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Getting over a relationship isn't as simple as 1, 2, 3...

It's said that for every month you date someone it will take you a week to get over them. So if you were with someone for a year, you'd need three months before the heartache of a break-up subsided. I'm not sure who came up with this formula. It's hardly scientific.

Author: Sandra Prior
Date: Apr 29, 2010 - 6:12:41 PM

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It's said that for every month you date someone it will take you a week to get over them. So if you were with someone for a year, you'd need three months before the heartache of a break-up subsided. I'm not sure who came up with this formula. It's hardly scientific. But it's something I always keep in mind - not because I believe it's accurate, but because it's nice to have a time frame to work with.

 

The thought of endless heartache is paralyzing. Heartache for a set amount of time (be it one month, three months or even three years) seems a lot more manageable. I can do three months. My friends can do three months. My liver can do three months. My bank balance can do three months. Forever? Well, no-one's willing to sign up for that.

 

And more often than not, you get over the guy long before the time is up. Which was my experience, or so I thought, after a break-up last year. We'd been together five months and I thought things were going well. He, well, didn't.

 

So it ended - no hard feelings. The first few post-break-up weeks were sore but standard. I deleted his number from my phone, wine was drunk (on school nights), Ben Harper was played (on repeat). Etcetera, etcetera. Roughly five weeks later I emerged, a little broke but hardly broken, and I was over him. But life had different plans. The relationship I thought I'd let go of would not let go of me.

 

The Haunting

 

Some history: three days before the break-up, I'd planned a romantic evening involving sunset drinks, dinner at a fine restaurant and a night in the John Lennon and Yoko Ono room, no less, at the Daddy Long Legs Hotel. And a dress. A dress that I was sure would dazzle. A dress I couldn't afford. But the dress was so worth it, he was so worth it, that I decided to charge it to my store account. As it turned out, three days later we were finished. But my repayments on the store account were not.

 

I'd forgotten about the doomed dress - and its price tag. Receiving the statement after a month was not cool. After the second month, even less so. After the third it was downright brutal and after the fourth, just plain pathetic. (Foetal position. Rocking. Corner. You get the picture.)

 

Future Forward

 

How could I get over him if he was still all around me? He was everywhere: in my cupboard, in my accounts, in my magazine. During one of the foetal-position episodes I had a realization: he was everywhere, but not in my heart. Not any more. And trying to eradicate him from my life was pointless. Trying to rid yourself of the past is a present-tense action, which means that I - not life - was the one keeping him in my 'now'.

 

My account is paid off. I have good memories of a great relationship and have let go of the ghosts. I hope that if you're holding on to any relationship demons (and kidding yourself that they're holding on to you), you let them go too.

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