How to Get Over Someone

The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.

I'm one who despite knowing this advice had been debunked many times over and was not actually recommended for efficient healing, routinely made it my first event post heartbreak.

I've always had a hard time shaking memories, my mind working like a goodtime highlight reel even in the midst of a break up from a bad relationship. So the endeavor of creating new memories, new feelings of a new body to reprogram my go-to daydreaming was a kind of therapy for me. Some of my most memorable lovers were the bridges that led me out of the initial pangs of heartbreak.

I remember in particular a man who unknowingly helped me leave a bad relationship, one I couldn’t find a way to leave on my own. I met him at a party toward the end, and his texts in the following weeks acted as a salve, a retreat from the emotional chaos. The night before I had to collect my belongings and move out of my ex’s place, I was scared and needed a distraction. He joined me for drinks. I told him what I had to do the next day and he respectfully acknowledged the weight of it all.

Back at his place, he chastely offered me a shirt to sleep in, vowing not to touch me, showing he knew I was emotionally vulnerable. I slipped off my top and skirt, mirroring his chasteness by turning away from his view even though I wanted him, pretending to “respect myself” the way he was respecting me, but knowing full well from behind he would see the curve of my ass in my lacy underwear. I slipped the t-shirt over my head and over my bra and panties, a new man’s smell enveloping me. Is there anything more intimate than wearing someone’s soft shirt to sleep?

I crawled under his comforter next to the heat of his body, the charade of not wanting to touch making us both insane with wanting to touch. When I turned to his bedside table to turn off the lamp, carefully letting the comforter fall off my hips to show what was under his shirt once more, I felt his hand on my arm, turning me back to him—lights on he crawled on top of me and kissed me deeply. We fucked that night more times than I could count. I didn’t want to sleep knowing what I’d wake up and have to do. I wanted all the newness—his weight on me, the taste of his spit, the taste of his neck, the smells of him and his pillows, and then the next morning, after the new neighborhood, the new coffee shop, I time traveled back to my old life to move out of my ex’s apartment. But I had already tasted the future, and I was much stronger for it.

Want some better advice for getting through a traumatic break up? Read Running. It’s a slow burn, not straight to sex. She’ll get there. But it’s a process.