How Long Do You Wait to Date After a Breakup?

This is apparently a question with rules.

Although I think the question itself may be wrong.

Time? Three months? Six? A year? Do I wear black?

I've had three "real" relationships in my life.

After my marriage ended, I started dating right away.

After the next relationship, it took me a while.

After my most recent one, well you'll see.

So which one was right?

All of them.

Because I don't think the answer has much to do with time.

It has to do with where you are when the relationship ends.

Seven Years

My most recent relationship lasted seven years.

That's a long time to love someone.

It's also a long time to feel disconnected from them.

Eventually, I couldn't reconcile the two.

So we ended the relationship.

But I wasn't convinced we had exhausted every possibility.

Very "me".

Love is really hard to find.

I had found it.

And there was one thing we had never tried.

Couples therapy.

I kept thinking, what if that one thing turned out to be the thing that worked?

What if twenty years from now we looked at each other and thought,

Thank God we tried that.

That possibility mattered to me, because I genuinely wanted a life with her.

So I went to a couples therapist alone first.

I came away thinking maybe we didn't need fixing.

Maybe we just needed a translator.

Someone who could say, "This is what HE is trying to tell you. This is what SHE is trying to tell you."

Seven years seemed worth fighting for.

So I reached back to my ex using my preferred method.

A nice long document.

I was willing to go.

She wasn't.

"I'm not interested."

That was when I knew.

Not when we broke up.

Then.

I still loved her.

I still do.

But you cannot be in love alone.

And once I accepted that, the question changed.

It wasn't: "Should I wait?"

It was: "What exactly am I waiting for?"

I wasn't waiting for us to try therapy.

She had answered that.

I wasn't waiting for the relationship to somehow repair itself.

That required two people.

And I wasn't going to wait until I stopped loving her because I had no idea when that would happen.

Maybe that's where we get dating after a breakup wrong. We use time as the measurement. I think acceptance may be the better one.

Have you accepted that the relationship is over?

Can you meet someone new without asking them to repair what someone else left behind?

If not, wait.

If you can, I'm not sure what another three months accomplishes.

Meeting someone and committing to someone are very different things.

Dinner isn't a commitment.

It's dinner.

And Then I Met Mary

And then, when I wasn't expecting it, I met Mary climbing the side of a wall.

On our third date, she arrived at my apartment with a fantastic bottle of wine and a dog toy for Charlie.

She remembered things.

She paid attention.

That landed with me.

As my last relationship was ending, I wrote The Refrigerator Test, a book largely about exactly that.

Being seen.

I've spent much of my life noticing what other people need.

I'm beginning to understand how much being noticed matters to me too.

Mary has traits I really like. A lot actually.

One caught my attention almost immediately.

She has no social media.

None.

What makes that unusual is her generation. She grew up in a world where having a social media presence is almost assumed.

She simply doesn't.

In a world where so much of life seems to require an audience, there is something incredibly attractive to me about someone who seems perfectly comfortable living hers without one.

It's also early.

Very early.

I don't know what we become.

I don't need to.

That's precisely the point.

Dating isn't a decision about your future.

It's allowing yourself to discover whether there might be one.

Commitment comes later.

The Line

So how long should you wait to date after a breakup?

Until you're ready to move forward with your life.

Not until you stop loving someone.

Not until you stop missing them.

And not some arbitrary number of months.

Until you accept that what you came from is no more and whatever happens next with that person is no longer in your control.

For me, that was the line.

I still love my ex.

Mary knows that. I wouldn't be dating her if she didn't.

Moving forward doesn't require me to pretend I stopped loving someone I loved for seven years.

It requires me to be honest about where I am and not ask someone new to compete with what came before.

But I couldn't keep waiting for a future that required someone else's participation.

At some point, moving on isn't about leaving someone behind.

It's about realizing you're still here.

And your life is still happening.

Don't wait until you're over them. Wait until you're ready to move forward without them.

Commitment can take its time.

Life doesn't.

Paul Harkins