Updated on June 30, 2025
How long a breakup hurts varies for each person. Some dumpers experience separation anxiety, depression, and pain for a few months whereas others stay hurt for years or longer.
The time it takes them to recover hinges on their attachment style, support system, coping mechanisms, intensity and duration of the relationship, unmet childhood needs or trauma, post-breakup mistakes, recovery techniques, experience with breakups, whether they date and rebound, and how their ex treats them during and after the breakup.
If their ex keeps checking up on them, they feel validated and hopeful—and need a long time to stop thinking their ex still likes them and wants them back. Likewise, if they stalk their ex’s social media, contact their ex, and tell themselves they’ll never find someone as good as their ex, they convince themselves their ex is a one-of-a-kind and that they’ll stay miserable forever.
What they believe feels real whether it’s true or not.
So don’t assume your pain should last the same amount of time as someone else’s. Others have different pasts and ways of dealing with rejection and pain. Their recovery process is completely different from yours. You may not blame yourself for your mistakes or lack of effort, but other may. That means you’re different and that you require different recovery tools.
It’s important to understand that you’re attached to your ex and the goals you worked toward with him or her. The more you invested in your ex and neglected yourself, the more the breakup will hurt and the more work you’ll have to do. If your whole life revolved around your ex, and you viewed the relationship as a way to love yourself, you must first stop seeing your ex as a reason to exist and find other, more meaningful things to look forward to.
You must slowly learn how to love yourself and forget about your ex. That takes effort and time, so don’t expect any quick results. Oftentimes, low self-esteem is the reason dumpees become so obsessed if not possessed by the ghost of their ex. Because they haven’t learned how to love themselves or because they had their self-love destroyed by their ex, they put their ex on a pedestal and think about their ex 24/7. Many dumpees even dream about their ex and relive the breakup over and over again.
If you’ve always struggled with low self-esteem or lacked friends, hobbies, or a sense of purpose, this is the perfect time to start investing in yourself. You’ll have hard days when you feel emotionally drained, lost, or overwhelmed, but it’s crucial to keep pushing forward anyway. You must persevere, regain your emotional independence, and think of yourself as a strong and worthy individual.
Recovery comes in phases.
During the first few weeks of the breakup, you’ll probably feel pain like never before. You’ll likely struggle with things like eating, sleeping, or even focusing on daily tasks. The shock from the breakup will trigger a deep depression and force you to question your self-worth and ability to move on and be happy.
Once you’ve dealt with shock, denial, self-blame, confusion, and the immense desire to do something to change your ex’s mind, you’ll experience anger. Anger will urge you to blame your ex for leaving out of the blue, hurting you badly, and making your life difficult. You may even accuse your ex of showing no compassion, moving on right away, and taking all your relationship efforts for granted.
Basically, you’ll get a fraction of your power back and try to make your ex responsible for how you feel. When you feel angry, remember it’s okay to feel that way, but that it’s not okay to act on it and take revenge. If you take your anger out on your ex, you’ll likely put your ex in a defensive position and provoke a negative reaction. That reaction will hurt you, fuel your anger, and keep you trapped in a never-ending cycle.
It’s best to acknowledge your anger and learn how to manage it. Doing so will strengthen your self-control and emotional maturity.
A few months in, you’ll start to accept the breakup and your powerlessness. You’ll realize that you’re starting to have fewer setback days and that life goes on even without your ex. You’ll be far from healed because you’ll still think about your ex obsessively and want him or her to validate you, but you won’t try to fight things. If you’re following a strict regimen of no contact, you’ll realize that there’s no point in trying to force your ex to change his or her mind.
Forcing change only leads to embarrassment, delays your healing, and drives your ex further away. This phase is likely to last a few months, depending on your focus, self-love, and ability to distract yourself.
Things will start to get much easier after the 3-month mark because you’ll start adjusting to the pain and relearning how to enjoy life again. You’ll still think about your ex every day, but it will seldom trigger a painful emotional setback. When setbacks happen, they won’t hit you as hard as before, allowing you to recover from them on the same or the next day.
From this point on, it’s about prioritizing yourself, growing internally, practicing self-forgiveness, and making the most of your time. You’ll focus on yourself more because you’ll understand why things happened the way they did and not feel the need to seek answers and closure. With each day you go without speaking to your ex, you’ll detach a little more and think about your ex less.
Eventually, you’ll realize you haven’t thought about your ex in a while and that you don’t need your ex anymore. You might still want your ex, but you won’t depend on him or her for happiness and well-being. If your relationship was healthy, your self-esteem and coping mechanisms normal, and your breakup behavior acceptable, you can expect to be over your ex within a year of breaking up.
Most dumpees leave their ex behind 8 – 12 months after the breakup. That’s how long they need to process their hurt feelings, grow as people, and find meaning outside the relationship with their ex.
In this post, we discuss how long a breakup hurts and what you can do to speed up the process.
How long does a breakup hurt?
A breakup hurts the most the moment it happens – when feelings of abandonment and rejection are the strongest. During this initial period, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed by sadness, loneliness, anger, and confusion. These emotions indicate that you had high hopes for the relationship and feelings for your ex.
You didn’t think the person you loved so much would leave you and disappear all of a sudden. You expected him or her to communicate problems, fears, doubts, and unhappiness clearly before ultimately deciding to walk away. That’s why you suffered such a powerful blow to the ego and self-esteem and felt disoriented.
It will take a while to pull through the breakup, so don’t expect an instant recovery. Expect to have dozens of ups and downs before you get your ex out of your system. I can’t tell you how many times you’ll miss your ex or despise your ex for putting you through such a painful ordeal, but it’s probably a lot. You’ll feel an overwhelming desire or urge to contact your ex and try to get back together.
No matter how badly you want to get another shot with your ex, remember that how you feel is temporary. You only want your ex back because your ex left you, crushed your self-esteem, and made him/herself look extremely desirable. You may feel unworthy of love and struggle to see your ex for the person he or she truly is, but give it time.
The longer you give it, the more you’ll detach and the more rational you’ll become. Once you’ve regained your rationality, you’ll see that your ex gave up first and that pursuing a relationship with a quitter isn’t the wisest thing to do.
It’s much smarter to let go of your ex, change your ex’s perception of you, and work on things you need to work on. If you get busy and live with purpose, you’ll forgive yourself and your ex and become immune to your ex’s rejection.
If you just got broken up with, you need to understand that you’re going through the stages of a breakup for the dumpee. These stages include denial, emotional withdrawal, and feelings of worthlessness. It’s in your best interest to learn to work with these emotions and slowly get them out of your system.
There’s no quick solution to your pain.
It took you months to get attached to your ex, so it will take months to detach. Separation anxiety will constantly remind you that you looked forward to a future with your ex and that you can’t get your ex out of your head as quickly as you’d like to.
You’re dealing with powerful breakup emotions that take months to process. If you handle the breakup the right way (by following the rules of no contact), the intensity of these emotions will gradually decrease each day. With patience and self-care, you’ll slowly wean off your ex and start to regain your sense of hope, self-worth, and joy. You’ll get over your ex and consider your ex a matter of the past.
Mark my words—a day will come when you’ll wonder what you even saw in your ex. When that day comes, you’ll have much more appreciation for yourself and much less for your ex.
Having said that, here’s a rough estimate of how long a breakup hurts, depending on your situation.
As you can see, the time it takes for a breakup to stop hurting largely depends on the type of relationship you had with your ex. But it also depends on the dumper’s reasons for ending the relationship and how he/she ended it. If the dumper cheated and monkey-branched, the dumpee could take things to heart and need much longer to redevelop self-love and confidence.
The same applies if the dumpee loved the dumper significantly more than the dumper loved him/her. When self-esteem is lower than it should be, the dumpee has no choice but to put his or her life on hold until he or she learns a thing or two about self-love. And this can take a very long time, oftentimes years.
So if you want to know how long a breakup hurts, figure out what kind of relationship and breakup you’re working with and how prepared you are to deal with the consequences of being single. You may not know exactly how long your recovery will take (no one does), but you’ll have a general idea.
If you just got broken up with, it might be better not to know that your healing could take a year or longer. You may find this information discouraging. If you do, remember that you’ll start feeling better long before you fully recover. You just need to stay positive and stop beating yourself up.
How to stop feeling hurt after a breakup?
Though this topic has been covered countless times, it never hurts to bring it up once more. Dumpees learn things and process the breakup through understanding and repetition.
So to stop feeling hurt after you’ve been dumped by a person you committed to and loved with all your heart, go full no contact with your ex. Don’t talk to your ex for no reason and expect your ex to help you get over him or her. Although your ex could help you, your ex could also lose his or her patience and explode.
It’s best to rely on yourself and your loved ones for emotional support. Confide in your friends, family members, and therapists. They’ll help you understand what went wrong and what you can do now that your ex feels relieved and elated. Therapy will help you a lot, but so will journaling. When you feel anxious, sad, or depressed, write down why you feel that way and why your ex isn’t worth crying over. You have to remind yourself that you’re feeling all this stress because your ex cut off your supply of happy hormones, not because he or she is the best person to ever walk the earth.
Your job as a dumpee is to devalue your ex in your eyes. The sooner you accomplish that, the sooner you’ll stop obsessing and crying over your ex.
The best way to get over an ex isn’t to get under someone else but to live a fulfilling life without your ex. This means you must stay as busy as possible. Hang out with friends, take up new hobbies, work on your flaws, set new goals, exercise, meditate, pray, and do what you enjoy. Live for yourself, and the ghost of your ex will eventually stop haunting you.
Not only will it go away, but it will also make you into a better, busier, stronger, and happier person. If you take the breakup seriously, you may even thank your ex for breaking your heart and forcing you to make positive changes.
So get to work. Life’s too valuable to waste chasing someone who stopped valuing you.
Lastly, remember that healing is a marathon, not a race. Others may have healed quicker, but that’s because they had less work to do than you. Either they weren’t so attached due to higher self-esteem, doubts, or experience—or they forgot how much they struggled and how long it took them to forget their ex. People tend to downplay breakup pain when they’re over their ex and in love with themselves or someone else.
Are you still wondering how long a breakup hurts? How long has it been for you? Share your timeline in the comments below.
However, if you need help understanding your situation or finding closure, feel free to reach out to us directly. We provide a range of coaching services, customized to meet your needs.
My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.
