How to get over someone you truly loved is one of the most searched, most whispered, and most desperately needed questions a human being can ask. Not the kind of love that was convenient or comfortable. Not the situationship that fizzled or the almost-relationship that never quite became real. But the kind of love that reorganized your entire world around one person — the love that made you believe in something bigger than yourself, that wove itself into your daily habits, your future plans, and the quiet corners of who you were becoming. Losing that kind of love doesn’t feel like a breakup. It feels like a dismantling.
And yet, most of the advice offered to people navigating this kind of grief is painfully inadequate. Keep yourself busy. Time heals everything. You’ll find someone better. These phrases, however well-intentioned, miss the depth of what genuine heartbreak actually is. Neuroscientists at Columbia University have confirmed, using brain imaging technology, that the pain of social rejection and romantic loss activates the same neural regions as physical pain. When your heart breaks, your brain processes it with the same urgency and distress it would process a bodily wound. You are not being dramatic. You are not weak. You are experiencing something that is, at a neurological level, genuinely painful — and you deserve advice that takes that seriously.
This article will not offer you toxic positivity or hollow reassurance. What it will offer you are 8 real, research-informed, deeply human steps for how to get over someone you truly loved — not by pretending the love didn’t matter, not by rushing past the grief, but by moving through it with the intention, self-compassion, and honest awareness that real healing actually requires. You loved fully. Now it’s time to heal the same way.
Why Getting Over Real Love Is So Much Harder
Before we walk through the 8 steps, it’s worth taking a moment to understand why getting over someone you truly loved feels categorically different from other kinds of heartbreak — because understanding the why is part of what makes healing possible.
When you love someone deeply over time, your brain doesn’t just form an emotional attachment. It forms a neurological one. The other person becomes woven into your neural pathways — associated with comfort, safety, reward, and the regulation of your own emotional state. Research from Dr. Helen Fisher’s neuroimaging studies shows that romantic love activates the brain’s dopamine reward system in patterns similar to addiction. When that love ends, the brain experiences something genuinely analogous to withdrawal.
This is why you keep reaching for your phone to text them before remembering you can’t. Why certain songs, smells, or streets feel unbearable. Why you can know — intellectually, completely — that the relationship is over, and still feel the pull of them as powerfully as ever. Your brain is not confused about the facts. It is grieving the loss of a neurological pattern it was built around.
Understanding this doesn’t make the pain disappear. But it does transform the way you hold it — from something shameful or excessive into something profoundly human. And from that more compassionate foundation, healing becomes possible.
Step #1: Allow the Grief Without Negotiating With It
The first and most important step in learning how to get over someone you truly loved is also the one most people try hardest to skip: allowing yourself to grieve — fully, honestly, and without a timeline.
There is an enormous cultural pressure to “be okay” quickly after a breakup. To demonstrate resilience. To post the right things, surround yourself with the right distractions, and perform recovery for the people around you. This pressure, however socially understandable, is one of the primary reasons so many people find themselves blindsided by grief months or even years after a relationship ends — grief that was suppressed rather than processed, delayed rather than moved through.
Grief is not weakness. It is the price of genuine love — and it deserves to be paid honestly. Cry when you need to cry. Sit in the silence when the silence demands to be sat in. Allow the waves of sadness, anger, confusion, and longing to arrive without immediately reaching for something to drown them out.
This does not mean wallowing indefinitely or allowing grief to consume every dimension of your functioning. It means creating intentional space for the feelings that are real — trusting that moving through them is the only path that leads to the other side. You cannot heal what you refuse to feel.
📃 Related article: The 5 Love Languages Explained: Which One Are You?
Step #2: Cut the Digital Lifeline
One of the most quietly destructive habits in modern heartbreak is what psychologists call “ambient awareness” — the low-level, constant monitoring of an ex-partner’s digital presence through social media, mutual connections, and online activity. Every time you check their profile, every time you analyze a new post for hidden meaning, every time you notice they’ve been active online, your brain receives a small neurochemical jolt — a brief hit of the same reward system that was activated by the relationship itself.
This pattern does not help you heal. It maintains the neurological connection your brain is trying to reorganize away from — like repeatedly pressing on a bruise and wondering why it won’t heal.
The most effective and compassionate thing you can do for your own healing is remove that access. Unfollow. Mute. If necessary, block — not as a dramatic gesture, but as a quiet act of self-protection. This is not about hatred or bitterness toward the person you loved. It is about creating the psychological and neurological space your healing genuinely requires.
Out of sight is not out of mind — not immediately. But it removes the constant re-triggering that keeps the wound fresh. And over time, the absence of those digital reminders allows the brain to begin the slow, essential work of restructuring itself around a life without them at the center.
Step #3: Resist the Urge to Rewrite the Relationship
When grief is at its most acute, memory becomes selective in a particular and painful way — it curates. The mind tends to replay the best moments, the warmest memories, the version of the relationship that felt like everything you ever wanted. The difficult moments, the incompatibilities, the patterns that hurt you — these fade into the background while the highlights reel plays on repeat.
This is not dishonesty. It is a natural cognitive process — the brain’s way of mourning what was genuinely good. But if left unexamined, it becomes a significant obstacle to healing. Because you cannot move forward from a relationship that your mind has reconstructed into something it never fully was.
This step is not about vilifying the person you loved or dismissing what was real and beautiful between you. It is about holding the whole truth of the relationship — the warmth and the wounds, the connection and the incompatibility, the love and the reasons it ended. A balanced memory is not a betrayal of the love you had. It is an honest honoring of it — and it is essential to moving forward with clarity rather than longing.
“Grief has a way of editing the past into something more beautiful than it ever fully was. Healing requires the courage to remember the whole truth.”
Step #4: Rebuild Your Identity Outside the Relationship
One of the most disorienting aspects of losing a significant relationship is the identity displacement that follows. When you love someone deeply and build a life around that love — even partially — your sense of self becomes intertwined with the relationship. We becomes part of how you understand I. And when the relationship ends, part of the identity structure collapses with it.
This is why so many people describe a profound sense of not knowing who they are after a major breakup. It is not a sign of pathological dependence — it is a natural consequence of genuine intimacy, which always involves some degree of self-extension into the shared space of the relationship.
Rebuilding your individual identity is not about becoming someone different. It is about remembering and reclaiming who you were before the relationship defined so much of your daily life — and discovering who you are becoming now that it has ended. What did you love before this relationship absorbed so much of your attention? What parts of yourself did you quietly set aside to make room for the partnership? What have you always wanted to explore, create, or pursue that never quite fit into the life you were building with them?
These are not distractions from grief. They are the active architecture of a self that exists fully and independently — and that independent self is the foundation everything else gets built on.
Step #5: Let Your Support System Actually Support You
There is a particular kind of pride that heartbreak activates in many people — a reluctance to be seen as struggling, a desire to handle the pain privately, an instinct to reassure the people who love you that you are fine when you are anything but. This instinct, however understandable, is one of the loneliest choices you can make in one of the loneliest experiences life offers.
The people who love you are not a burden to lean on right now. They are a resource — one that research consistently shows is among the most powerful predictors of healing speed and emotional recovery after loss. A study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that social connection following a significant relationship loss was one of the strongest buffers against prolonged grief and depression.
Let the people who love you show up. Not to fix it — nothing fixes grief except time and honest processing. But to sit with you in it. To remind you, through their presence, that you are loved outside of the relationship you lost. That your value and your belonging were never contained in one person. That you are known, and wanted, and not alone in this.
Allowing yourself to be supported is not weakness. It is one of the most psychologically intelligent things you can do for your own healing.
Step #6: Stop Waiting for Closure From Them
Closure is one of the most sought-after and most misunderstood concepts in heartbreak. The idea that the right conversation, the right explanation, or the right final interaction with the person who hurt you will somehow unlock your ability to move forward — this idea feels intuitively true and is, in most cases, a significant obstacle to actual healing.
The truth about closure is this: it almost never comes from the other person. Not because they are withholding it maliciously, but because the answers they could give you — however honest, however complete — cannot provide what you are actually looking for. What you are looking for is peace. And peace is an internal state that no external conversation can reliably deliver.
The ex who explains everything perfectly still leaves you with your grief. The conversation that finally gives you all the answers still leaves you alone in the aftermath of a love that mattered to you. Closure, as therapists consistently confirm, is something you grant yourself — through honest processing, through acceptance of what cannot be changed, through the gradual decision to stop waiting for something outside you to make it okay to move forward.
The moment you stop waiting for them to give you permission to heal — the moment you decide that your peace is your own to create — is the moment your healing genuinely accelerates.
📃 Related article: Gaslighting in Relationships: How to Recognize, Name, and Leave It
Step #7: Redefine What Moving On Actually Means
Moving on does not mean forgetting. It does not mean the love wasn’t real, or that it didn’t matter, or that the person you loved has no permanent place in the story of who you are. Real love leaves marks — and trying to erase them is not healing. It is denial dressed as progress.
Moving on means something far more honest and far more achievable than erasure. It means reaching a place where the memory of the relationship no longer controls your present. Where you can think of them without the thought derailing your entire day. Where the love you had becomes part of your history rather than the lens through which you see everything current.
It means carrying the lessons the relationship gave you — about what you need, what you deserve, what you are capable of — into the life you are building without them. It means allowing the experience to have taught you something without allowing it to define you permanently.
You do not have to stop loving someone to move forward from them. You only have to stop making their absence the organizing principle of your daily life. That shift — quiet, gradual, and deeply personal — is what real moving on looks like.
“Moving on isn’t forgetting someone you loved. It’s choosing, one day at a time, to make your present bigger than your past.”
Step #8: Invest in the Relationship With Yourself
The final step — and perhaps the most transformative one — is to use this season of healing as an intentional investment in your relationship with yourself. Not as a consolation prize for the love you lost. But as a genuine, deeply worthwhile priority that may be one of the most important things this experience is asking of you.
Heartbreak has a way of stripping things back to the essential — of revealing where you lost yourself in the relationship, where you compromised more than was healthy, where you were asking someone else to fill a space that was always yours to fill. That revelation, painful as it is, is also an extraordinary gift if you’re willing to receive it honestly.
What does taking care of yourself look like right now — not performatively, but genuinely? Not the aesthetically pleasing version of self-care that looks good on social media, but the real version: therapy if you need it, sleep if you’ve been neglecting it, honest conversations with yourself about what you want and what you will no longer accept.
Who are you when you are not organized around loving someone else? Who do you want to become in the space this relationship has now left? These questions are not easy. But they are the questions that lead somewhere extraordinary — to a version of yourself that is more whole, more self-aware, and more genuinely ready for the kind of love you actually deserve.
Final Thoughts: You Will Carry This — And You Will Carry On
Learning how to get over someone you truly loved is not a destination you arrive at one morning and stay at forever. It is a process — nonlinear, sometimes brutal, sometimes surprisingly gentle — that unfolds across days and weeks and seasons until one day you realize that the weight you’ve been carrying has become something you can hold without being held down by it.
The love was real. The grief is real. And your healing — when you commit to it honestly, patiently, and with genuine compassion for yourself — will be real too.
You are not defined by this loss. You are not diminished by this grief. You are someone who loved fully and deeply — and that capacity for love, the very thing that makes the healing hard, is also the most beautiful thing you will carry with you into everything that comes next.
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📃 Related article: Anxious Attachment: Signs, Causes, and How to Heal
FAQ: How to Get Over Someone You Truly Loved
Q1: How long does it take to get over someone you truly loved?
There is no universal timeline — and anyone who gives you one is offering false comfort. Research suggests that the most acute phase of heartbreak typically lasts between three months and one year, depending on the length and depth of the relationship, individual attachment styles, and the presence of a supportive social network. What matters more than the timeline is the quality of processing that happens within it. Active, intentional healing consistently produces better outcomes than passive waiting for time to do the work alone.
Q2: Is it normal to still love someone you know you shouldn’t be with?
Completely normal — and one of the most painful aspects of heartbreak. Love and compatibility are not the same thing, and the end of a relationship does not instantly end the feelings that existed within it. You can know with full clarity that the relationship was wrong for you — even that it was harmful — and still love the person deeply. That contradiction is not a sign that you made the wrong decision. It is a sign that you loved genuinely. The feelings typically evolve with time and intentional healing.
Q3: Why do I keep wanting to contact my ex even though I know I shouldn’t?
Because your brain is experiencing something neurologically similar to withdrawal from an addictive substance. The neural pathways built around this person — built around the comfort, connection, and reward they provided — are still active and still seeking the stimulation they were built around. The urge to contact them is the brain seeking relief from that withdrawal. Knowing this doesn’t make the urge disappear, but it does allow you to respond to it with compassion and firm self-discipline rather than shame.
Q4: How do I stop thinking about someone constantly?
The research-supported answer is somewhat counterintuitive: trying to forcibly suppress thoughts of someone tends to make them more intrusive, not less — a phenomenon psychologists call the “rebound effect.” More effective strategies include allowing the thoughts to arise without engaging with them as truth, actively redirecting attention toward meaningful activity, reducing digital triggers that reinforce the neural connection, and using therapeutic techniques like journaling or talk therapy to process rather than suppress the emotional content.
Q5: Can you truly get over someone you deeply loved, or does a part of you always remain attached?
Both things can be true simultaneously. You can heal fully — reach a place of genuine peace, build a joyful life, and love again deeply — while also carrying a permanent imprint of someone who mattered profoundly to you. Real love leaves real marks. Healing does not require the erasure of those marks.
It requires learning to carry them as part of your history rather than the defining weight of your present. Many people find, in retrospect, that the loves that hurt them most also taught them the most — and that who they became through the healing was someone they are genuinely grateful to be.
🎵 Music
Maren Lull is a singer-songwriter who writes from the places most people don’t talk about out loud.
Not the dramatic grief. Not the obvious heartbreak. The quiet kind — the ordinary Tuesday emptiness, the habit of reaching for someone who isn’t there anymore, the particular exhaustion of being strong for so long that the strength itself wears thin.
Her music lives at the intersection of emotional honesty and soft beauty — breathy vocals over gentle piano, slow tempos, lyrics that feel less like songs and more like something you wrote in a private notebook at two in the morning and never showed anyone.
Maren Lull writes for the people who feel everything deeply and say very little about it. For the ones who listen to sad music not because they want to feel worse — but because being understood, even by a song, makes the feeling easier to carry.
📱 Follow Maren Lull:
→ Spotify
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→ Youtube
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