How to stop grieving over lost time after a breakup

If there’s any feeling we all know all too well, it’s heartbreak. At some point in our lives, we’ll all feel it, become consumed by it, and feel the unique grief it brings us. 

Much like when someone dies, studies show that we grieve after a breakup(opens in a new tab). And as we all know, there are seven stages of grief: shock, denial, isolation, anger, depression, the emotional rollercoaster, and, finally, acceptance. The one that’s missing though, especially where breakups are concerned, is the part all people feel after a relationship breaks down: mourning the time that’s been lost. 

After acceptance rolls in and you realise the relationship won’t be revived, you’d think most of us would embrace freedom, redownload the dating apps and get back out there. But often, there’s a period of grief for the time you feel was wasted on a person you’ve now lost, even if it was for good reason. So, how exactly do we shift this mindset away from feeling like we’ve wasted precious time on a relationship that isn’t going the distance? 

The post-breakup panic over wasted time

“Not to make a relationship sound transactional, but I feel like I lost an investment,” 26-year-old store manager Daisy* tells Mashable. “My boyfriend of six years broke up with me about three months ago and while I feel like I’m mostly getting over it — I don’t think about him as much anymore and I’m on the apps meeting people — I’m just fuming that I put so much of me into that relationship and now I have nothing to show for it.”

“Not to make a relationship sound transactional, but I feel like I lost an investment.”

She adds, “When I think about it, and I try not to, I literally spent my entire 20s with him. I have no idea if it was worth it. I can’t stop thinking about what my life might have been if I’d skipped him, and spent my 20s doing what other 20-year-olds were doing: Partying, meeting a wide variety of people, trying out different jobs. I can’t stop feeling like I lost my most important years to him.”

This feeling is even more prevalent for some after the pandemic, which warped our concepts of time and led us to sometimes feel like more time has passed than it actually has. For many of us, the pandemic also left us feeling worried about how much time we’d lost to lockdowns and how much we had left to do the things we had wanted to. Add in a breakup, and you’ve got the perfect combination for panic over where all our time went. 

Dating and relationships expert Callisto Adams, who has a PhD in sexuality counselling, says it is common to feel like you’ve wasted time or lost part of your life when a relationship ends because those partnerships are often built on emotional investments and shared experiences. “When a relationship ends, it can feel like you’ve lost not only a partner but also a part of yourself and the future you’d planned,” she tells Mashable.

“This can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, people may feel like they’ve lost their sense of self or self-worth, or that they’ve missed out on opportunities or experiences they would have had if the relationship continued,” she explains, adding that they may also feel guilty or regretful for not ending the relationship sooner.

Breaking up in your thirties

34-year-old property manager Ellen, who asked to use her first name only, has been struggling with the same type of mourning for almost six months. She and her partner mutually ended a relationship around seven months ago, after eight years together. She can’t stop wondering whether those eight years would have been better spent elsewhere. 

She tells Mashable, “I’ve always been the kind of person who knows exactly what they want to do with their life. I had a strict idea of when I had wanted to get married and have kids and how long I’d want to be with ‘the one’ before it happened. Breaking up with someone in my thirties was never part of that plan.”

Ellen says she got over the actual relationship after a few “very hard months”. They both knew it wasn’t right and she got more and more frustrated each year that he didn’t propose to her.

“That part, realising we weren’t right for one another and would be going our separate ways, I could get over,” Ellen says. “But having to start my whole life plan from the beginning at 34? I burst into tears every time I think about how far away I am from my goals, and how much more urgent it is now that I’m older. I’m not ageist and all for people going after new things at an older age, but let’s face it. There’s a biological clock limiting my time with kids. And I had wanted to have them at 35. That isn’t happening anymore.”

She continues, “What frustrates me most is I’m now wasting even more time feeling angry about the time I’ve lost. I keep switching between being upset about the years that have gone down the drain, that I could have put into someone who did want the things I had wanted, and angry that I’m wasting more time now and I can’t pull myself together.”

Adams explains that this feeling of mourning the time lost to a failed relationship can get worse as we get older, particularly if we want to get married or start a family, because relationships are no longer just relationships. They are essentially our access routes to getting the life that we want. 

“As we age, we may feel more pressure to settle down and make long-term commitments. We may also become more aware of the limited time we have left to find a partner or start a family,” Adams explains. 

Adams adds that this feeling of losing time can be more likely to happen when a relationship has been toxic or harmful. “In these cases, the emotional investment is often greater, and the feeling of betrayal or loss can be more intense,” she says. 

28-year-old barista Hattie, who also asked to use her first name only, left a toxic relationship two months ago, after five years together due to the the two of them “constantly screaming at each other over the tiniest things.” She tells Mashable, “The first two years were good but it went wrong after that. We were constantly arguing, and sometimes those arguments would end up with him just storming out and going missing for days. Then he’d just show up again and refuse to tell me where he’d been. It was really toxic.”

“I finally left with the help of my friends and I think we were both relieved. We were both so mean to each other and we definitely both need to get some therapy and work on ourselves.”

Hattie continues, “I’m just in so much pain over the time I spent there. I should have ended the relationship as soon as things got bad. Why did I wait three years? I always see these messages on Facebook and Instagram about life being too short and needing to go after the things you want and I just feel like I failed. I wasted all that time.”

To stop obsessing over the time that’s been lost to a bad relationship, Adams says it’s essential to focus on the present and the opportunities that are available to you now. “It’s also important to take the time to process your emotions and feelings and to seek support from friends and family,” she adds.

“Engage in hobbies or activities that you enjoy, practise self-care, and seek professional help if needed. It’s also important to remember that it’s normal to have feelings of sadness and loss after a relationship ends and to be gentle with yourself as you navigate this process,” Adams recommends. 

Our grief over wasted time when a relationship ends is ultimately embedded in the societal idea that to be single, after a certain age, is to fail. 

Letting go of patriarchal relationship ideals

Thanks to good old capitalism and the culture of pro-natalism, which centres the nuclear family as an ideal we should all be reaching towards, which most of us grow up with the deep-seated idea that we should spend our 20s looking for a partner, and be settled with them, permanently, by around the age of 30. According to one study,(opens in a new tab) these systems make it so when we don’t achieve these societal milestones, we feel anxious, depressed, and worried about being viewed as a failure by family, particularly in-laws, and our peers — particularly for those with limited resources. This means we’re prone to measure our success based on romantic achievements obtained as young as possible, and subconsciously place goal posts around our relationships — even if that’s not how we actually feel towards romance. And breakups can pull us further away from that imaginary finish line. 

“We see relationships ending as a failure because society often views relationships as a measure of success and happiness.”

Adams explains that “we see relationships ending as a failure because society often views relationships as a measure of success and happiness. People may feel like they’ve failed to find or maintain a loving and healthy relationship.”

It’s also natural for people to look for ‘mistakes’ in their own behaviour as a defence when a relationship has been toxic, harmful, or abusive. We’ll think things like ‘I wasted my time with him when I could have been doing something else’ and that’s because, sometimes, it’s easier to pretend the experience was a result of your mistake, and therefore avoidable in the future, rather than entirely down to the person we were attached to. This is, of course, not true. No one is ever cruel to you because of something you did.

This idea that a relationship breaking down is a personal failure is capitalism in its truest form. We grow up with the message that an archetypal relationship developing into a nuclear family is the ultimate destination, and that every relationship breakdown is a personal setback.

But we all have different ideas of what we want our lives to look like, and putting yourself out there to work on a relationship that ends up not working out is never a waste of time. It’s a brave and vulnerable thing to do.

What can help is to look at the lessons we can take away when a relationship ends. Often, relationships breakdown as a result of a communication mishap, a violation of trust, or some type of argument. Within those instances are lessons to take into our future relationships and the way we take care of ourselves. It’s time we all collectively rethink what success in a relationship truly means. People will come into our lives, and leave again, and each time we will learn something about ourselves. The relationship will end, but that impact will always remain. There’s no failure in that.

Remember, all relationships in life will end, maybe after weeks, years, decades, one partner’s death, but they all end. Things ending are not ‘failure’, just life. You can look at your relationships as endings, or simply things that you experienced and now you’re free to try something else.