How long should it take someone to get over a long term relationship…Especially one that ended badly??
I was with him for seven years and the end was horrible. He cheated and broke me. But, I still miss the “good“ sides of him. I miss our talks, our laughs, our adventures. But, I don’t miss the constant feelings of not trusting him. I knew he had issues of not being faithful in his past, but I stupidly believed him when he said he wanted to change and that it was different with me. It was the real thing and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with “me”. Yeah, right.
How can I miss someone that hurt me that much?
I was in a very similar situation. I convinced myself that the person I was in love with wasn’t real. My love was for the idea I had of that person. For their good side. With who I wanted to believe that they were, not who they actually were.
It helped, but in the end it took over two years for the feelings from a 14 year relationship to pass. As well as losing a second relationship that could have been great if only I had been able to leave the first one behind and conduct myself like a decent human being.
Time was the most helpful thing over all, and it took a lot of it.
As I posted in the thread about the “I’m shocked…” Mom, posting and asking for advice on a forum is fine, but keep in mind that no one here knows you or the full circumstances of your situation and everything (including what I’m about to post) is individual biased opinions. Get out and interact with real people who know and truly care about you.
That said, time does heal, but if it’s your first love, you’ll probably never fully get over it. It will always be in the back of your mind, but there are some things that may help to push it farther back.
As I said, get out and interact with others. If they’re mutual friends with your Ex, minimize the conversations about him, especially negative comments. You may not realize it, but you’re suffering from depression, hopefully minor and may be prone to greater emotional swings than normal.
Make a mental list of all the good things and bad things about your relationship and strive to add more good things and less bad things with your next love interest.
Don’t blame yourself for being fooled. I kept my relationship with my Ex going for ten years with the promise that “I’ll change” while knowing deep inside that I never would. I didn’t cheat on her physically, but deep down knew that we wouldn’t have remained together. Yes, I’m a complete jerk and have finally stopped beating myself about it after 20+ years.
It may take months or it may take decades, but eventually you’ll be able to look back upon this a small part of your life that was better lived and learned than not.
Some of the healing will come from learning how to avoid the same mistakes. It sounds like your mistake was in what I call the “Maya Angelou Test” She said something like “When a person shows you who they are, it is up to you to believe them the first time.” We have to make up our minds at some point to be fierce in protecting our hearts. We have to be cold in rejecting those who show us they are not honorable, not honest, not kind. But it is very hard because we are socialized to keep giving people breaks and to believe that love will change them. It almost never does. Make dating about getting to know the character of the other person and how it fits with yours. And if you haven’t already, read Maya Angelou and Jane Austen.
The other part of it is just habits of thought. Trains of thought literally form tracks in our brains, our neurons strengthen the most common pathways. The habitual connections are far easier to coast along then new or different ones. And the habit of seven years can be difficult to break; your thoughts will tend in his direction for quite some time.
It is necessary to make purposeful decisions about what to think about instead. You need a list of predetermined topics to which you will turn your mind when he occurs to you. Carry a book or periodical which you can read if you’re stuck in a boring situation and he pops up. If you have a group of set play lists, change them up to remove any that make you think of him.
There is nothing wrong with cherishing the good times. There is a great deal of pain to be found in wallowing in them once they are no more.
Manipulative people are experts at making you feel really good about yourself and very bad about yourself all at the same time. Once you accept that you were being manipulated it will be much easier to simply not look back. You can stretch this thing out for years or you can simply choose to get over it quickly, you actually have a choice here.
Long term romances and marriages are hard work. It’s all the harder if you are the only one doing the heavy lifting. Don’t beat yourself up, pamper and baby yourself. And for God’s sake don’t jump into another relationship. Take time to reaclimate yourself to being by yourself.
You may never ‘get over it’. Unless you want to remove all bad experiences through amnesia then you just need to ‘get past it’. I don’t know how long it should take but I wouldn’t be surprised if you needed months to get past the break up. That doesn’t mean you should sit around and mope for months, just that you have to avoid things like convincing yourself that a rebound relationship is the real thing, or avoiding people and friendships altogether because one didn’t work out well. I was 14 the first time a girl broke my heart, so around a half century ago and I’ll never forget it. I had my heart broken a couple of more times after that and thought I’d never end up in a lasting relationship. I’ll never be positive that the one I’m in now will last, however, our 40th anniversary will be coming up and it’s looking like it’s possible this one will make it to the finish line. So there’s so much more of your life ahead of you than behind, it just looks different now because it doesn’t include that sorry loser, but you’ll eventually appreciate that it still looks good and it will probably include people you may not even have met yet. And as time goes on and you peek at the rear view mirror occasionally you’ll notice this past relationship getting smaller and smaller as it recedes in the distant past.
You do NEED a significant amount of time without a new relationship. Especially you must stay away if you meet “the perfect guy” really soon, because chances are he isn’t. You have unfortunately not done well at “picking good ones”. This isn’t your fault, just a fact.
It sounds like you miss the friendship aspects of it. Get into a new social circle - bowling league or something like that to exercise that part of your brain in a healthy way.
It’s not unusual to be lonely when someone’s out of your life suddenly, especially after 7 years of established relationship. A year from now will be much easier and they may even be a pleasant memory.
People are complicated creatures. This first glimpse into the dark, tightly guarded depths of what makes a person who they are is often just that, a glimpse. A glimpse is often not enough information to allow someone to truly say they know the substance of the glimpsed individual’s soul. This is not to say that such glimpses can never be enough to make self-protective decisions upon. It’s simply to say that they often can be insufficient as well.
Every cheater tells the next one that they’ll be true this time. Its almost never true. And no, I’m not going to spend hours researching that for you. I’ve done it in the past but I don’t have the links handy. Look it up yourself, the psychology is clear, and applies to both sexes.
But ask yourself, seriously, is yours the message that a vulnerable woman like the OP needs to hear right now?
The ending was the** reality**; everything before that was stuff that passes the time. By not being with him, you’re no longer wasting time. Your life is yours now. Nobody else’s…if that makes sense.
We miss anything or anyone that we got used to. Long-term hostages miss the hostage-takers. People who had horrible jobs miss it when they leave. Even former slaves miss the old days - even though the old days were bad. BUT… you do lose that sense of emptiness, and you do recover yourself. Differently compared to eight years ago, but still, you become yourself again.