How long does it take to get over an ex? According to a recent study, there may be a scientific answer: 8.36 years.
Published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in March, the study observed 300 participants to determine how long it takes for the bonds between people to fully dissolve after they terminate their relationship. Psychologist Mark Travers, Ph.D., wrote to Forbes about the study, breaking down its “dumbfounding” findings.
“If you, like many others, are shocked (or perhaps even validated) by these results, you’re most certainly not alone,” the psychologist penned. “Yet, despite the astonishing numbers, these findings make perfect sense in the broader context of research on love, attachment and breakups.”
To explain why it takes over eight years for many people to get over their exes, Travers outlined three important influences on relationships. For starters, love can be addicting.
Love as an addiction
In 2005, research led by anthropologist Helen Fisher revealed that, as far as the brain is concerned, love is about chemically induced motivation.
“Neurotransmitters like oxytocin, dopamine and norepinephrine are all released, each of which contribute to the feeling of attachment and reward,” Travers wrote. “The dopamine release, in particular, can have neurological effects that mirror those of drug addiction. Similarly, cortisol and serotonin levels are lowered — which can respectively result in lower stress and greater levels of obsession.”
In that sense, love can alter the way your brain functions, making it feel dependent on the sensation. Once a relationship ends, the brain is forced to slowly rewire itself to not depend on those neurotransmitters that are no longer present in the same way. It’s a process that takes time.
The stages of grief
Enduring a breakup has been compared to grieving, and science can back up the sentiment. Travers compared the experience to the traditional Kübler-Ross stage model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Completing the process in a way that feels relieving is easier said than done, and it can take nearly a decade.
“The problem is that these stages rarely unfold in a neat, linear fashion,” he explained. “You can feel like you’ve fully moved on, only to see an old photo or smell a familiar scent and find yourself grieving all over again. Emotional closure doesn’t always arrive when we want it to — and for many, it never arrives in the clean, satisfying way we hope it will.
“And even once you do reach acceptance, the emotional shrapnel doesn’t always dislodge entirely.”
When ‘you and I’ becomes ‘we’
Another challenge people often need to overcome after a breakup is the long-lasting consequence of enmeshment — a relationship dynamic where couples begin to lose their individual identities to each other.
“In other words, ‘me and you’ slowly but surely becomes ‘we,’” Travers wrote. “Instead of feeling as though you’re two separate individuals, you start to instead take on a joint, codependent identity.
“When this happens, partners start to place more importance on the needs of the relationship than their own. Their personal thoughts, feelings and desires become lower-order concerns, and partners become an extension of one another in terms of opinions, goals and emotions. They may even suppress their feelings or avoid asserting themselves to keep up this conjoined sense of harmony.”
For such a couple, breaking up would mean beginning a long process of self rediscovery.
“And, the rediscovery is never instant,” he later continued. “It unfolds slowly, as life offers new opportunities to remember who you are, separate from who you were when you loved them. In this sense, it’s perfectly understandable that the time-stamps between ‘lover,’ ‘ex’ and ‘somebody that I used to know’ can span over years.”
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