We ended it in March, mutually, no betrayal, just the same argument for two years. I moved flats, I see friends twice a week, I am fine at work. Then I look at her account most nights and lose the evening. For people who have come out of something this long: how long before the checking stopped, and did you have to do something deliberate about it or did it fade?
Seven years, ended amicably, and the honest timeline was that the acute part took about four months and the checking took eleven, because the checking was a habit rather than grief. It stopped the week I blocked rather than muted - muting left the door open and I walked through it every night. The formula people repeat about half the length of the relationship is nonsense, mine was nothing like that in either direction.
Block rather than mute is the whole answer for me too. Muting made me feel mature and cost me about four months.
I did the soft version first - unfollowed, kept the account, told myself I was being reasonable - and lasted three weeks before I was looking at her friends' accounts instead, which is somehow worse. Then I deleted the app off my phone for a month and left it on the laptop. Removing the thing that gets picked up at 11pm did more than any amount of deciding not to look.
The friends' accounts stage is real and nobody warns you about it. That was the point I realised I was doing research, not healing.
Different read: the checking is not really the problem, the empty evening is. Twice a week with friends is decent, and it leaves five nights with a gap in exactly the slot the relationship used to fill. I filled mine with a class that met on the two worst nights and it turned out I did not need willpower, I needed somewhere to be.
One thing that helped me measure it: I wrote down how many days a week I checked, on paper, once a week. It went from six to five to three over a couple of months, which I would never have noticed from the inside because the bad nights are the ones you remember. If yours does not move at all over the next couple of months, that is worth mentioning to a professional rather than grinding it out alone.
@cure_rack_cody · 2w ago
Five months out of six years is early. You are not behind, you are in it. The checking will outlast the sadness because it is the last remaining piece of contact and you will have to end it on purpose.
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