How long does it take to get over a breakup?

Recommend me a heartbreak playlist?

What’s the best food to eat when you have a broken heart?

When my last relationship ended, I absolutely bombarded Google – and my longsuffering friends – with questions like this. My life had never felt so turbulent – in the space of an evening I not only had nowhere to live but also had no idea what the coming weeks, months, years – hey, the rest of my life – were going to look like.

If that sounds overdramatic, it’s meant to.

Believe me, I was astonished – and perhaps a little embarrassed – at how in-pieces I was. I knew that breakups happened to everyone. I knew that by most standards, mine was a decent one – reasonably mutual, no terrible behaviour on either side, definitely the right thing. And I knew – I promise I knew – that a relationship was only one part of a full and interesting and joyful life. Yet I genuinely felt like I cannot and will not cope with how awful this is.

Enter the very specific questions.

It’s interesting, looking back, how much I was hoping I could gamify my way out of heartbreak. That if I followed the right ‘ten easy steps to healing a broken heart’ then I would be miraculously cured – tomorrow.

This kind of thinking probably owes a lot to self-help books. How To Win Friends and Influence People. The Power of Positive Thinking. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The Secret. These are titles that have wormed their way into pop culture and parody, that sell in their millions even as they’re criticised for being full of pseudoscience at best and charlatanism at worst.

What they all promise is certainty – that even at the most devastating rock-bottom of your life (or perhaps the humdrum bleurghness of your life!) – you can follow a neatly-packaged process and emerge triumphant.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of things did help me navigate my heartbreak. I will always be an advocate of the walk-and-talk during times of emotional strife, and pulling on my hiking boots for a wet weekend in Yorkshire with my closest friends did soothe the soul – even if I was sobbing every five minutes. Getting extremely drunk whilst playing Catan with my new housemates also made a positive difference – at least for that evening. The following morning – not so much.

Convincing myself that I just needed to meet someone new, like now and going on an app overdrive – including drinks with three separate people in a single day – was probably a mistake. Though I like telling the story a few years on.

But the point is that none of these things was a miracle cure – not collectively and certainly not individually. Some took me backwards even as they took me forwards. The path through heartbreak is not linear.

This contrast between the desire for concrete answers and the rather messier reality of recovering from a broken heart is what inspired my debut novel, Instructions for Heartbreak. Four friends, all heartbroken in different ways, come together and create a kind of manual, writing down the lessons they’ve learned. This advice is pooled at the end of each chapter. How will post-breakup sex feel? Should you cut off all your hair? Why exactly does getting outside help?

It also inspired my accompanying Substack, where I ask writers to recommend seven things to soothe a broken heart – books among them. It’s interesting, reading these, to notice how much commonality there is. So many people recommend being by water as an opportunity to think and reflect (pun intended). Tea has come up more than once as the ultimate drink to soothe the soul – and with an important element of ceremony. But there are plenty of contrasts too, and I’ve loved learning about people’s favourite comfort reads, building a whole new heartbreak playlist and adding new films to my must-watch list.

Because moving through heartbreak might be a meander rather than a sprint, but it turns out there are myriad things out there that will make a positive difference. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all heartbreak toolkit – but there are infinite different ways you can build your own.

And really, isn’t that more comforting?