Someone once told me that, for every year you’re in a relationship, that’s how many months it will take for you to get over them. It seemed to be the complete opposite for me. A five-year relationship ended and I found myself attracted to someone else in less than two months. Another lasted a little over a year and I was unable to let go for three years.  What’s the right amount of time to allow yourself to be completely over someone?  Do we jump into another relationship because we’re secretly masking our fear of deprivation or of being alone?  Do we allow ourselves to pine over someone long enough to relive the pain to ensure ourselves that it’s really over?  How much time is enough and will that time ever be enough?

As some of you may or may not know, Ingrid and I have been together since last year. We have something in common that we both can relate to eerily well: we’ve both had “the one.”  Hers was a girl she met at university; the connection was instantaneous. She saw her across a crowded room and couldn’t turn her attention to anything or anyone else.  Mine wasn’t as romantic, but the moment I saw her I fell in love like I never had before. I knew from that moment I’d be destroyed if she ever left … and I had just met her! Yeah, that bad. Ing and I would sit and reminisce about our exes and the similarities in the feelings that we had for our respective love interests were astounding. We also shared a similar pain of letting go. We would get drunk some nights and have YouTube time playing songs that reminded us of them. It was so comforting to know that she could undeniably relate to me on this.  We’d sit there and cry with each other, only to laugh it off and say, “Are we fucking crazy?”  

The question is, what determines how long it takes to get over someone? Everybody has a different take on the matter. Andrea-Lee Peters of the relationship site Helium theorizes that “relationships that have been truly questionable for whatever reason generally take longer to bounce back from. If you have been in a relationship for several years all of which were bad yet it took you a while to build up the strength and confidence to leave, chances are you will need a while again to continue to build that confidence before embarking on a new relationship.”

But what about the good relationships that, for one reason or another, come to an end?  How in the hell are you supposed to bounce back from those?  That is a devastating pain that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  I lost thirty pounds during that breakup.  Yeah, I looked good, but a part of me was missing.  The only part I craved, the part I couldn’t obtain.  I would drown myself in wine every night, cringing when I saw the bottom of the bottle.  I would wake up screaming her name, soaked in sweat and tears.  My whole word ended.  There were nights when I couldn’t even make it into my apartment.  Not because I was drunk but because my eyes were so swollen from crying that I couldn’t see. 

I finally had to come to terms and deal with the obvious conclusion that she wasn’t coming back.  I spent months dissecting, analayzing, and piecing together why it wasn’t meant to be.  Those months were harder to deal with than the intitial pain of the breakup.  I hated not having control over my life and not being able to fix whatever went wrong.  After all that subsided, I had one more need to overcome: closure.  We never had closure.  The only resemblence to that I ever received was a text saying, “I never meant to hurt you. You didn’t deserve that.”  The topic was never discussed again.

Breakups, whether amicable or heartbreaking, take time to heal.  Don’t let anyone try to convince you that there is a proven mathematical theory about how much time it should take.  It’s different for all of us.  Only we know what’s best for ourselves. We can’t be the best for someone else when we haven’t let go of our past.