How long does it take to get over a breakup

How long does it take to get over a breakup. As you work to patch yourself back together after a bad breakup, you might wonder, “How long will this last?” Unfortunately, there’s no definitive answer.

People recover from grief at different paces, for one. You also might need more time to recover from certain relationships, particularly those that lasted longer or felt more meaningful to you. You may always carry some memory of your loss.

But you will heal in time. Here’s a closer look at what might affect this amount of time and some tips for recovering and moving on.

You can probably expect to feel better within a year

Again, because every break-up is so different, there’s no standard rule for the amount of time you’ll feel sad and hurt. Generally speaking, though, Juarez divides break-ups into three tiers based on what she’s seen in her practice: To overcome a “big breakup” (a relationship of three to 10 years), it may take six to 12 months; a “mid-breakup” (a relationship of nine months to two years) may take three to six months; and a “mini-breakup” (under nine months) will usually take under one to three months.

Similarly, Dr. Lewandowski finds that three to six months is “a fairly standard timeframe” to develop the coping strategies needed to move on. The concept of developing coping strategies is crucial here; instead of passively waiting for time to heal all wounds, it’s helpful to think of yourself as intentionally growing, learning, and healing.

Your mindset can speed up or slow down healing

The most important factor in all of this is your mindset. If you want to move on, and work hard on moving on, you’ll find it far easier to do so. Alternatively, if you intentionally wallow in the hurt, check your ex’s social media, or pry information about your ex out of mutual friends, it will almost definitely be harder for you to put the relationship behind you. Stay in a productive mindset by focusing on yourself, leaning on your social network for support, and preventing yourself from obsessing over your ex.

“Heartbreak can be extended by the way we react to it,” says Dr. Brandy Engler, founder of Silver Lake Psychology. “If you accept that relationships end and you seek to grow and learn rather than blame, the breakup period will be shorter.” Try to remember that getting over a breakup isn’t some distant end goal. It’s a process, and one that you have agency in. If you consciously try not to indulge in negative emotions and spend time working on yourself, that process will be smoother and shorter. 

Above all, keep in mind that this sadness is temporary and you will get through it. Be patient and gentle with yourself — no heartbreak is forever, even if it might feel that way in the moment.

Why it takes some people longer to get over a breakup

A few reasons Burke and McBain posit:

• It wasn’t your idea. If it wasn’t a mutual split, the dumper will obviously move on faster than the dumpee. McBain also adds that “if they saw that this was where the relationship was headed versus feeling blindsided by the breakup,” it will also make a big difference. Someone who had no idea a breakup was coming, no matter who initiated it, will likely take longer to get over it.
• You were really invested. “One significant factor, I guess, is how much the person has invested in the relationship, whether they hoped it would be enduring or not,” Burke says. If you really thought the relationship was going to be a long-term thing before it ended, it’ll likely be harder for you to get over your feelings and attachment for that person. Your heart was already locked in.
• Cheating. If you’ve been cheated on, that betrayal can make healing feel all the more impossible, McBain says. Not only are you getting over someone you love, but you’re also having to simultaneously process the fact that someone you love consciously chose to hurt you.
• You don’t actually want to get over the person. “Some people don’t,” Burke explains. “They create a mental and emotional ‘altar’ of worship to their ex and go there in their heads regularly to worship. Often people who struggle to let go may feel that theirs was the perfect relationship, that there’s no one out there that can compare, so they’d rather sustain the relationship in their heads than to confront the painful reality that it no longer exists.”

How long it takesWhy it takes some people longerHow to know when your over someone

The grief after a breakup can be devastating, especially when it feels like months or even years have gone by without any substantive change in your emotional state.

I once casually dated a guy for just five weeks before our communications tapered off, and now nearly four years later, I still have dreams about him and often catch myself wondering where he is and how he’s doing. When he comes up in conversations with others, I can hear the anger and hurt in my own voice, and if I saw him again, I’m sure I’d still get a rush of nerves and butterflies.

Many people out there surely have similar stories about frustratingly persistent lingering feelings for a past flame. So how long should it take to get over someone? It’s actually a pretty tough question to answer—perhaps even impossible.

The truth about how long it takes to get over someone

How long does it take to get over a breakup. Pop culture (see Sex and the City and How I Met Your Mother) popularized that oft-repeated wisdom that getting over a breakup takes about half as long as the time you were together. So if you were together for two years, it’ll take you about one year to get over them.

Meanwhile, scientists have conducted actual research trying to nail down the timeline for moving on: A found 71% of people who’d gone through a recent breakup felt better after about three months, while a survey of some 2,000 people in 2017 put the number at six months. For divorces, a found people take roughly 18 months on average to move on.

Clearly there’s not much consistency here.

The truth is, as nice as it feels to have a formula telling you the end is in sight, many people (myself included) just take a much longer time to get over past love, while many others take far less.

“This is a bit like the ‘how long is a piece of string’ question,” says Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist, couples counselor, and author of The Phone Addiction Workbook, in an interview with mbg. “There is no standard, no template for how long it takes to get over a breakup.”

Heidi McBain, a licensed family and marriage therapist, tells mbg the timeline totally depends on the individual person and the work they’re doing to come to terms with the breakup. “Some people get over breakups much faster than others,” she says. “It’s so dependent on the person themselves.” Recap Research shows it could take roughly half as long as the time you were together. However, there is no universal standard for how long it takes to get over a breakup.

Why it takes some people longer to get over a breakup

A few reasons Burke and McBain posit:

• It wasn’t your idea. If it wasn’t a mutual split, the dumper will obviously move on faster than the dumpee. McBain also adds that “if they saw that this was where the relationship was headed versus feeling blindsided by the breakup,” it will also make a big difference. Someone who had no idea a breakup was coming, no matter who initiated it, will likely take longer to get over it.
• You were really invested. “One significant factor, I guess, is how much the person has invested in the relationship, whether they hoped it would be enduring or not,” Burke says. If you really thought the relationship was going to be a long-term thing before it ended, it’ll likely be harder for you to get over your feelings and attachment for that person. Your heart was already locked in.
• Cheating. If you’ve been cheated on, that betrayal can make healing feel all the more impossible, McBain says. Not only are you getting over someone you love, but you’re also having to simultaneously process the fact that someone you love consciously chose to hurt you.
• You don’t actually want to get over the person. “Some people don’t,” Burke explains. “They create a mental and emotional ‘altar’ of worship to their ex and go there in their heads regularly to worship. Often people who struggle to let go may feel that theirs was the perfect relationship, that there’s no one out there that can compare, so they’d rather sustain the relationship in their heads than to confront the painful reality that it no longer exists.”

How do you know when you’re over someone?

When it’s taking an extremely extended amount of time to get over someone, it can sometimes feel like the end will never come. You get so used to missing them that it feels like no progress is ever being made. But if you’re deep in the trenches of longing right now, know this: You need to feel this way to eventually get the closure you need.

“As the poet Robert Frost wrote, ‘the best way out is always through,'” Burke says. “The only way to ‘get over’ a breakup like any other suffering we experience in life is to fully go through it, and that means letting ourselves feel and express the pain, to allow ourselves to grieve for what we’ve lost. … It may be a cliché, but time does help heal most wounds.

Plenty of people have tried to calculate an average

Perhaps you’ve heard the theory, popularized by various media sources, that breakup recovery requires half the amount of time you spent in the relationship.

Having a solid endpoint to look forward to might help you feel better, but recovery doesn’t always follow a clear timeline.

People sometimes find themselves still grappling with pain and grief more than a year after ending a relationship that was over within months. Others might heal and move on in weeks, even when the relationship lasted a year or longer.

Online polls

When looking at the timeline of breakups, many sites refer to a “study” that’s actually a consumer poll a market research company conducted on behalf of Yelp.

The poll’s results suggest it takes an average of about 3.5 months to heal, while recovering after divorce might take closer to 1.5 years, if not longer.

Scientific research

While the above poll doesn’t qualify as an actual study, that doesn’t mean researchers haven’t considered this age-old question.

In one researchers surveyed college students who’d gone through a breakup within the past 6 months. On average, the breakups happened in the 11 weeks before the study.

After the breakup, many participants reported increased positive emotions — including empowerment, confidence, and happiness.

Since the breakups happened an average of 11 weeks before the study, these findings seem to imply many people recover after about 11 weeks. This time frame only offers an average, though.

Remember, the study looked at people who had gone through breakups within 6 months, so it could take 6 months to see this improvement, if not longer.

Another aimed to compare the level of distress people thought they might experience after a breakup with the actual distress they experienced.

Of the 69 participants, 26 experienced a breakup within the first 6 months of the study. These participants reported their distress by filling out a questionnaire every 2 weeks. Their distress declined steadily over several weeks, just as they had predicted, and by the 10-week mark, they felt better.

While these findings don’t conclusively offer a specific timeline for recovery, they suggest two things: You might start feeling better fairly quickly and feel better after about 10 weeks.

Remember that both of these studies were quite small, making it hard to draw any major conclusions from them.