The toothbrush is still in the cup by the sink. Weeks after they left, you keep meaning to throw it out, and keep not doing it.
That small object, more than any conversation, is where the ending actually lives — in the ordinary debris that has not yet caught up to the news. Most of what gets written about how to get over someone hurries past this part, the part where grief hides in a bathroom cup, and goes straight to the advice. The advice is not wrong. It is just not the whole story.
Why is it so hard to get over someone you really loved?
Start with what the research mostly agrees on. Losing a partner can register as something close to grief, and the brain seems to treat it a little like withdrawal. Attachment, the psychologists who study it tend to say, runs deep.
The standard breakup guidance follows from that — go no contact, lean on friends, sleep, move your body, give it time. Sensible, all of it.
Drs. Julie and John Gottman’s research adds a detail that may explain why the ache is so physical. In an experiment he often points to, the psychologist James Coan slid women into an MRI scanner and delivered mild shocks. When a woman in a high-trust marriage held her partner’s hand, the fear centers of her brain quieted.
Couples, over time, come to “co-regulate” — they calm each other’s nervous systems, usually without noticing they are doing it. So when a relationship ends, you do not only lose the person. You lose the thing that helped your own body settle. The hurt, seen this way, is not a weakness to be ashamed of. It is the cost of having genuinely attached.
What are the actual stages of getting over someone?
You will find a lot of tidy stage-models, and they can be a comfort. But anyone offering a clean sequence is rounding off. Grief does not file its paperwork in order.
What tends to happen is messier — shock, then a long stretch of missing them, then, if you allow it, an honest reckoning with what the relationship actually was.
That reckoning is where Gottman would push, gently. By temperament and by five decades of data he is an optimist about love; he describes the death of a relationship as a kind of tragedy, and has spent his career helping couples avoid it. And yet he is candid that some relationships do end, and sometimes should. You cannot mount a rescue of something already gone.
When that is the case, he suggests, the work is to draw on inner strength and the support of others to carry the pain and move toward a better life. Part of it is telling yourself a true story of the relationship — not the airbrushed version, not the all-bitter one.
If you are still unsure whether it is truly over, Gottman’s own guide to that question is a steadier place to weigh it than a 2 a.m. scroll. And ending things with care is its own quiet skill.
How long does it take to get over someone?
Longer than you would like, and on no schedule anyone can hand you.
Here it helps to name a myth outright, because Gottman does: the belief that there is a deadline for getting over this. There is none. Grief loops back on anniversaries, on a song in a grocery store, on an ordinary Tuesday you thought you had reclaimed.
None of that means you are failing, or broken, or behind. The honest measure is direction rather than pace — whether, across the months, the ordinary debris is slowly clearing, and the cup by the sink finally gets emptied.
How to get over someone you can’t stop thinking about
The mind replays what it has not finished metabolizing. That is why the thoughts can feel like a tape you did not choose to press play on.
Fighting them rarely works; feeding them works even less. What seems to help is giving the story somewhere to go — saying it aloud to a friend, writing it down, letting the memory stay complicated rather than forcing it into something perfect. Healing from a past relationship tends to be slow, ordinary work rather than a single act of will.
There are two reflexes worth watching, both of which Gottman flags. The first is clinging to a relationship that is already over, because the alternative — being alone — frightens you more. The second is the opposite vow: never to let anyone that close again. One woman he describes said she would sooner live with a goldfish, since at least a goldfish cannot betray you.
It can sound like sensible self-protection. More often, it quietly becomes a cage.
When should you see a therapist to get over someone?
When that second reflex begins to harden. In What Makes Love Last?, Gottman gives a whole chapter to what he calls learning to trust again — and he does not soften the phrase. He calls it a skill that saves lives.
He seems to mean it almost literally. His long studies, with Robert Levenson and Laura Carstensen, found that people in low-trust, adversarial relationships — and, it follows, those who wall themselves off from closeness entirely — tend to carry measurably worse health, up to and including a higher risk of dying. Loneliness keeps a tab the body eventually pays.
So what does learning to trust again actually mean? Less blind faith than a kind of smell test. Near the end of that chapter, Gottman names the qualities worth checking for in a new person: honesty, transparency, accountability, ethical action, and what he calls proof of alliance — the evidence, gathered over time, that someone is genuinely on your side.
In practice, it is a set of quiet questions. Is this person truthful, even when a lie would be easier? Do they keep their life open to you, rather than compartmentalized? Do they own their mistakes instead of explaining them away? Do they do right by you when it costs them something? And, across the months, do the small things keep proving they have your back?
None of these are mysteries. They can be learned to read — and they are the difference between guarding your heart and using it well.
The same is true of the skills worth building before the next relationship — not as homework, but so you arrive in it a little less braced. The Gottman Institute’s Lessons in Love for Singles adapts the same research into exactly that: how to recognize a trustworthy partner, and build a strong relationship, before you are standing in one.
And loneliness rarely lifts on its own. That may be the quietest, most important thing to say about getting over someone: waiting does not cure it. You have to do something — reach toward people, stay in contact when the instinct is to vanish, and, when the hurt has hardened into a refusal to trust anyone again, sit down with a therapist whose work is partly to help you find that trust is survivable.
The goal was never to forget a face. It is to keep heartbreak from teaching you the wrong lesson. The toothbrush goes in the bin eventually. The harder, better task is staying open enough that, someday, there is a new one in the cup — and learning, slowly, to love again begins right there.
If you want a clearer picture of what actually sits underneath your recurring fights, What Are You Really Fighting About? offers a free place to start.
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