A reader told me once that she had cleared every photo from her phone, changed the route she walked to work, and still caught herself smiling at a song in the supermarket, and then felt furious with herself for it. If you are searching for how to get over someone you still love, I would like to say first that the smile is not a failure, because loving someone does not switch off on the day you decide it should.
The honest answer to how to get over someone you still love is that you do not get over the love first and the person second. You build a life that has room for the love to be quieter, one ordinary day at a time, and the feeling changes shape as the days pile up. Nothing about that is slow because you are doing it wrong.
Why you can love someone and still leave
People tend to treat love as the reason to stay, so when it lingers after an ending they take it as proof that the ending was a mistake. I do not think that follows. You can love someone and still know the two of you wanted different things, or that the way you were together was costing you more than it gave, and both of those can be true on the same evening.
It may help to give yourself two sentences to hold at once: I still love them, and this is still not the life I want. Saying both out loud takes the argument out of your head, because the feeling no longer has to win in order to be allowed.
How to get over someone you still love, in small repeatable things
The kindest approach I know is to stop aiming at the finish line and aim at the next ordinary hour. Pick one thing that used to belong to the two of you, a Sunday walk or a playlist or a particular mug, and gently give it a new owner. Take the walk with a friend, make a new playlist with three songs you have never associated with anyone, and drink your tea from whatever mug you like best.
Each of those is tiny, and together they teach your days a new shape. You are not erasing anything, you are showing yourself that the hours still belong to you, which is most of what the missing is really about.
Let the feeling be visited, not fed
There is a difference between feeling the love and feeding it, and it is worth learning where one becomes the other. Feeling it looks like sitting on the sofa for ten minutes when it arrives, breathing out slowly, and letting it be as large as it is. Feeding it looks like checking their profile, rereading old messages, or asking a friend for news you did not need.
You do not have to be perfect at this, and nobody is. If you slip, you have simply learned what your Tuesdays are like, and you can arrange the next Tuesday a little differently. A reminder on your phone that says only ten minutes, then the kettle has helped more people than any amount of willpower.
What the cards add
When people ask me for a card for this stretch, I think of the Star, the woman kneeling at the water with a jug in each hand, pouring one onto the land and one back into the pool. It is the card of tending yourself after something has been taken apart, and what I like about it is how ordinary the work is: a little here, a little there, on a quiet night under a very large sky.
If you want something to read alongside this, the piece on why you still miss your ex goes into what the missing is made of, and no contact, day by day is a gentle map of the first weeks of leaving the door closed.
Where the love can go
I have noticed that love which has nowhere to land tends to get louder, so it helps to give it somewhere to go that is not the person. Write the letter you will never send and keep it in a drawer. Cook for someone, call the friend who always picks up, buy the flowers for your own table. The feeling is real and it deserves a home, and it does not have to be the same home it had before.
Over time, and it is rarely a single day, the love settles into something you can carry, like a stone in a coat pocket that you find on a walk and smile at. That is not the same as being over it in the way the internet promises, and I would argue it is better, because it asks nothing of you anymore.
What is worth doing today
You do not need to finish this today, or this month. You need one small thing that moves an old habit to a new owner, and a kind sentence to say to yourself when the song comes on in the supermarket. If it would help to set the question down in front of the cards, a free reading is a quiet place to do that.
Wherever you land with this, the decision about what to keep and what to let rest is yours, and you have already shown you can walk a route differently, which is further along than it feels tonight.
Clara
