This Is How Long You Are Allowed To Grieve A Breakup

I was just shy of 19 years old when I had my heart broken the first time.

If you asked me at 17, I’d tell you my heart had already been broken twice. But 17-year-old was dumb and thought she loved every guy she dated for more than a month. You know, pretty much like any other girl in high school who craved constant affection. I didn’t fall in love “for real” until I was almost 18. It was my first really painful breakup.

I remember a lot of big moments from my relationship with S.

We met on the first day of freshman year in homeroom, and I just knew there was something special about him. We became friends pretty quickly. I was so deeply rooted in that friendship that I trusted him with my private journals – mostly poems – to read and comment on in the margins. That was the first and last time I opened myself up so easily and willingly.

When I lost a close friend early senior year, S comforted me.

He was no stranger to my misfortunes. Freshman year when I lost my grandma to cancer, he was the person I called. When my first boyfriend started dating my best friend, he was there. S talked me through a lot of the hard stuff: death, breakups, family struggles. We were good friends. And what I would consider our First Date was initially just a friendly hangout.

Something shifted that night when he drove me home.

He was showing me music – on his huge ass iPod, as everyone had back in 2010 – and there was a point where I completely forgot about everything else in the world except what was happening in that car at that moment. I knew I loved him then, but I didn’t quite understand that’s what it was yet. As time moved on, he became a crutch to get me through my depression and my newly formed anxiety disorder. I was terrified of losing him.

Even though I was on auto pilot that year mentally, I still remember the first time he told me he loved me. I remember taking a picture of that moment with him, and how that was my favorite photo we took together. I remember all the days we spent together during the Icepocalypse when school was cancelled for an entire week. And I remember not giving a shit about how gross I looked eating spaghetti like a savage around him (because let’s be honest, eating spaghetti is never cute like Disney made us think). I remember the promise ring, the long goodbyes, and most importantly, the last goodbye.

S and I were far from perfect.

Part of me knew it wouldn’t last, so I tried to end it before I left for college. Between him sharing things with his mom that I told him in confidence and my own personal insecurities, we were destined for disaster. Yet for some reason I didn’t end things when I should have, and three weeks later found out he’d met someone else. She was there, I wasn’t. It wasn’t hard to figure out why he left me.

But that didn’t make it any easier. We had a dog together – or rather, I adopted a dog that he kept because my parents suffered a house fire and were living in a hotel – and I never got a proper goodbye. Skip to October 2011, I drove the 10 hours back home from school because I just needed to feel the comfort of my own city. I showed up at his house at midnight to drop off his things and found that S wasn’t even man enough to face me on his own – his side chick drove him. I went ballistic. It was so bad that his mom woke up and came outside to yell at us. (In hindsight, #yikes.)

That first heartbreak was the most gut-wrenching feeling I ever experienced.

After spending the weekend at home, I drove back to Virginia. I’ll admit, it was not easy. There were multiple times I nearly drove myself off a cliff, literally. My guardian angel saved me on that drive back, but I am lucky depression didn’t get the best of me. I was nauseous all the time, missing classes, not eating, barely showering, having daily panic attacks. Basically I was a total shitshow. I made it through the first couple of huge waves of emotion, and eventually I learned how to ride out the rest.

And it was then that I promised myself I would never allow myself to get that low over a breakup again.

I decided to come up with an easy way to determine exactly how long I would allow myself to cry, mope, scream, break things, and wallow in my sadness before picking myself up and moving the fuck on with my life.

For every month spent in the relationship, I would allow myself one day of grieving.

If I could get it out of my system in less time, great. But I would not allow myself to stay in bed eating Edy’s French Silk ice cream and watching Harry Potter for a single day more than my formula dictated. When I dated C for about four months, I barely made it to day three before I was past it. And with my yearlong relationship with D? I moved on within a week.

I got good at handling the end of relationships emotionally. They barely seemed to phase me. T and I made it to about 10 months, but I was over the breakup before it even happened. (Things with A were a little different what with the whole marriage thing and all, so I let that be an exception to my rule and didn’t clock the time I spent grieving our separation.) Next was E; also a little complicated because of the nature of the relationship (co-parents), so I made sure to take an entire month – more days than the formula called for – to myself.

If you’re going through a breakup now, or if you do in the future, remember the formula.

One day of sadness for each month you spent together. I’m no scientist, but after a handful of relationships and testing this out for myself, I can tell you it works. Some people might say that you can’t put a timeline on grief. But I say that is total bullshit. If you don’t give yourself a time limit, you’ll allow yourself to continue to carry the weight for months, even years.

Do yourself a favor and create a deadline for your grief.

Once your time is up, get on your damn feet and start taking steps forward. Don’t let a breakup hold you back from moving on with your life and living the best you can. Let go of your sadness and pain, and go out and explore the world. You’ve got this.