WTF Does It Mean to “Get Over” Someone?

When talking about breakups, we talk about “getting over” our exes. We talk about “moving on,” and “letting go.” But I think there’s a lot of murky ideas about what the fuck any of that actually means. And I don’t pretend to have THE answer to any of it, but I do think it’s a big mistake to think you’re supposed to stop loving someone before you can move on.

I still love all of my exes. Even the ones who wounded me deeply and I’d prefer never to see again still have a place in my heart. Because that’s part of what love is: an offering of yourself. 

Loving someone and opening yourself to love means setting a place at the table of your heart and inviting someone to take a seat. And I think that particular seat is always taken. Always. Even if we don’t want it to be anymore. The key thing to remember is that there are an infinite number of places to sit.

Love Is Not In Limited Supply

Love is not a finite resource. There isn’t any cap on how much love we have to give or offer to the world. Loving one person doesn’t mean you have less love to offer someone else. It’s not pie. You don’t have a limited number of love slices that you have to figure out how to portion and dole out. 

Rather, we all have an infinite supply of love pies – each made up of different sizes, shapes, and flavors. Each person we love gets a unique pie all of their own, rather than just a slice. 

[Note: since I’m an avid baker, I’m about to launch into a very imperfect extended metaphor about pie. Just bear with me.]

Our capacity for love is like a pie shop. The quantity of love pies we have on our menu is infinite; we keep testing new recipes and expanding our selection. However, the space in the display case – the metaphoric representation of our time, energy, and attention – is limited. Of that, we only have so much. 

So, we can have an infinite number of love pies on the shelves in the kitchen, but only a limited number will fit in the case. We can swap out which pies we’ve got on display (i.e. who we’re giving our energy and attention to at any given time), but that doesn’t mean the pies in the kitchen no longer exist.

Let’s say the size of the pie is a measure of your time, energy, and attention – not the quality or quantity of love you have for a person. When it comes to romance (for folks operating in the monogamous paradigm), there’s one, giant pie reserved for our current partner. But there’s also space for other pies in your case – the friends, family, and dear ones who you’ve got time and energy for.

And to circle this back to the point of this post, I don’t think we ever get to really take back the love pies we baked for our exes (or for anyone we loved, really). Maybe their size just shrinks over time, and maybe they get a little dusty on the pantry shelf. But they’re still there. The bitch of it is, we don’t get to choose how quickly we can banish the pie to the pantry.

Letting Go Means Accepting Incompatibility

Getting over someone doesn’t mean forgetting them or convincing ourselves we don’t or didn’t ever love them. It doesn’t mean trying to pretend their love pie isn’t still on our shelf. What it means is coming to terms with the ways that their particular flavor of pie didn’t work for you.

In the months since my last partner and I split, I’ve given myself a lot of space to grieve that relationship. Comparatively, it was by far the best love pie I’ve ever baked – the most well crafted, the most intensely flavored. And. I’ve lately come to terms with the reality that it wasn’t the right flavor for me. 

I think that’s what getting over someone means – acknowledging and coming to terms with the ways in which you were fundamentally out of alignment or incompatible with someone. I still miss my ex. I can also now clearly see the ways in which we aren’t able to meet each other in partnership – and won’t ever be.

He’s cerebral, and I’m heart-centered. I’m playful and whimsical and ridiculous, and he’s much more serious and structured in his ways of being in the world. And while there were so many ways in which those things complemented each other well, in this case, they also rubbed up against each other in ways that created too much friction for long-term feasibility. 

Being able to see that kind of stuff clearly and accept it as fact is what I think it means to move on, to let go. Getting over someone means getting clear on our needs in relationship and seeing clearly the ways in which someone wasn’t able to meet those needs.

Here are some other ways we can be fundamentally out of alignment with someone we love:

• Wanting or not wanting kids
• Having kids already
• Where we want to live
• Polyamorous vs. monogamous relationship structures
• Discordant attachment styles
• Differing values when it comes to family or career or lifestyle
• Being on different timelines for life trajectory
• Wanting to get married or not
• The ways we handle conflict (or don’t)
• Communication styles
• Cohabitation (or not)
• Sexual needs and desires
• Financial practices
• Sobriety
• Commitment to health – physical or mental

Now, this list isn’t exhaustive, nor is it rigid. People are absolutely capable of changing their beliefs and behaviors. But after it’s over, looking back, it can be helpful and healing to identify the areas where misalignments were fundamental.

It can be really hard when the misalignment seems circumstantial, though. When things didn’t seem to work out because you live in different places or the timing is off. But those things are still facts that we can’t ignore or change. 

And none of this stuff is about the quality of love.

Misalignment Isn’t About Love

The trap we can so easily fall into is in thinking that someone “should” have been able to meet our needs. Especially for those of us who’ve done a lot of work on ourselves, who’ve read the books on attachment, who’ve done the therapy and the EMDR and the hard work of healing, it can be easy to fall prey to the idea that if the other person would only do all of that work, too, then the relationship would be perfect! 

But we have to meet people where they are. If they haven’t done the work or aren’t actively doing it, then that’s where they are. We don’t get to love someone for their potential. We get to love them for who and how they are in this moment. 

A partner’s capacity for change or growth or healing has nothing to do with us. It’s their fucking journey, not ours. And making it about us will only lead to misery.

A friend of mine just went through a really painful and dramatic breakup in which his partner made it about love. There was a lot of “if you really loved me, you would…” thrown around. (Let’s be real, we’ve probably all done that at some point.) But that’s just not what it’s ever about. 

Love can be inspiring, it can make us want to be better versions of ourselves and show up in ways we didn’t know we were capable of. But it’s also not a hammer designed to jam square pegs into round holes. Using it as the metric for how other people show up is only going to make us miserable and feed the lie of unworthiness.

My ex loved me. I loved him. The quantity and quality of that love had nothing to do with why we broke up. Love isn’t a magical lever that can make someone have more time, energy, and attention than they do. It can’t make someone be different than who they are. And it can’t change what someone fundamentally needs in a relationship.

Love Won’t Change Your Needs (and Shouldn’t)

We can absolutely love someone deeply and still not be able to show up in the way they need us to. And someone can love us deeply and still not have what we need to feel safe and seen in relationship. It’s not about love. It’s just about fit, or flavor – to bring it back to pie.

The love pie I baked with my ex was something spicy and fruity and rich –something like peach habanero with salted caramel, vanilla custard, and crunchy topping. It was a completely unique and damn good pie. But no matter how good and interesting and exciting it was, the reality I’ve come to see (with enough distance) is that I kind of need chocolate to find a dessert fully satisfying. That’s the truth for me that I’m now able to see more clearly. And in this admittedly silly metaphor, I think “chocolate” means the capacity for deep empathy paired with inherent lightheartedness – which he just doesn’t have to offer.

Letting go, moving on, or getting over someone means coming to see and appreciate them for who they actually are – not who we want(ed) them to be. It doesn’t mean we stop loving them, just that we come to recognize that they couldn’t actually meet our needs. If they could have, they would have. And vice versa. 

Maybe we couldn’t be the person our ex needed us to be – and that’s okay. We don’t have to beat ourselves up about it. In my last relationship, a whole mess of sexual trauma (that I didn’t really know I had until it came up) got in the way of the sense of safety and connection my ex needed around sex. I’ve now had the opportunity to do a lot of work and healing around that, but it doesn’t change the reality that it was one of the major challenges in our relationship. I feel sad about that, but I also don’t have to fall into a shame spiral around it. 

Our needs are fundamental and valid. Someone else’s capacity to meet those needs isn’t about us – it’s about them and what they have to offer. My trauma wasn’t about my ex, and loving him didn’t make it go away. His somewhat limited capacity for intimacy and empathy weren’t a matter of how much he loved me.

When things don’t line up between us and our partners, it’s not because our needs are too much or they don’t love us enough. It’s just about alignment. While we can and probably should do some stretching of our capacities to show up well for our partners, there’s a difference between leaning in an unfamiliar direction and twisting ourselves into knots trying to be someone we aren’t.

Healing Takes Time and Perspective

In the long term, with enough time and distance, after we’ve given ourselves space to grieve, we get to choose what we take away from relationships. We get to choose our narratives. I prefer to see all relationships in my life as opportunities to get better at being in relationship. And I do keep getting better, even when relationships end.

Relationships that end aren’t failures. Success isn’t a matter of duration or even depth. I believe that on this journey of life, what we’re doing is moving along the path from fear to love. And every single relationship has something to offer us on that path. 

I don’t know that I’m “over” my ex yet. Or how long that will take. But I do have a lot more peace than I did last month or the month before. I can think about what we had and appreciate how amazing it was and also see the ways in which it was ultimately a bad fit. And that helps me stop wanting it. Because I trust that there’s a different, better, more suitable pie out there for me, no matter how good I thought the last one was at the time.