Surviving a Breakup: a Comprehensive Guide

Relationships are crashed after a dramatic breakup, the only thing that is left is pain ... How long will this pain last? Will it hold me back? Will I ever meet someone to fall in love with? How long does it take to forget a person? All these questions are very standard for the separated. Let's try to figure things out.

How long does it take to get over a breakup

The standard of breaking-up and forgetting

The standard recommendation sounds the following way: measure the time from the beginning of the relationship to its end, divide it by two, and you get how long it will take to forget the person. What does it mean to “forget”? First of all, this means to “get rid” of them emotionally.

It seems simple. You relationship lasted two years, consequently a year after the breakup you will cool down and get ready for a new romantic adventure.

In fact, it turns out that there are zillion of additional factors.

Minimum, maximum or the average?

It is extremely difficult to determine the minimum time for surviving relationship breakup. However, if your inner self says that you are too “hurried” to start a new relationship, you will most likely be disappointed in the one. The thing is that you failed to take into account how long it takes to forget a person in order to:

• forget your “favorite music”, “favorite places”;
• forget about the way “his” or “her” voice sounds;
• stop shuddering when hearing the slightest hint to a close relationship;
• stop looking for “dirty tricks” and “hidden meanings” in your new partner or partner-to-be.

On the other hand, it's easy to extend this time to an unthinkable “maximum” if your ex turns into a “skeleton in the closet”. In this case you will cherish your true love (in reality - painful experience) for 5 or even 10 years. Well, the average time people need when surviving a bad breakup is half of the relationship (do not forget to take into account the type of the relationship: whether you were living together, whether were married, whether you had children, or had a monthly hookup).

How to get over a breakup fast

I'll start with what you absolutely cannot do. It is banned to pronounce the phrase “He/she dumped me” even in your thoughts. This makes you taking the place of the victim. You – two healthy adults - did not dump each other. You broke up – nothing less and nothing more. You came to the conclusion that you do not cease the relationship. You did not see prospects for your union. Pick whatever sounds better; the key here is that it reflects the core of what happened. Your couple broke up. And no one dumped anyone.

Certainly, a mentally healthy person will not disappear without an explanation. The one will find the courage to tell their beloved about it, to make it clear that the passion have faded and that the one sees no sense in continuing the relationship. Well, we understand that it may develop far from the above mentioned scenario: you return home from work and see an empty room – all his stuff is gone, or you find out that he has another woman, or he suddenly starts being pissed off, because whatever you do - you annoy him. It may be hard to believe, but it does not matter what the final straw was, whether he left with reasonable explanations or without them, you caught him cheating on you or not.

It never happens so that two people had been living a completely balanced life without the tiniest signs of troubles, and one of you suddenly wanted to break up. This is not the way things happen. If he fell in love with another woman - he had fallen out of love with you long before he started cheating or decided to leave. This is a crucial idea, and I would like to get every woman experiencing a breakup to understand it. The breakup is not where it all begins. It is a consequence of the situation in which a man has stopped loving you.

So let’s base our recommendations on it. If he does not love you anymore, why do you need him? Why do you care about a person who does not want to spend his leisure with you, who has become indifferent to you, who does not want to take part in your daily life, who has nothing to talk to you about? He is not the man who loved you anymore. And you cannot get him back, as he is not some vacation or rehabilitation... He left. Thus, we are about to realize another crucial idea: your breakup is not unexpected.

No “skinny bitch” made your man leave you. You cannot blame him because his feelings to you have faded. People cannot fall in love and fall out of love by someone’s order. You had unresolved issues with your partner that you either did not pay attention to, or did not want to notice, or hoped that everything would settle down somehow, or called it another bad streak, or missed it for some other reason. Anyway, misunderstanding is growing between you, tenderness has disappeared, you start spending less time together, you quarrel more often or do not communicate much. Well, plenty of couples experience such times, but only if their relationships had been fragile initially. So your pairing had broken before the official breakup, the only question was When.

Stop regretting and do not complain to others about the bustard and the jerk. Even if he left you without saying a word, and took away a laptop, a dishwasher and a bottle of rum, you got for your anniversary from your friends, remember: you were the one who chose this particular man. “He was completely different!” – you may say with irritation. That’s right! But if he changed that much, why did you not leave him first? After all, he did not turn into a jerk overnight. You had been together for a long time, you probably saw the way he communicates with others, the way he talks about beloved people. Yes, you could fail to notice some traits. But the way out is obvious: it is necessary to cease these relations. Now that your jerk has self-destructed, isn’t it a reason to be happy?

It is difficult for most of us to speak to fellows and relatives about breakups. This is understandable; people start pissing you off with terribly unpleasant questions. My recommendation is - do not go into any details. Do not blame yourself or him for that matter. “We don’t see the future the same way”, “We went our separate ways”, “We are just different” - limit yourself to the general phrases.

The last but not the least one... It is not your fault. You did not scare him away because one beautiful morning you forgot to do the makeup. You cook fine, your shapes are fine, your character is fine, everything is fine. Do not let the evil thought “If I had done that differently, we could have worked it out” haunt you. You are who you are. Therefore, the only question that should bother you is whether you feel responsible for everything that your couple has gone and actually still going through. Well, if you think that the success of the relationship is exclusively your liability, then you should make it feel differently asap. Tango is a dance for two.

How to be happy after a breakup

Eat sweets, listen to sad songs non-stop or register on Tinder? Cut the ropes or stay friends?

1. Accept the fact that everything is over

When our heart is broken, we often try to avoid pain, but the best way to move on is to take the pain and go through it. Start with picking the right name for what you feel. Do you feel sad or angry, do you feel abandoned? Accept that feeling bad is quite natural for you and it is good that you miss, it is to be in grief - this is part of the healing process. All this is part of the natural process, so be kind and compassionate to yourself.

2. Cheer yourself up, but do try to cure

Comforting yourself is when a friend comes to you and you're having a great evening watching Bridget Jones. If your way to cope with the situation is to drink two bottles of wine, it's called self-healing. Do not overdo it with ice cream, as well. However, there will be no distress from one cream cake - when it's just cheers you up. Sad songs will not hurt either if you want to listen to them. Do sports, because the rise of adrenaline will definitely improve your day.

3. Minimize contacts with ex

It seems to people that the slow breakup will be less difficult, but you just prolong the agony. Blocking or deleting sounds very rough, so do not do this, but if you receive a message from ex, I would simply ignore it or make it clear that you are not ready to be friends.

4. Get rid of negative thoughts

9 out of 10 breakups are overloaded with negative thoughts that torture a person. Get rid of them. Do not wake up thinking that you will never find a true love.

5. Be compassionate

Give yourself a break. You just make yourself unhappy if you are too harsh on yourself. Consider what's happened to be a useful experience.

Try to think why everything happened the way it happened. Do not miss any important alarm bells. Think about why this is happening, and do not repeat this thing the next time.

6. Forget about friendship

I would not approve any attempts to remain friends with an ex, at least not until half a year passes since the breakup. It will do more harm than good if you continue seeing your ex as a friend. Avoid such meetings when possible, it is worthwhile to get away from your common friends for some time.

When is the best time to date after a breakup?

If you start seeing someone else immediately, you will not have time to take a lesson from past mistakes. Yes, it will comfort you, but you will likely make the same mistakes in a new relationship and feel the same pain all over. So learn your lesson, and go back to dating.