Why does it hurt so much to see him with someone new?

A second ending, even if you chose the first

While he was on his own, the story stayed slightly open. Not because you wanted him back. The place you used to hold was simply empty, and an empty place still belongs, loosely, to the last person who stood in it. Someone else standing there closes what the breakup had only pulled to.

That is why this can hurt even when you would leave again tomorrow. You are not grieving him, exactly. You are grieving being the most recent person he loved. It is a smaller loss than the first and still a loss. It does not mean you decided wrongly. It means the decision has now finished happening.

You are comparing with almost nothing to go on

Look at what you have: a picture, or one sentence from a friend. It shows their first months, and only the part somebody chose to show. Against it you set your private memory of him at his worst: the long silences, the plan he cancelled, the night he would not talk. Then your mind does a cruel piece of arithmetic. He is easy and happy with her, so the difficult part must have been you.

But you had first months too, and anyone looking at your photos then would have seen this same ease. The beginning is light with almost anybody. The hard part comes later and in private, where nobody takes pictures. You are holding your whole film up against their poster.

What his speed says, and what it does not

If he moved on quickly, it reads like a verdict: he did not need to grieve, so you were easy to replace. Speed does say something, but about how a person handles being alone. Some people cannot bear an empty evening and fill it with whoever is near. Some do their grieving inside the next relationship. Some had left in their heads long before.

You cannot tell from outside which of these he is, and none of them is a statement about your worth or about what the two of you were. What was real between you was real then. Nothing he does afterwards reaches back and edits it.

She is a stranger

The mind wants to cast her as a rival who won, or as a replacement dropped into your exact place. She is neither. She met a man at a particular point in his life, and probably knows as little about you as you know about her.

What you know is a face and perhaps a job. The rest you are filling in yourself, with whatever you most fear you lack: calmer, funnier, less trouble. That portrait is drawn from your own doubts, not from her.

Where astrology fits, and where it keeps you stuck

Astrology cannot tell you whether they will last, whether he thinks about you, or whether he is happier now. What it offers is language for the part of you that took the hit. Venus in a chart describes what being chosen means to you: what makes you feel wanted, and what you count as proof. For one person it is being claimed in public. For another it is being the one he tells things to. Knowing which is yours explains why that photo landed where it did.

Saturn is the part that keeps score: the inner bookkeeper that reads his new relationship as a mark against you. It helps to hear it as a voice with a habit rather than as the truth.

One thing is worth refusing. Do not find out her birthday and set her chart beside his. It feels like research and is a way of staying in the room with them. No answer would help: a good match would read as a ruling against you, a poor one as a reason to wait. Either way the evening goes to their relationship instead of your own life.

Mute quietly, and announce nothing

Mute him, mute her if she turns up in tags, and for a month mute the mutual friends whose stories they keep appearing in. Nobody is told, and you can undo it the day it stops mattering.

What to skip is the announcement: the public unfollow timed so that he notices, the pointed quote, the photo chosen to show how well you are doing. Each is a message to him in disguise, and then you are waiting to see whether it arrived. The aim is fewer things to wait for.

What to say to friends who bring news

Friends pass on updates because they think that is loyalty. Tell them once, kindly, what you would prefer: “I’d rather not hear about him unless it changes something in my week.”

Then there is the friend who runs her down for your sake. It feels good for ten minutes and keeps her at the centre of the conversation. Try “I don’t need her to be awful, I need to talk about something else.” And when somebody asks how you are taking it, you do not owe a performance of being fine. “It stung more than I expected” is true, and it closes the subject.

When you will be in the same room

A wedding, a birthday, the bar everybody goes to. Decide things before you leave home, not at the door.

• Go with someone and tell her the plan, including the signal for “take me somewhere else”.
• Decide what the greeting is: a hello, a nod to her, and you keep walking. A short hello costs less than a whole evening spent avoiding one corner.
• Have your own way home and a time after which leaving is allowed. Going at ten is not losing.
• Go easy on the drinks. The talk you most want to have with him at midnight is the one to skip.

You are also allowed not to go. But if it is a place rather than an event, your café, your gym, keep it and go at your own hours.

Plan the hour afterwards as well: a friend’s sofa, a call on the way home. The drop usually comes once the door has closed behind you, not in the room.

When the arithmetic starts again

Give it the column it is missing. Write down what your own first three months with him were like: where you went, how easy it was, what you would have posted. It will read a great deal like their photo. That is the fair comparison, and it says nothing against you.