--- title: How to Get Over Your Ex description: Limerence, an obsessive form of attraction, can keep us stuck on people long after they’re gone, writes Meehika Barua. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/03/16/how-to-get-over-your-ex/ author: Meehika Barua article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-03-17T10:00:03.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-19T07:44:51.312Z article:section: Ideas og:title: How to Get Over Your Ex og:description: Limerence, an obsessive form of attraction, can keep us stuck on people long after they’re gone, writes Meehika Barua. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/03/16/how-to-get-over-your-ex/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1cff62b971cf0d92/69b87167ff8e2733833f333b/How_to_Get_Over_Your_Ex.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: How to Get Over Your Ex.png og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How to Get Over Your Ex twitter:description: Limerence, an obsessive form of attraction, can keep us stuck on people long after they’re gone, writes Meehika Barua. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1cff62b971cf0d92/69b87167ff8e2733833f333b/How_to_Get_Over_Your_Ex.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  IDEAS Time ideas # How to Get Over Your Ex > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. by [Meehika Barua](https://time.com/author/meehika-barua/) ## Meehika Barua Meehika Barua is a freelance journalist who is currently working on her memoir on friendships and love. Mar 17, 2026 10:00 AM UTC  Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling (Source Image: miniseries/Getty Images) by [Meehika Barua](https://time.com/author/meehika-barua/) ## Meehika Barua Meehika Barua is a freelance journalist who is currently working on her memoir on friendships and love. Mar 17, 2026 10:00 AM UTC I still think about the guy I dated for two months in 2024\. I wonder if he could have been “the one” had I not self-sabotaged by trying to pick fights or acting distant. My friends find it easier to point out that I’m just romanticizing that early phase of dating and putting him on a pedestal. On a slow weekend recently, I thought about one friend who love-bombed me in 2022 sending me “Love you” texts within a month of meeting and BFF memes on social media with captions like, “This will be us in fifty years drinking tea from our porch while our grandkids play outside.” When we first met, I thought she was my twin. A year later, I realized that it was a one-sided friendship where I was the one initiating every text exchange and plan to hang out. For the longest time, I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me because it takes me months or years to get over people. Whether it was a break-up or the end of a friendship, the moving on phase seemed like it was 10 times harder for me than for my friends. It wasn’t until I [stumbled upon the word “limerence”](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLkPULdxEXv/) on social media that it all started to make sense. Limerence is a term used to describe an intense and often obsessive infatuation or romantic attraction towards another person. People who experience limerence will find themselves daydreaming about their object of affection, idealizing them, and obsessively seeking their attention—whether this is in reality or purely in fantasy. In friendships, platonic limerence is an intense infatuation with someone in a non-romantic way. It brings persistent thoughts and a longing for closeness. Both romantic and platonic limerence are marked by a strong focus on the positive qualities of the desired person, with the individual experiencing a heightened sensitivity to their presence or absence. In order to understand this phenomenon more deeply, I reached out to [Christine McInnes](https://www.theanchoredself.com/), a therapist in London focused on addiction recovery. She told me that limerence is a self-soothing mechanism created in early childhood as a way of managing emotional distress. “It begins with a child using their imagination to create a feeling of connection,” [McInnes](https://www.theanchoredself.com/) told me. “When the child finds themselves alone, they imagine that they are actually with a person they love. This innocent form of self-soothing can then become romanticized and sexualized later in life.” As someone who has emotionally unavailable parents, I have longed for connection and attunement as an adult. Now I realize that because I didn’t get validation or reassurance in my childhood, I find myself in all the symptoms of limerence. When I started watching [McInnes’ YouTube videos on the topic](https://youtu.be/Js7C97jgyfs?si=q-yipGycYsSELwTc), it made sense why I have been susceptible to lovebombing by partners and friends. In her videos, she explains [“twinning in limerence](https://youtu.be/Js7C97jgyfs?si=q-yipGycYsSELwTc)” which is a trauma-based pattern used to attune to people through charm. “When a person is twinning, they are not being their full self, they are becoming a version of themselves that matches what they believe you would want from a partner,” McInnes told me. This can trigger limerence particularly in someone who has a deep longing to be perfectly attuned to another because, in childhood, they felt abandoned. In the past, I have classified that as a mystical bond that I felt when I made a new friend in my early 20s and thought she was my long-lost twin, or when I met a potential partner and called it a “twin flame,” a popular term in astrology for a destined soulmate connection. McInnes also does a series of group classes on limerence on the [online therapy platform BetterHelp](https://time.com/7014816/does-text-therapy-work/), which is where I first found her and realized that there are people like me who have been obsessed with past lovers and friends. She recommends [Love Addicts Anonymous](https://www.addictionhelp.com/recovery/love-addicts-anonymous/) and [Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous](https://slaauk.org/), which frame limerence as an addiction, and help people who feel stuck with 12-step meetings, following a similar model as meetings for alcohol or drug addiction recovery. I assumed fantasizing about exes was normal. For every ex, I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what I would say to them if I ran into them. Would I just ignore them or would I play it cool? Where would I run into them? Perhaps on the train, or perhaps at a bar? Limerence creates physical symptoms such as an increased heart rate, butterflies in the stomach, and a rush of adrenaline, all of which I feel during the fantasy reunion in my head. Yet now I know that this sense of emotional dependency has been holding me back. Understanding limerence hasn’t stopped me from obsessing about people from my past, but it has stopped me from looking at their social media every week and spiraling over their life updates and how happy they seem. I can now see my former lovers and friends as humans who I put on a pedestal. When I catch myself replaying imaginary scenarios in my head, I try to ask, “Am I actually missing this person, or am I just missing the feeling of being chosen?” Learning the difference might just be the most important step in letting go. [TIME Ideas](https://www.time.com/ideas) hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. 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