Okay, let’s be real for a second.
Getting over an ex is one of the hardest things you will ever do. And I don’t mean “hard like a difficult workout” hard. I mean the kind of hard where you check your phone first thing in the morning hoping for a message you know is not coming. Where a random song comes on and suddenly you can’t breathe. Where you’re fine for three whole days and then you smell something that reminds you of them and you’re right back at square one.
It’s brutal. And nobody talks about how nonlinear it actually is.
Here’s the thing though. Getting over someone you loved isn’t just about “moving on.” That phrase is honestly so unhelpful. You’re not moving on from a bad commute. You’re rebuilding a life that had another person woven all through it. You’re unlearning the habit of reaching for them. You’re reclaiming parts of yourself you didn’t even realise you had quietly handed over.
That takes time. It takes honesty. And it takes these ten things, done consistently, even on the days when you absolutely don’t feel like it.
1. Stop Romanticizing the Relationship and Start Seeing It Clearly
Here’s what your brain is doing right now and I say this with love: it’s lying to you.
It’s playing the greatest hits on repeat. The best moments. The good mornings. The way they laughed. The trip you took. And it’s quietly editing out the nights you felt invisible, the times you had to beg for basic effort, the things that made you cry in the car on the way home.
The person you’re missing right now might not even be the person they consistently were. You’re grieving a highlight reel, not the full film.
This is not about turning bitter or rewriting history unfairly. It’s about being honest with yourself. Write it all down if you have to, the good AND the hard. The full picture. Because healing from a distorted memory is nearly impossible.
2. Remove Them From Your Digital Life Completely
I know. I know. You’re not ready. But hear me out.
Every time you check their Instagram, you reset the clock. Every time you reread old texts, you reopen something that was starting to close. Every time the algorithm serves you a photo of them looking happy, it sets you back in ways that feel small but absolutely are not.
Unfollow. Mute. Archive the photos. Delete the thread. Not because you hate them. Not because what you had wasn’t real. But because you cannot heal in an environment where the wound keeps getting poked.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t keep going back to a place where you got hurt just to check if it still hurts. Give yourself the kindness of some distance.
3. Let Yourself Actually Grieve
This one is for everyone who has been told to “just get over it” or who has been putting on the “I’m totally fine!” face for so long they’ve started to believe it themselves.
You’re allowed to not be fine.
Grief after a breakup is real grief. You lost a person, a future you had planned, a version of yourself that existed inside that relationship. That’s a lot. And suppressing it doesn’t make it go away. It just buries it somewhere it can cause damage later.
So cry. Write horrible dramatic journal entries at 2am. Eat the pasta. Call your best friend and talk about it for the fourth time this week. Give yourself a real, honest grieving period without the guilt of feeling like you should be further along by now.
4. Resist the “Let’s Just Be Friends” Trap
Okay, I have to be honest about this one because I’ve seen it go wrong so many times.
Staying friends with your ex right after a breakup, while you still have feelings, is emotional quicksand. You tell yourself it’s mature. It’s healthy. You can handle it. But what actually happens is you end up existing in this painful in-between space, clinging to whatever scraps of connection you can get, completely unable to actually heal because they’re still right there.
Distance is not cruel. Distance is what makes healing possible. You can revisit the friendship idea later, much later, when you genuinely don’t feel anything romantic anymore. But right now? Give yourself permission to step back.
5. Rewrite the Story You’re Telling Yourself
So much of the pain of a breakup lives in the story we keep replaying. And usually that story goes something like: “Why wasn’t I enough? What did I do wrong? Why did they choose this?”
That story keeps you small. And it keeps you stuck.
Here’s a different question to sit with: what did this relationship teach you? Not in a toxic positivity “everything happens for a reason” way. In a genuinely honest way. What do you now know about what you need that you didn’t know before? What did you discover about your own patterns? What parts of yourself did you abandon that you now want back?
When you shift from “why did this happen to me” to “what is this giving me”, the healing actually starts to move.
6. Cut Off the What-If Spiral
“What if they change?”
“What if I had just said something different?”
“What if they come back and we try again?”
Friend, I need you to hear this: the what-if spiral is one of the most effective ways to keep yourself stuck indefinitely. It feels like hope but it’s actually just pain with a more optimistic costume on.
Every minute you spend in “what if” is a minute you’re not spending in “what now.” And “what now” is where your actual life is waiting. The fantasy version of them and the fantasy version of how it could have been is not where your future lives.
Let the what-ifs go. As many times as you need to. They’ll come back. Let them go again.
7. Reclaim the Parts of Yourself That Got Lost
This one is so important and it doesn’t get talked about enough.
When you’re in a relationship, especially a long or intense one, you adapt. You shrink in some areas, expand in others, organise your life around another person in ways so gradual you barely notice. You stop doing certain things. Stop seeing certain people. Start filtering yourself through what they liked or didn’t like.
Now is the time to go get those parts back.
The music you used to love that they made fun of. The friends you drifted from. The hobby you dropped. The version of you that existed before you started editing yourself for someone else. She’s still there. She’s just been waiting for you to come back for her.
8. Build a Support System and Actually Use It
You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through this alone. I promise you, you don’t.
Talk to the friends who knew you before this relationship. The ones who will tell you the truth and also hold you when the truth is hard to hear. If you have access to therapy, this is absolutely a season to use it. A good therapist during heartbreak is genuinely one of the most useful tools that exists.
And if talking feels like too much right now, even just being around people who make you feel like yourself matters more than you’d think. You don’t have to perform okayness. You just need to not be alone with it all the time.
9. Stop Waiting for Closure From Them
Here’s the truth that took me a long time to understand: closure is not something another person can give you.
You can have the final conversation. You can get the full explanation. You can hear exactly why it ended, step by step, and still walk away feeling just as unresolved as before. Because closure isn’t information. It’s a decision.
The decision to accept that it’s over. The decision to stop waiting for them to say something that finally makes the pain make sense. The decision to write your own ending rather than waiting for them to provide one.
That decision is available to you right now. You don’t need anything from them to make it.
10. Commit to Healing as a Daily Choice, Not a One-Time Event
Some days you’re going to feel genuinely good. You’ll go hours without thinking about them. You’ll laugh at something and not immediately want to send it to them. You’ll feel like yourself again.
And then some days you’ll want to text them so badly your hands literally hover over your phone.
Both of those things are okay. Both of them are part of the same process. Healing is not linear and it doesn’t mean feeling better every single day. It means making the choice, on the hard days as much as the easy ones, to keep moving forward anyway.
You don’t need to feel ready to make that choice. You just need to keep making it.
A Few Things That Make Healing Harder Than It Needs to Be
Checking their social media “just once.” It’s never just once and it never makes you feel better.
Talking to mutual friends to get information about what they’re doing. You think it will help. It won’t. It just keeps you orbiting someone you need to move away from.
Jumping into something new before you’ve processed anything. A rebound can feel like relief but it tends to just delay the grief rather than replace it.
Being unkind to yourself about how long this is taking. There is no correct timeline for getting over someone you genuinely loved. Anyone who tells you otherwise has either never loved someone properly or has a very short memory.
Final Words
The end of a relationship can feel like the end of yourself. Like the whole shape of your daily life has collapsed and you don’t know what the structure is supposed to look like now.
But here’s what’s also true: you were whole before them. You had a life, a personality, a future that was entirely yours before they came into the picture. And all of that is still here. It’s just been a little buried.
This is not about forgetting them or pretending it didn’t matter. It clearly did. It’s about slowly, imperfectly, on your own timeline, remembering who you were before the relationship and discovering who you’re becoming after it.
That person is going to be really something. I genuinely believe that.
FAQs
How long does it actually take to get over an ex?
Honestly? It varies so much that any specific timeline would be misleading. Research suggests it takes an average of about three months to start feeling significantly better after a relationship ends, but that changes dramatically depending on the length of the relationship, how it ended, and whether you’re doing the actual work of healing or just waiting for time to pass. Time plus intentional healing is faster than time alone.
Is it normal to feel like I’m doing fine and then suddenly feel terrible again?
Completely normal. Healing from a breakup is genuinely not linear. You can have a great week followed by a day that feels like you’re back at the beginning. That’s not a sign you’re failing. It’s just how grief works. The overall trajectory matters more than any single day.
What if I still love them even though I know the relationship was bad for me?
This is one of the most common and most painful experiences after a breakup and it makes complete sense. Love and compatibility are not the same thing. You can genuinely love someone who is genuinely wrong for you. The love being real doesn’t mean the relationship was right. Both things can be true at the same time.
Should I reach out to tell them how I feel?
In most cases, no, at least not while you’re in the thick of the healing process. What feels like something you need to say usually serves more to keep the connection alive than to actually create closure. Ask yourself honestly: am I reaching out for me, or am I hoping it will bring them back? The answer to that question usually tells you what you need to know.
What if they reach out to me while I’m trying to heal?
This is genuinely one of the hardest situations and there’s no single right answer. What matters is being honest with yourself about what contact from them actually does to your healing process. For most people, especially early on, any contact resets the emotional clock significantly. It’s okay to not respond. It’s okay to say “I’m not in a place to talk right now.” Your healing takes priority.