A breakup ends in parts
The question "how much longer?" assumes there is 1 thing inside you: broken or fixed. In reality, several processes happen at once after a breakup, and each has its own pace. In diary studies where people tracked their feelings toward an ex day by day, sadness and anger declined noticeably faster than love and attachment. Sadness is the loudest part, and the first to fade: it is usually what you use to judge whether you are over it. Anger comes in waves and clings to specifics - a phrase, an unfairness: it lasts while the inner argument over who was right continues.
That creates strange math. After 2 months, you sleep, work, laugh at someone else's joke - but in the evening you want to text them, and you give yourself a zero. You measure the whole process by its slowest part, and attachment fades slowest of all: you may not want to get back together - and still miss them. And separate from your feelings is your routine: the route home, the evening message, Sunday morning. There are fewer feelings, but your day is still set up for 2.
So it is more useful to ask not "when will it pass?" but "what exactly is still burning?" "I miss them" and "I am still angry" are different states, and they end at different times.
Your forecast is usually longer than reality
In 1 study, people after a recent breakup were surveyed every 2 weeks for about half a year: how hard it was now, and how hard it would be in a month and 6 months. Their forecasts were consistently bleaker than reality: it was hard, but not for as long or as intensely as they had expected.
The circles are schematic: there is no exact ratio, just a consistent direction of error. People described how they felt now accurately - and missed the mark as soon as they predicted their future selves.
Forecasting wrong comes at a cost. If you are sure there is a year of ruins ahead, you give up trips, meetups, and new challenges in advance - and end up alone with exactly the state you predicted.
Be careful with exact numbers here. The best-known one is about 11 weeks: that is how long had passed for students in 1 survey before they began to name good sides of the breakup. This is self-report, not measured recovery: it refers to the first glimmers, not "it is all over."
About this many out of 10 saw something useful in the breakup by week 11
What affects the length is not so much how long the relationship lasted, but how much your sense of self dissolved into it. If your social circle, habits, and idea of who you were rested on them, the longest-lasting question is "who am I now?" - and that is what stretches out the timeline, not the longing.
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Sources
- Diary measures of feelings after a breakup (Sbarra and Emery, 2005)
- forecasting error for distress (Eastwick et al., 2008)
- blurring of the self in relationships (Slotter et al., 2010). Eleven weeks is a frequently cited 2007 student survey
- the figure is self-reported