that she missed him too much.

"She and I had been together for six years or so back then. Things were getting old, and she was taken with this other guy," recalled Tan. "Was the worst four weeks of my life, until she finally shared with me what it was she was troubled by in our relationship. We've grown closer ever since, and now are happily married for two years."

So, whether it be our biological perversion that makes us appreciate things only when we are deprived of them, or the way life works in all its strange twists, the end is only just the beginning of something better, or something new.