How to Get Over Someone: What Actually Works

Which situation you're actually grieving

A breakup with a clear ending gives you a start line: the conversation, the move-out, the "we're done." You know when you can start counting.

A situationship that faded doesn't hand you that. There's no announcement, just longer gaps between texts until they stop. Your moving-forward moment is the day you stop waiting for a follow-up text and start planning your week without checking your phone for it. Muting or unfollowing works as your boundary here, since there was never an official ex to block. Closure means writing your own ending, because they were never going to send you one.

Feelings for someone who never chose you back run on the same clock, minus the shared history. You're not mourning lost routines, you're mourning the version of them you built in your head. The moving-forward marker is the day you stop rehearsing what you'd say if they finally reached out.

How long this takes, and why rushing it backfires

Some of this you can act on tonight. Limiting how much you see of an ex online is one: McMaster researcher Tara Marshall found that deliberately checking an ex's posts left people feeling worse "not just that day but the next day too," what she calls a next-day emotional hangover.

What you can't act on is the timeline itself. A 2026 study in Social Psychological and Personality Science found the average emotional bond to an ex takes about 4.18 years to reach its halfway point, and continued contact was the strongest predictor of it lasting longer.

That's the whole case against checking their profile, sending "just to see" texts, or waiting for an explanation: each one resets a wound that was starting to close. Tonight, instead of reaching out, mute or unfollow the one place you keep checking. That single click is the only part of tonight's urge you actually control.

The first two weeks, however the ending happened

Start the clock from whatever moment you call the end, a clear breakup conversation, a slow fade with no announcement, or the day you admitted someone was never going to choose you back. The Cleveland Clinic's Dr. Adam Borland says breakup grief has a lot in common with grief after a death, right down to the shock, the racing heart, and the trouble sleeping that show up in the first days.

Denial is normal here too: you may half expect a text, or catch yourself thinking this can't be permanent. That doesn't mean you're in denial about reality, it means your nervous system hasn't caught up to what your head already knows.

A study of young adults tracked depressive symptoms around breakups and found they typically spiked in the month it happened, then returned to pre-breakup levels within three months, a pattern the researchers likened to recovering from a bad cold. People who didn't view the breakup as entirely negative often showed no measurable spike at all, which is worth remembering if week one feels unbearable: how you're appraising it right now is already shaping how long it lasts.

What to do with the feelings instead of pushing them down

Cry, journal, say the ugly parts out loud to someone you trust. Borland's guidance is direct: resist numbing the feelings with alcohol, compulsive sex, or jumping straight into someone new, because emotions that don't get processed tend to surface later at worse moments.

What actually prolongs pain is rumination, replaying the same scenes on a loop without resolving anything. Research on young adults after breakups found that people who leaned on avoidance and repetitive negative thinking fared worse than those who used problem-solving and a more positive reappraisal of what happened.

The difference isn't suppressing the feeling versus indulging it. It's giving the story somewhere to go: tell a friend the version you haven't said yet, write down the part that still doesn't make sense, and let the memory stay complicated instead of forcing it into either a villain or a saint.

Handling contact, online and in person

If you're tempted to check his profile tonight, know what the data says happens next. A McMaster University study of nearly 800 people found that deliberately seeking out an ex's photos or posts left people feeling worse the next day too, something researcher Tara Marshall calls a "next day emotional hangover." Even passively seeing him pop up in your feed dented people's mood for the rest of that day.

Marshall's practical fix is blunt: mute him, unfollow him, or take a short break from the apps entirely, especially in the first few months when the pull is strongest. A separate study on former partners found that continued contact was the single strongest predictor of a longer-lasting emotional bond, more so than how long the relationship lasted or whether either of you started dating someone new.

When you can't fully disappear from each other, a shared job, a class, mutual friends, an app where you still occasionally match, the same principle still applies at a smaller scale. You can't unfollow a coworker, but you can decide not to check his stories after the meeting, and you can ask a mutual friend to stop relaying updates about him for now.

Rebuilding a life that isn't organized around him

A breakup doesn't just remove a person, it removes routines, an imagined future, and often a piece of how you saw yourself, according to clinicians who work with breakup grief. That's why the ache can feel bigger than the relationship itself: you're also grieving the Tuesday dinners, the shared plans, the version of yourself who had someone to call first.

Rebuilding starts by treating your own interests and your own people as worth investing in on purpose, not as a consolation prize. Try the class you put off, make plans with friends you'd been neglecting, and give yourself permission to find out who you are outside the shape the relationship gave you.