How long does it actually take to get over someone?
You have started counting. Three weeks, two months, however long it has been, and underneath the counting sits a quieter worry: that by now you ought to be further along than this. You want a date to aim at, the way you want to know how long a flight is before you board it.
The formulas are folklore
You have probably met the rules already. Half the length of the relationship. One month for every year. Three months, flat, for anything. They get passed around between friends and repeated in magazines, and they sound like findings. They are not. Nobody measured anything to arrive at them. They survive because a number is comforting.
The trouble with a borrowed number is what happens when you pass it. If the rule said four months and you are at month six, the rule has not helped you. It has only added a second problem, which is the feeling of being behind. There is no schedule you are failing to keep.
What actually changes how long it takes
The length of the relationship matters less than people assume. Four things matter more, and you can look at each of them directly.
The first is how it ended. An ending you saw coming, talked through and half agreed with leaves less to go over than one that arrived in a single evening. If you were surprised, part of you is still catching up with the news, and that takes its own time before the missing even starts.
The second is whether contact continues. Every message, every look at his profile, every evening with shared friends where he might turn up, brings him back into the present tense. That does not make contact wrong. It does mean the clock you are watching keeps being reset.
The third is how much of your ordinary day was shared. Someone you saw at weekends leaves a gap at weekends. Someone you lived with leaves a gap in the kitchen, in the bed, in the question of who buys the milk. The more hours of the day he was in, the more hours have to be relearned one at a time.
The fourth is what was left unsaid. An apology you never got, a question you never asked, something you wanted him to understand. Unfinished sentences keep a conversation open in your head long after the real one has stopped.
What “over” looks like when it arrives
It is easy to picture it as a morning when you wake up and feel nothing. It rarely comes like that. It comes as arithmetic. He used to take up most of the day; then it is a few hours; then it is the walk home and the last ten minutes before sleep. One afternoon you notice it is four o’clock and you have not thought about him since breakfast, and noticing it is what brings him back.
Over does not mean indifferent, either. You can be through it and still feel a small pull when someone at the next table laughs the way he did. A feeling that visits is different from one that lives with you. If you are waiting to feel nothing at all, you may be setting a mark that people who are perfectly fine never reach.
Where astrology fits, and where it stops
Astrology cannot give you the date either, and any reading that names one is guessing. What it offers is two ways of thinking about time. The first is the Moon. Your Moon sign is the traditional description of how you take things in: whether you go over a loss again and again until it is worn smooth, need to talk it out loud, or keep busy and feel it late. Knowing which one is yours mostly stops you from measuring yourself against a friend who is built differently.
The second is Saturn, which takes about twenty-nine years to go once around the zodiac and has always stood for the slow kind of time: the kind that works by repetition and cannot be hurried by wanting. Some things are finished by a decision. This one is finished by ordinary days piling up, and Saturn is the old name for that. It is a picture, not a timetable. No chart can tell you what he is feeling or when you will stop.
Look at your own chart while you are here
Your chart will not tell you when this ends. It can show you where your Moon is, which is a fair description of how you carry a loss while it lasts.
What to do while there is no date
Change what you measure. Stop counting days since it ended and, once a week, ask a different question: roughly how much of today went to him? Write the answer down in a few words. Days since only ever goes up. Hours a day tends to go down, unevenly, and it is the one figure here that tells you something true.
Make one decision about contact and give it an end date. Not for ever, which is too large to hold. Thirty days without messaging him or opening his profile, with the date in your calendar, and on that date you decide again.
Find the exact hours he used to fill. The call on the way home from work. Sunday morning. The half hour after you turned the light off. Write them down, then put something specific in each one, however small: a different route, a standing call with a friend, a podcast you only listen to then. You are not distracting yourself. You are relearning those hours.
Deal with the unsaid on paper first. Write everything you would say if he had to sit and listen, and do not send it. Read it again a week later. Often most of it has done its work by being written. If one sentence still needs saying, it tends to stand out on the second reading.
When a bad day turns up late
At some point, often after a good fortnight, a day may flatten you. A birthday, a photo, nothing at all. It is easy to read that as being back at the start. You are not. Look at the weekly notes: one bad day in the third month is a different thing from every day in the first week. This kind of time does not run in a straight line, and a dip in it is not a verdict.
One plain thing. If the weeks pass and you cannot get through ordinary days, or you are frightened of what you might do, this page is not the right help. A person is, and it is worth telling one today.
Friends are generous at the beginning and then, without meaning to, start expecting you to be done. If you want an hour with someone who will not ask why you are still on this, astrologers who work one to one will sit with your chart and your question for as long as the question takes.
Questions people ask
Is it true that it takes half the length of the relationship?
No. That rule, like the others in circulation, is a saying rather than a finding, and nobody measured anything to produce it. Short relationships can take a long time and long ones can ease sooner than expected, because what matters more is how it ended and how much of your day was shared.
Why does he seem to be over it faster than I am?
You are seeing only what he shows, and what someone posts or says in public tells you very little. He may also have started letting go before the ending, if he was the one who saw it coming. His pace is not a measure of what it meant, to him or to you.
Can astrology tell me when I will be over him?
No, and a reading that gives you a date is guessing. What a chart can do is describe how you tend to take a loss in, through the Moon, and offer Saturn as a picture of slow time that works by repetition. That is a way of thinking about it, not a forecast.
I still think about him every day. Does that mean I am not over it?
Not on its own. Ask how much of the day it takes rather than whether it happens, because a thought that passes in a minute is a different thing from an afternoon lost to it. Thinking of him less, and getting back to your day sooner, is usually what the change looks like.
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First published .