You are looking for a date to aim at. It is a reasonable thing to want, and the internet is full of people supplying one. Before anything else: the widely repeated rule that recovery takes half the length of the relationship is not a finding. It has no study behind it, it does not appear in the literature on separation and adjustment, and it is repeated because it is memorable and easy to say.
What the research actually found
The useful work here is the daily-diary kind, where people who have recently separated report how they feel every day for weeks rather than being asked afterwards how it went. Those studies describe a shape rather than a duration.
The distress is steepest at the start and declines faster than expected. The heaviest period is the first stretch after the separation, and from there the curve falls — not smoothly, but downward. In work that asked people to predict how they would feel and then followed them, the predictions overshot: people expected to be more upset, for longer, than they actually were. Your forecast tonight is not reliable, and it is reliably too dark.
The emotions do not fade together. Anger tends to resolve relatively early. Sadness runs longer. Love and longing are the slowest of the three, and the fact that you still feel love for someone months in is not a sign that the recovery has failed — it is the expected order of operations, and the one that most surprises people.
The recovery is bumpy, not a slope. The diary data shows good days appearing early and bad days appearing late, well after things had generally improved. Anniversaries, songs, a sighting, a friend's news: a spike at week nine does not put you back at week one, and treating it as though it does is one of the things that extends the whole process.
What predicts the pace is mostly not the relationship. Length of relationship is a much weaker predictor than people assume. What shows up more strongly is how much of your sense of self was bound up in it, whether you have people to talk to, and whether you are able to build an account of what happened rather than replaying it. Which is why two people leaving identical relationships can recover months apart.
The other thing worth settling is what over it means, because the definition is doing a lot of the work in this question. If it means never thinking of them, the answer is effectively never, and the target is unreachable by design. If it means the thought arrives and does not take the evening with it — you can hear their name, see the photograph, know they are seeing someone, and the day carries on — then it is a real threshold and most people cross it far earlier than they notice. People tend to date their recovery from the last bad day rather than from the general trend, which makes the whole thing look longer than it was.
What actually moves it
Talking about it repeatedly, in sentences, to people who will let you. Some of the research on breakup recovery has the unusual property that the experimental condition — coming in regularly to reflect on it — appeared to help rather than to prolong it, which is the opposite of what the participants expected.
Rebuilding the parts of yourself that were shared. The self-concept damage is a real component, and the repair for it is activity rather than insight: the thing you did before them, the people you knew before them, a new thing that has no history.
Reducing contact, including the passive kind. Checking is the single most reliable way to restart the clock, because each look re-supplies a system that was in the middle of extinguishing. Rumination is the other one — replaying is not processing, and it is distinguishable by whether you arrive anywhere.
And the thing that reliably does not move it: a rebound taken up quickly to skip the middle section. It is not always a disaster and it is not a shortcut; the arithmetic tends to get done later, at an inconvenient time, in front of someone new.
What to do tonight
- Stop counting days. A date to aim at converts every bad afternoon into evidence of failure, which is worse than not having a date.
- Assume the bad days are scheduled and will keep appearing after the general trend has improved. Nothing has gone wrong when one arrives.
- Put one structural thing in the next week that is not about them — one appointment, with people, that exists whether you feel like it or not.
- If you are three days in and trying to plan the recovery, that is the craving looking for a project. Tonight is for eating and sleeping.
What it depends on
The spread between individuals here is larger than any average worth quoting. Some people are functionally through it in weeks; others are still regulating badly a year later, from the same length of relationship. The biggest single source of that spread is how your attachment system handles separation — whether absence settles into sadness or stays an emergency.
That is measurable in two minutes, and it converts the unanswerable question into a useful one: not how long, but which part of this is the relationship and which part is going to happen to you every time.