How to Get Over Someone: An Honest Guide

Almost every piece of advice about getting over someone is either wrong or incomplete. "Get back out there." "Time heals all wounds." "Keep yourself busy." "Cut them off completely." These aren't bad suggestions so much as surface-level ones — they describe what the process might look like from the outside without addressing what's actually happening inside.

Getting over someone is a genuine neurological process. Understanding what it involves — rather than just managing the symptoms — makes it considerably less disorienting.

What actually happens in your brain

Helen Fisher's neuroimaging research found that romantic love activates the same reward circuitry as cocaine: the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the caudate nucleus flood with dopamine when you think about the person you love. When that relationship ends, you're not just sad — you're experiencing withdrawal from a substance your brain produced itself.

This explains several things that seem puzzling: why you can't stop thinking about them even when you know the relationship was wrong for you; why the pain comes in waves rather than diminishing linearly; why seeing a photo or hearing a song can trigger acute distress weeks or months after you thought you were over it. The neural pathways don't care about logic. They care about reward, and they keep seeking it long after the source is gone.

The stages (and why they're not linear)

Grief models like Kübler-Ross's five stages were never meant to describe a sequential process, despite how they're usually presented. What people actually experience is considerably messier: acute pain, then okay days, then unexpected acute pain again, then something like acceptance, then grief returning, then gradual improvement.

What actually helps (and what just delays it)

The common thread in things that delay recovery is anything that keeps the neural pathways active. Every time you check their profile, you're giving the addiction a small hit. Every text you draft and don't send still activates the system. The brain needs time and actual disconnection — not proximity with restraint.

The role of attachment style

How hard you find getting over someone — and what specifically is hardest — is significantly shaped by your attachment style. Anxiously attached people tend to experience the protest phase most intensely: the impulse to reach out, the obsessive monitoring of potential contact, the fear of abandonment overwhelming rational awareness that the relationship was wrong. Avoidantly attached people often seem to recover quickly, then find the grief arriving later and sideways — unexpected and confusing when it comes.

Securely attached people aren't immune to heartbreak. But their recovery tends to be more linear, partly because they're better able to tolerate the discomfort without having to escape it, and partly because they haven't experienced the relationship as a fundamental threat to their sense of self.

Understanding your own attachment pattern doesn't fix the pain. But it helps you interpret what you're experiencing without catastrophising it — which itself accelerates recovery.

The grief you don't expect

There's the grief for the person. Then there's the grief for the future you imagined: the plans, the life you'd built in your mind, the version of yourself you were becoming in that relationship. These are separate losses that often get conflated.

Some people grieve the imagined future far longer than the actual person. This is particularly true in relationships that ended early, before reality had much chance to complicate the fantasy. You're not grieving who they actually were — you're grieving who you thought they were. Recognising the distinction can be genuinely liberating: you're not losing a real future, you're letting go of a projection.

What "getting over it" actually means

It doesn't mean you stop caring, or that you don't think about them, or that you're fully indifferent to what happens to them. It means the thoughts don't arrive with the same charge. It means you can encounter something that reminds you of them and feel a gentle nostalgia rather than acute pain. It means you can imagine your future without them in it without that feeling like deprivation.

This usually takes longer than people expect, and shorter than they fear when they're in the middle of it. Research on recovery from romantic loss suggests most people show meaningful recovery within six months, with complete emotional resolution more commonly around a year — longer for relationships that ended without closure, or where the attachment was particularly intense.

When to start dating again

Not when you feel ready to date again — that feeling is often driven by loneliness or the desire to prove something rather than genuine readiness. The useful question is whether you can think about the previous relationship without significant distress, and whether you've understood something about what didn't work and why.

If you start dating again while still in protest or resignation phase, you're likely to either unconsciously seek someone who resembles your ex, or choose someone dramatically different as a corrective — neither of which is about who would actually be right for you.

The best indicator of readiness isn't the absence of grief — it's the presence of genuine curiosity about who's out there, and what kind of relationship you actually want to build next. Not a replacement. Something new.

At LoveCertain, a meaningful portion of members are people who've come through a significant relationship and are being deliberate about what they want next. The compatibility-based approach — rather than swipe-based — suits people who've done the reflection and know that chemistry alone isn't enough.

Related: Dating Someone with Kids: An Honest Guide.

Related: How to Get Over Someone You Never Officially Dated.