A map, not a date.
Six questions and a position on a band, not a date. Two of your answers move the marker — how long it has been and how much contact there still is — and under fourteen days it is not drawn at all, because a position that early is noise. The half-the-relationship rule is not in the research, and this page will not invent a replacement for it.
Six questions
The one you control
Free, no signup, and nothing to install.
- AcuteThe first weeks. Loudest right after it ends.
- Turning windowWeeks, not a date. It arrives as ordinary hours.
- RebuildingMonths. Uneven, and there is no finish line.
The one you control
What nobody has put a number on
The two rules you have already read
Half the length of the relationship. A line spoken by a character in Sex and the City in 1999 and repeated ever since as though it were data. No study has tested it.
One week for every month you were together. No traceable origin at all. It turns up in advice columns and forums, uncited, the way round numbers do.
Both are appealing for the same reason: they turn an open-ended thing into arithmetic. Both fail the only test that matters, which is that nobody has ever measured them.
Where these phases come from
- Sbarra and Emery (2005), Personal Relationships. Fifty-eight young adults carried a beeper for 28 days after a breakup and logged what they felt whenever it went off. Love fell in a straight line and sadness on a curve, and days with contact carried more of both while interrupting the fall.
- Lewandowski and Bizzoco (2007), Journal of Positive Psychology. This is where the eleven-week figure comes from. It surveyed 155 undergraduates once, about a non-marital breakup in the previous six months, and asked what they had gained. Nobody was followed through time, so nothing in it could time a recovery. The eleven weeks came from news write-ups of the paper.
- O'Hara and colleagues (2020), Clinical Psychological Science. A recorder sampled ambient sound from 122 recently separated adults on three occasions across five months. More in-person contact with an ex predicted higher distress two months later, over and above how much contact was happening at the time.
None of the three can produce a date for one person. That is a limit of the research, not a gap in this page.
How the marker is placed
Six questions are asked and exactly two of them move the marker: how long it has been, and how much contact there still is. The other four change what the page says to you and nothing about where you sit, which is stated here because a page that quietly weights six answers into one position is claiming a precision no study supports.
The band is a piecewise line, not a curve fitted to anything. The first four weeks occupy the first 35 per cent of it, weeks four to sixteen the next 35, the rest of the first year the next 26, and everything past a year is squeezed into the last few per cent up to a hard stop at 99. Those boundaries are the windows the studies actually measured in rather than a schedule. Contact then multiplies your day count before it is placed: no contact leaves it alone, occasional contact multiplies by 0.82, daily contact by 0.62. So eighty-four days with daily contact lands where about fifty-two quiet days would.
Those two factors are ours. No study publishes a multiplier for contact, and nothing here should be read as one. What the research does say, repeatedly, is the direction: Sbarra and Emery's daily diaries found that days with ex-contact carried more love and more sadness, interrupting the decline of both, and Marshall's 2012 survey found the same pattern for checking a profile. The factors are a way of drawing that direction on a band, and they are the most invented thing on this page.
Under fourteen days the marker is not drawn at all. In the first two weeks a position on a map is noise, and the page says so instead of pointing at a band. Nothing here is a date, and the two rules people arrive having read — half the length of the relationship, one week per month — come from screenwriting and forums rather than from research. The eleven-week figure people quote is Lewandowski and Bizzoco (2007), 155 young adults reporting on themselves after non-marital breakups, and it does not transfer to a separation: O'Hara and colleagues (2020) followed adults after marital separation and found a longer course, with contact tracking distress.
Where these numbers come from
- Addition through subtraction: Growth following the dissolution of a low quality relationship — Lewandowski & Bizzoco, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2007
- The emotional sequelae of nonmarital relationship dissolution: Analysis of change and intraindividual variability over time — Sbarra & Emery, Personal Relationships (University of Arizona research profiles)
- Contact with an Ex-partner is Associated with Psychological Distress after Marital Separation — O'Hara et al., Clinical Psychological Science, 2020 (PubMed)
- Facebook surveillance of former romantic partners: associations with postbreakup recovery and personal growth — Marshall, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2012
Nothing on this site is medically reviewed and nobody here is a therapist. Every figure above was read out of the code that runs on this page, and where a number is our own judgement rather than a published one, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.
What the research can actually tell you
There is no formula, and the reason is more useful than a formula would be. "Over it" is not one event. The crying stops, then the checking stops, then an afternoon goes by without them in it and you only notice afterwards. Researchers do not measure a finish line either. They measure how love, sadness and anger change over weeks, and those three lines have different shapes. So the honest output is a position and a range, which is what the map above gives you.
The eleven-week figure, in full
Search for a timeline and you get eleven weeks, usually with "about seven in ten people" attached. It traces to Lewandowski and Bizzoco (2007) in the Journal of Positive Psychology: a survey of 155 undergraduates about a non-marital breakup in the previous six months, asking what they had gained. One questionnaire, answered once. Nobody was tracked through time, so nothing in it could time a recovery, and the eleven weeks entered circulation through news write-ups. The finding underneath is real and worth keeping — leaving something that had gone flat is often followed by growth, and people notice it within the first few months. That is not a clock. The long version is here.
Separation is a different question
Almost every timing study used young adults in short, non-marital relationships. A separation carries shared money, shared property, children, a shared social world, and often a legal process that forces contact for months. The clearest study on it recorded ambient sound from 122 recently separated adults across five months and found that more in-person contact with the ex predicted higher distress two months later. If you are separating rather than breaking up, read every timeline on the internet as belonging to somebody else.
Contact is the line every study keeps drawing
Sbarra and Emery gave 58 people a beeper for 28 days after a breakup. Love fell in a straight line, sadness on a curve, and the days with contact carried more of both while interrupting the fall. A survey of 464 people found that checking an ex's profile went with more distress, more longing and less personal growth. None of that shaves weeks off a known total; nobody has run that experiment. The claim is narrower and more useful. Silence does not speed anything up. It stops the resetting — which is why contact is the only answer above that moves your marker, and the no contact rule is what deciding it in advance looks like.
That also makes the one measurable thing here the one thing this map cannot give you. A phase is a guess about where you are; a day count is a fact about what you have done. The no contact counter holds the second half, live from the last time you reached out.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a real formula for how long it takes?
Does the 11-week figure apply to a divorce?
Does no contact speed it up?
What slows recovery down?
When should I get help?
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