The world is not short of advice for those who are struggling to get over their exes.
The problem is how much of it is extremely sensible, and therefore, in its way, utterly ineffective.
For what we are dealing with in heartbreak is not some administrative malfunction for which one or two handy pointers will swiftly return a sufferer to the norm, but a wholesale and long-term loss of command over one's emotional constitution, for which the most apposite response may be limitless acknowledgement of the scale of the crisis, unbounded compassion, and a heavy emphasis on the utter reasonableness of madness.
Here, therefore, are a few slightly less conventional pieces of advice for those who, 10 months or 15 years after a breakup, are still finding few more compelling things to think about today than their long-lost love.
Firstly, don't expect to get over this anytime soon.
Severe damage is done by those who, out of great kindness, frame heartbreak as something that we must all inevitably get over with time.
But what if there were no shoulds in this area?
What if we let the pain last just as long, and not a minute less, as it needs to?
Which might be three months, 10 years, or the rest of one's life, but in any case, considerably longer than one's sensible married friends seem to think it should last.
What if we re-categorize this as a chronic illness rather than a passing cold?
