Did you just have a breakup with your partner, or do you know someone who did? The feeling after a breakup has been described as one of the most painful experiences ever, and it’s one you’d wish to get over as fast as possible. The memories of your ex sting your innocent heart each time you remember the time you shared with them.
You hear people tell you not to worry, that you will soon get over the breakup. But you begin to question, “How soon can I get over these feelings”, or “Will I ever get over this breakup”?
Whether it was you who called initiated the breakup or it was your ex who did, or even if it was based on a mutual decision by both of you, you’d still experience some of the pain of a breakup, such that getting over a breakup can be extremely difficult for most people, especially those new to relationships.
In a previous post, I wrote about how to get over a breakup. Here, we will see factual evidence of how long it takes to get over a breakup, and much more.
How Long it will Take You to Move on after a Breakup
If you are worried that the hurt after your breakup is lasting for too long already, the good news is that they don’t last forever. You will get over it in no time.
According to an online poll conducted by Yelp on 2000 Americans, it takes about 3 months and 11 days before the average American feels ready to date again after having a breakup. The poll also highlighted that the average American takes 4 days to wallow in sadness and grief after the relationship ends.
A more scientific study about how long it takes to get over a breakup was conducted among 155 undergraduate students who had experienced a breakup in the past 6 months in the US. This study showed that 71 percent of the participants started to feel significantly better about 11 weeks or 3 months after the breakup.
Conclusions from that study indicated that most breakups resulted in positive outcomes, growth, positive emotions, and self-expansion. This means that you will come out better and more developed once you finally come out of the breakup.
There is a positive correlation between how hard a breakup feels and how close the individuals became. That is to say, the longer the relationship or the stronger the union, the worse the breakup experience would feel. Divorces tend to take the longest time to heal from, and one study showed that divorcees would need around 17 months and 26 days to catch their breath and move on.
While we now have a benchmark period of roughly 3 months to get over a breakup, there is no specific recovery time for everyone. In fact, it is quite unhealthy to fix your gaze on a particular period of time to get over a breakup. Instead, when you just learn to live your life normally, you will begin to see that you are getting a lot better each passing day.
Factors that may affect how long it takes to get over a breakup
Several other factors affect how quickly it can take you to get over a breakup. Here are some of those factors:
1. The quality of the relationship
A healthy relationship generally improves the quality of your life on a daily basis. An unhealthy relationship involving regular fights and quarrels often makes your life more miserable. If you and your partner fight a lot, you might feel relieved once the relationship ends.
Even though you would still experience some hurt from the memories you shared, the time to get over the breakup will be considerably shorter.
2. What caused the breakup
The cause of the dissolution of the relationship can affect how long it takes for either partner to get over their breakup. These causes can be related to infidelity, incompatibility, or mistrust.
If the cause of the breakup was infidelity, this can make it more difficult for you to move on. The trauma of betrayal can persist longer in your mind and will prolong the period it takes you to move on after the breakup.
Breakups relating to incompatibility are often discussed at a mutual level, and thus might require a short time to get over them.
3. Your level of commitment to the relationship
When you are committed to a relationship, you put all your efforts and resources into making sure that it works out as intended. It is also quite difficult to imagine the end of that relationship, and when it inevitably comes, it would hit you so unexpectedly.
The more your personal investments into a relationship, the worse the impact will be if it ends in a breakup. Your expectations in the relationship for the future would also be shattered, and this can affect how long it will take you to move on when the relationship ends.
4. Who ended the relationship
The decision to end a relationship is often not a very easy one. Even if you see reasons to break up with your partner, you might still want to give them a chance and fight together. After several attempts to hold back, you might find yourself your partner for a breakup.
As countlessly mentioned, whether it was you who initiated the breakup or not, you would still experience your share of the pain that follows. However, the impact is often worse if it was your partner that ended the relationship, as it can leave you feeling rejected, worthless and vulnerable for a longer time.
Why does it take so long to get over a breakup?
The relationships we build every day form a part of our lives and existence. We subconsciously integrate our relationships with every other aspect of our lives.
Relationships with friends and family, pets, and properties can affect our lives to varying degrees. This will be reflected following a loss of the individual or object on the other side of the relationship. Romantic relationships, however, create a stronger bond and consequently, more intense feelings after a dissolution via any means.
How to begin the healing process
I have earlier talked about some specific ways to get over a breakup but these tips here will help improve your outlook while you get ready to begin the healing process.
Remember it’s okay to grieve but focus on overcoming
Most losses, including relationship loss to a breakup, take several phases. These include the denial stage when you are trying not to accept the event; acceptance and grief.
It is okay to grieve when you just had a breakup. You should not feel odd about that. Most times, the only way to suppress grief is to stay too long in the denial phase but while that might feel helpful, it is not, in the long run.
Face the grief, cry if you need to, be around people that can comfort you through the period of grief, and continually maintain the mindset that you can go through this.
Keep a balanced view about the breakup
Not all relationships last forever. Some do not even see the light of the day, but each of these relationships teaches us some vital lessons about love, family, and what relationships truly entail.
Putting all the blames on yourself or heaping them on your ex-partner will not do you any good. It will rather make things worse for you, and the healing process slower.
Keeping a balanced view means that you should consider the relationship objectively. Consider the lessons you have to learn from it and move on with your life. It has already gone in this direction, just stay positive. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
Maintain your distance
To help you get over the breakup, you need to enforce strict distancing from your ex and anything that reminds you of him. The more his memories are reinforced in your head, the longer it might take to get over the breakup.
Maintaining your distance involves establishing a physical and emotional space from your partner until you have moved on completely.
You might also need to distance yourself from social media, for a while or even permanently. Some people would only need social media distance until they have gotten over the breakup, others might need to do so permanently.
Move on with your life
The irony about relationships is that they come with some of the greatest things of life but they come with the requirement of sacrificing your individuality for the relationship. When you are in a relationship, you let go of your selfish desires to pursue the collective needs of the relationship.
Now that the relationship has ended, it is time to pick up your individual from where it stopped. Take it as another opportunity to develop yourself even further.
Can you get over a breakup in one week?
It is practically impossible to get over a breakup in one week, but there is one exception though. Some breakups happen for a long period of time. The partners begin to see themselves drifting apart gradually until the relationship dissolves completely one day. In this case, both partners might get over the breakup faster than if it had come very unexpectedly.
It might look practically impossible to fully get over a breakup in about a week but here are some tips to speed up the healing process considerably:
- Get closure if you can: Getting closure can be difficult sometimes, especially when your ex-partner decides to punish you but if you manage to get it, it can make it faster for you to get over the breakup.
- Tell yourself you deserve better: People will tell you that you will find someone who deserves you but that is not a mere consolation. It is a fact. You will indeed find someone you deserve and who deserves you if you stay positive.
- Think about what you truly want in a partner: It’s true that your ex had some things you admire in a partner but the fact that you could let them go means you wanted something more. Take time to reflect on the attributes you wanted. Maybe that will make you stop trying to get back your ex.
- Focus on work and career: Actively pursuing your dreams and career can easily make you forget the trauma associated with a breakup. While it may be difficult to focus in the midst of the pain, if you succeed in distracting yourself by focusing on your career, you would have succeeded in killing two birds with one stone – getting over the breakup and career growth.
- Mingle with other friends: Mixing up with people helps you fill the void created by the breakup to a large extent. This is not the time to isolate yourself or detest people of the same gender as your ex. This is the time to enjoy the company of your friends and family.
- Remove objects that remind you of them: The earlier you remove objects, pictures, flowers, etc, that remind you of your ex, the faster you will get over the breakup.
Final words
A breakup can feel like the world is ending. The pain might appear to be lasting forever. This may heighten your curiosity as to how long it would take to get over a breakup.
We have seen that most individuals will get over a breakup within 3 months after the relationship dissolves. Getting over your breakup might be faster than you imagined. Just give it a little more time.
