Recovery is not a single decision. It is a set of smaller shifts that usually happen at different speeds: you stop refreshing their Instagram, you rebuild the parts of your week that used to include them, you get more comfortable around mutual friends, and you start making choices without running them through an imaginary version of your ex.
For young adults in the US, breakups are rarely clean, because so much of your life is shared infrastructure. You may still be on the same lease, the same group chat, the same campus, the same gym, the same Spotify Family plan. You may be trying to hold together a first serious job, a move to a new city, or a full course load while your personal life quietly falls apart. Advice that assumes you can simply remove every reminder does not survive contact with that reality.
There is also no universal schedule. A three-month relationship can hurt intensely if the connection mattered or the ending was abrupt. A five-year relationship carries more shared logistics and more of your identity. A situationship may leave you with almost no formal closure. A betrayal adds a second problem on top of the loss: whether you can trust your own read of what was happening.
So the useful question is not “should I be over this by now?” It is “what is keeping me stuck today, and what would make next week slightly more workable?”
