About

About Moving On Well

A small set of pages for the weeks after a relationship ends. Each one takes a question people really search for and answers it with what is known, what is only repeated, and what nobody has measured.

Not therapy Sources named No promises

Limits first

What this site is not

It is not counseling, diagnosis or treatment, and nobody here will tell you how your situation ends.

The pages cover what to do after a breakup, how long getting over it takes, the no contact rule, what the "signs" can and cannot tell you, missing an ex and rebound relationships.

You will not find

Methods for getting an ex back, making someone jealous or making them miss you.
A guaranteed number of days after which it stops hurting.
Advice to stay in touch with someone who frightened or hurt you.
Stories about invented clients or readers.

Method

How a claim gets on a page

It needs an origin

A number about how people recover has to lead back to a study, a large survey or an official body, and the page links to it. We say who was studied, because much breakup research was done with college students over a few weeks.

Thin evidence is labeled thin

A lot of popular advice in this area has no research behind it. Where that is the case, the page says so in plain words. An honest "nobody has tested this" is more useful than a confident number.

A second reader checks it

Before a page goes live, its research claims are checked against the sources again, separately from the writing. Sentences that said more than the source did have been rewritten or removed.

Advice is marked as advice

Where a paragraph is our own judgment and not a finding, it does not carry a citation and should be read that way.

Our own numbers

What we count ourselves

Every page has one section built on something we measured: ten years of search volumes, what the highest-ranking pages actually claim, or what people type into a search box.

Those sections give the date, the method and the weak points. They describe what people search for and what websites say. They are not studies of how people recover, and the pages do not present them as such.

Authorship

Who writes it

The pages are signed "Moving On Well editorial team". There are no named authors and no expert portraits, because we will not make any up.

Nobody writing here is your therapist. Researchers named on the pages are cited from their published work and have no connection to this site.

Funding

The site may earn a commission when a reader follows a link to a dating service and signs up. The reader pays nothing extra.

Where those links are, and where they are not

They appear only in passages about being ready to date again, mostly on the page about rebound relationships. They are kept away from passages about distress, and this page and the privacy page have none. There is no advertising and no mailing list.

More than a page

If you need more than a page

Reading is not a substitute for talking to someone. If weeks pass and you cannot work, sleep or eat, a doctor or a licensed therapist is the right next step.

If you are thinking about harming yourself, in the United States you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour. Outside the United States, contact your local emergency number.