How to Get Over a Breakup (When You Still Check Their Last Seen)

Nobody searches how to get over a breakup at 3pm on a good day. You are here at some unkind hour, thumb hovering over a chat you have already read eleven times, hoping a stranger on the internet has the one instruction everyone else forgot to give you.

So here is the short version, before the long one. You get over a breakup by letting yourself grieve it properly, cutting off the supply of new information about your ex, rebuilding the parts of your day that were built for two, and giving it more time than feels reasonable. None of that is glamorous. All of it works better than the 2am text.

We are the psychologists at The Thought Co., and a breakup is one of the things that most often brings someone to our therapy rooms in Mumbai. What follows is what we tell them.

Why does a breakup hurt this much?

Because your brain files it next to physical injury. In 2011, the psychologist Ethan Kross and his colleagues put 40 people who had recently been through an unwanted breakup into a brain scanner and showed them photographs of their ex. The regions that responded overlapped with the ones that respond to painful heat on your forearm. The ache in your chest is not a metaphor you made up.

There is a second layer, and it explains the behaviour you are least proud of. The anthropologist Helen Fisher scanned people who had recently been rejected in love and, in a paper published in 2010, reported activity in the reward circuits involved in craving and addiction. Which is why you check their last seen, know perfectly well it will hurt, and check it again nine minutes later. That is withdrawal. It just happens to have a profile picture.

And a third. You lost a person, and you also lost a draft of yourself. Erica Slotter, Wendi Gardner and Eli Finkel showed in 2010 that people's sense of who they are gets measurably blurrier after a breakup. The Sunday routine, the shared playlist, the flat you had already furnished in your head. Some of the grief is for them. A surprising amount is for the person you were going to be.

How long does it take to get over a breakup?

Longer than your friends have patience for, and shorter than it feels tonight. The number quoted all over the internet is eleven weeks. It comes from a 2007 study by Gary Lewandowski and Nicole Bizzoco, and the people in it were American university students. They did not share a flat, a friend group of fourteen, or two sets of parents who had already met and approved of each other.

So treat eleven weeks as a floor. A relationship of six months and a marriage of nine years are different injuries, and nobody serious will give you a date.

What changes first is the spacing. At the start it is every hour. Then it is mornings, and certain songs. Then one day you notice it is 4pm and you have not thought about them since breakfast, and you feel oddly guilty about it. The guilt is a good sign.

It also does not move in a straight line. You will have a decent fortnight and then be flattened by a food delivery app suggesting their usual order. You have not gone back to the beginning. Grief loops.

What should you do after a breakup?

Think of this as the to do list after a breakup that nobody hands you. It is short on purpose.

1. Tell one person the whole version. Skip the tidy one you gave the office. Tell the one with the part you are embarrassed by. Grief that stays secret stays loud.
2. Cut off the supply. Mute, archive, unfollow. In a 2012 study, the psychologist Tara Marshall found that people who kept checking an ex's Facebook profile reported more distress, more longing and less personal growth than people who did not. There is no reason to think Instagram stories are kinder.
3. Rebuild the routine that was built for two. Your day probably synced with theirs: the goodnight call, the Saturday plan, the route home. Keeping the old routine is like setting eleven reminders a day to miss them. Change your evenings first. That is the hour that does the most damage.
4. Take places back. You cannot delete the café, the promenade or the Netflix home page from the earth. Go back with a friend who makes you laugh, and keep going until it is also the place where that happened.
5. Do the boring three. Sleep, food, movement. Heartbreak on four hours of sleep and a packet of Maggi is a different and worse condition. A twenty minute walk counts.
6. Write the message you are not going to send. The urge to text is mostly the urge to be heard. Say all of it somewhere that has no send button. We built a free tool for exactly this, the message you will never send. If you would rather work through the ending on paper over a few weeks, What Happens After Goodbye is our journal of prompts and CBT exercises for endings.

Should you stay in touch with your ex?

Not for now. The no contact rule has a slightly militant reputation online, but the logic is ordinary. Every reply, every story view, every message asking if they got home safe is a small dose of the thing you are trying to withdraw from. You are asking a craving to settle while feeding it snacks.

No contact means no texting, no calling, no watching, and no sending word through friends. How long? Until news of them stops changing your day. For most people that is months.

Two honest exceptions. If you share a child, a lease, a workplace or a company, contact is unavoidable, so make it dull. Logistics only, in writing where you can, and no asking how they are doing underneath it all. And if the relationship was frightening or controlling, this has stopped being about heartbreak and become about safety. Read our piece on why smart people stay in bad relationships, and talk to someone.

As for staying friends: later, if at all. An offer of friendship in the first month usually means one of you is still hoping.

You are asking a craving to settle while feeding it snacks.

Why is it harder to get over a breakup when nobody knew you were together?

Because you are grieving without permission. A great many relationships in India run partly or fully in secret: from parents, from the building, sometimes from everyone except two friends and a cousin. When one ends, there is nobody to tell at home. You cry with the tap running. You sit down to dinner with your family and answer questions about work.

The grief researcher Kenneth Doka gave this a name in 1989: disenfranchised grief, a loss the people around you do not recognise. You get none of the usual allowances. Nobody brings food, nobody covers for you, nobody asks. It tends to drag, because so much of recovering from a breakup is saying it aloud to someone who then looks after you a little.

Then there are the local complications. The friend group that now has to be divided like property. The family that did know, and liked them, and keeps asking. The relative who hears you are single at 29 and produces a biodata within the week. The relationship across caste or religion that ended because the families said no, where you are grieving one person and furious with the people you live with, both at once.

If this is you, the first item on that list matters twice as much. Find the one person. A friend, a cousin, a therapist. The relationship can stay private. The grief needs at least one witness.

What if you are doing everything right and still not over it?

Then you have met the part most advice leaves out. In 2018, Sandra Langeslag and Michelle Sanchez tested the strategies people use to get over someone. Thinking about everything that was wrong with the ex did reduce feelings of love. It also left people feeling worse. Distraction did the opposite: better mood, same amount of love. Nothing they tested did both.

So there is no clean method. Listing their faults works and costs you. Keeping busy helps and changes nothing underneath. You alternate for a while, and it is unsatisfying, and we would rather tell you that than sell you closure.

Your memory is not on your side either. It edits the relationship into a highlight reel, or rewrites it so that you always knew. Malvika Lobo, one of our psychologists, has written about both tricks and how to stop thinking about someone after a breakup.

And sometimes it is more than a breakup. Get help if, a few weeks in, you still cannot sleep, eat or work. Get help if you are drinking to get through the evenings, or if the relationship involved fear. This is ordinary work for a therapist, and you can book a free intro call for relationship counselling with one of ours.

If you have started having thoughts of harming yourself, do not wait that one out. Call Tele MANAS on 14416, which is free and open at all hours, or tell someone in your home tonight.

How do you know you are over a breakup?

Less dramatically than you expect. There is no morning where you wake up healed and buy yourself flowers. Their name comes up and nothing in your chest moves. You hear they are seeing someone and your next thought is about lunch. The song comes on in an auto and you let it play.

You will still miss them now and then, years on, in a mild way that asks nothing of you. That is allowed. Being over someone has never required pretending they did not matter.

We cannot tell you when that day arrives. We can tell you that nearly everyone who sits across from us certain it never will turns out to be wrong, and is mildly annoyed to admit it.