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It usually comes from someone who loves you. You say something small and true, like "I still can't sleep", and they squeeze your arm and say it: "You need to get over it." Or the softer version: "Give it time. Time heals everything."
They mean well. They want the old you back, the one who laughed at their jokes and didn't check the phone every ten minutes. But you go home feeling worse than before, because now you have two problems. You are still hurting, and apparently you are also failing at something everyone else seems to find easy.
If that has happened to you, hear this clearly: the advice is wrong, and you are not failing. There is a reason it doesn't work, and once you see it, the next few weeks start to look very different.
[Add one honest sentence about why you are sharing this, for example a breakup you went through yourself or a friend you watched struggle. If you have nothing to add, delete this line.]
Penny Price has worked as a relationship counselor for over 20 years and has met with thousands of people going through heart-shattering breakups. One thing she tells every one of them is that the hurt is real. If you truly loved your partner, what you feel now is a human response to losing them, "mental, emotional and even chemical", and nobody talks their way out of a chemical response by deciding to be fine.
So when someone says "just get over it", they are asking you to do the one thing a person in love can't do on command. You didn't choose to feel this, and you can't un-choose it either.
Maybe you have started to wonder whether you are being dramatic, or too sensitive, or whether something is wrong with you for welling up in the supermarket when that song comes on. Penny's answer is blunt. The people telling you to hurry up are simply wrong, and the pain you feel is justified.
Time does pass, and some days do get easier. But time on its own does not heal all wounds. Plenty of people wait it out and are left, years later, "with a bit of a hole in your heart that you just choose to bury and try to ignore." That buried hurt doesn't stay put, either. It can affect all your future relationships, and your future happiness.
Waiting has a way of turning into a loop. Penny calls it a "sadness rut": you think about your ex all day and night, you keep going over what must be wrong with you, and you can't picture a happy life without them. The calendar keeps moving while you stay exactly where you were.
The way out runs in the opposite direction from "get over it". In Penny's words, if you don't let yourself fully feel the pain, you can never be free of it. Pushing it down only postpones it, and usually makes it heavier when it comes back.
This one is hard to take in, especially at 2 a.m. when you are replaying the last argument for the fortieth time and rewriting every line you said. But whatever led to the breakup, Penny is clear that you are not at fault for the pain you are in. As she puts it: "That was then. This is now." No healing can happen while you are busy putting yourself on trial.
What you do get to decide is what happens next, and that is far more useful than any amount of blame.
Penny put everything she has learned about that "what next" into a step-by-step eBook called Survival After Separation, and she explains the heart of it in a short video on the 5 key principles to getting over your ex. If the "just get over it" crowd has left you feeling alone, it is a kinder voice to listen to.
Most people say "get over it" because they don't know what else to offer. You can give them something better to do, and give yourself a better plan at the same time.
Penny's view is that you can honor what you shared and still look forward to a bright future. Getting through a breakup properly doesn't mean forgetting the person or pretending they never mattered. It means carrying the good parts with you and letting the rest go, until one day you notice you have gone a whole morning without checking whether they have posted anything.
She describes the person on the other side of all this as "a newer, better and more loving and loveable you". That may sound a long way off tonight. It is still where this leads once you stop trying to skip the hurt and start working through it, one honest day at a time.
You have heard "get over it" enough times. If you would rather hear from someone who has spent two decades with people in exactly your position, Penny's short video walks through the 5 key principles to getting over your ex and how to be happy again. It is for you whether your breakup came as a total surprise, was mutual, or was your own choice.
Watch Penny's short video on the 5 key principles
(As I said at the top, that is my affiliate link.)