How Long Does It Take To Get Over a Breakup?

I just broke up from the world’s shortest relationship. Yes, it was only 3 months long. Is it even a relationship?

How long do you have to be with someone for it to be legit, for you to be allowed to grieve when it’s over (by social standards)?

If only I could tell you how many times in the past three weeks since I broke up with my short lived boyfriend some friends told me this was so short it didn’t even matter. ‘For three weeks it was long distance, you dated for three months overall…it doesn’t even count!’ And it’s not just me, other friends also told me how their friends and families told them that their pain didn’t really count, because the relationship wasn’t significant enough as it was simply ‘too short to count.’

What makes a breakup so painful (even if you hadn’t been dating for a long time)?

The surprise effect: you had no idea the end was coming
The amount of hope you put into it: you thought this was it, that you had found the person you would share your life with
The back to single factor: thinking that you have to put yourself out there again, find someone you like, risk getting hurt again you want to throw up
The point in the relationship in which it ends: mid honeymoon phase, when you still think everything is amazing and see no faults
The amount of heart you put into it: pretty much all of it
The experiences you lived together: vacations, road trips, meeting with family, meeting friends both ways
The level of intimacy of topics you talked about: all of the secrets you felt comfortable sharing, all of the past experiences, suffering, trauma, pain, happy times, personal stuff you entrusted this person with and viceversa
The amount of love and dedication they showed you, the consistency in words and actions, the effort they put into making this work and making you happy
The every day gap: everything that is now missing in your every day, from his hand to a text to sleeping in each other’s arms
The long term gap: all of the things you had talked about doing together that will now never happen

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Reading this back to myself I realized that somehow, time had little to do with the amount of pain I was experiencing.

So why do those around us insist in delimitating our allowed threshold for pain based on the amount of time we shared with someone?

Yes, time does play a factor, clearly a 5 year relationship will be harder to move forward from that a 3 months one.

But in the world of singles who have been dating and looking for their person, let me tell you, this is still just as painful. First of all, you come from pain. You have been smacked down again and again for a while, you have been trying to navigate and to survive the dating scene knowing that every year that passes it’s just a little harder, knowing that just because you found someone you like today it doesn’t mean that tomorrow you will have the same luck.

This got me thinking: dating is tough, it’s brutal, it’s a little bit like surfing.

You may have beginner’s luck: you manage to stand the first time you put your feet on the board. A wave comes and magically you reach the shore. Congratulations to you, you did it!

Despite having this wonderful experience, some may think ‘wait — I could catch a better wave’! They dive right back in and paddle back in the hopes of finding a larger, better wave whilst others are still waiting for that first chance.

Most of us by now have sort of understood how to navigate a wave. We are no longer waiting for the perfect wave, in fact, we know that the perfect wave doesn’t actually exists, it could look perfect at first and knock us down a minute later.

That’s how I felt in this last relationship. The wave looked perfect. It welcomed me inside its tunnel. I was trying to do everything perfect to look flawless, so that I could keep standing but it felt so easy I began to relax, the board felt steady, and just when I thought I was hitting a home run, right when I was about to reach shore, it knocked me down and removed the board from under my feet.

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine this could happen again, with such a perfect wave.

So if the perfect ones are unpredictable and the others are horrible from the start, what should we be searching for?

At the moment I am out there in the ocean laying on my board alone, knowing that at some point I’m going to need to get up and paddle back out there to catch a bunch of imperfect waves in the hopes of spotting one that truly matters, one that is wonderful just for me.

All of us who have been single for a while know how to navigate even the worst waves, the ones that barely make any noise. We know how to throw ourselves a party on that board pretending we landed a huge, a perfect wave even when there is barely a crease in the water. We know how to sunbathe without getting too sunburned when we have really long waits in between any waves passing by at all. Truth is, the longer we are out there, the least viable waves actually pass by.

Once in a while, instead of looking for a good one, we just jump in on a horrible one and swim back and repeat this process a few times in a row. The risk of this is that a good one comes by while we are out there trying to briefly surf a really shitty one. This can be out of boredom or out of a need for validation or simply because we truly just need love. We have love to give so why can we not find someone ready to receive it, to share it with us?

I was talking to a friend today and as we were rehashing our latest breakups we began to wonder: what are commitment phobic people actually scared of? We are out there literally trying to give them love and happiness and to navigate this tough world in an easier way, together.

We are out there wishing them all the best, trying to make their life amazing. Why would someone who has the great luck of meeting someone who is genuinely there to try to make their life better decide to just cut you off?

So here I am my friends, paddling back to the starting line as seemingly perfect wave knocked me down right before the most exceptional moment, right when I was about to fly.

I am wounded. I am tired, I am very low on the hope of finding something real but I am trying to get back to the start line for a new beginning.

How do you measure the importance of a relationship?

I believe each of us has our own criteria, but I did see a snippet of a video where Teal Swan said that if we are in a car accident and we break a leg, we don’t get angry for not being able to go for a jog the next day. We are not frustrated about the fact that we cannot run right away, we know that the injury will take time to heal, yet when we are injured emotionally we are surprised that we are not simply doing great again right away the next day. Why is this? Why can we not just accept that it will take a bit of time to feel okay again?

If you have ever watched the musical Rent, I’d love to point you to the line of ‘Seasons of Love’:

Five hundred, twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes

How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets

In midnights, in cups of coffee

In inches, in miles

In laughter, in strife

In five hundred, twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes

How do you measure a year in a life?

How about love?

How do we measure anything in life? We measure it in love. We measure it in the heart we put into it.

So whenever someone tries to make you believe you’re just a little bit ‘less’ amazing for feeling, for mourning, for needing that extra time to recover, remember not to listen to them. You are allowed to be in pain, you are allowed to need space, you are allowed to wish in the back of your mind that this isn’t true.

You are going to be okay, you are going to heal in your own time and you should be damn proud of yourself for having gone out there full heartedly.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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