About breakupnotes
Signed Tessa Mowbray Editor · after a long one
Last updated
breakupnotes is a small set of plain notes about the end of a relationship: what the first days actually need, what no contact is for, and what changes as it eases. It is written for the hour you are reading it in — usually late, usually badly — so the pages are short on encouragement and long on specifics.
What this site does not do
This part matters more than the part above it, because almost everything written about breakups quietly does one of these things:
- It does not diagnose your relationship. No page here can tell you whether it should have ended, whether they were right, or what the ending meant. A site does not know your relationship, and lists of signs mostly confirm what the reader already decided.
- It does not give you a deadline. You will not find a schedule on this site — no count of weeks, no fraction of the length of the relationship, no date after which feeling this way is late. Those numbers circulate because they are comforting to read, not because anyone measured them.
- It does not promise an outcome. Nothing here is a method for being missed, taken back, or won. Where a page discusses getting back together, it says what is true — that couples sometimes do, for their own reasons, and that no technique causes it.
- It does not sort your feelings into stages. Grief after a breakup loops, skips and repeats. Being told there is an order to it mostly leaves people feeling they are doing it wrong.
- It is not therapy, and it is not a crisis service. Heartbreak borders on health. Where a page reaches that border — sleep gone for weeks, eating gone, a dread that does not lift, any thought of not being here — it says so plainly and points to a professional. That boundary is written into the pages, not appended as a disclaimer.
How the pages are written
Drafts are AI-assisted and human-edited, and every page passes the same checks before it goes up. The rules are documented in full in the editorial policy; the short version is:
- A fact gate sits between a draft and publication. It is a file, not a habit: a claim that carries a number cannot render unless that number is already in the approved list, with the publisher named and the population it describes spelled out. A draft that smuggles one in fails the build. Nobody has to remember to check.
- Claims that cannot be supported are cut, not softened. The tempting move is to keep the sentence and blur it — "studies suggest", "many people find". That is the same claim with the evidence removed, so it does not survive review. Either the page can name where something comes from, or the sentence goes.
- Every date on the site means something. A page carries the day it was published and, separately, the day it was last gone over — and the second only appears when it genuinely differs from the first. A modified date that moves for a comma is a way of looking fresh without being it.
- Illustrations are labelled as illustrations. Generated images say so on the page, in text, next to the picture. Diagrams carry structure only — an order, a contrast, a list — never a figure.
Where the numbers come from
There are none, and that is a finding rather than an omission. The widely repeated figures in this subject — how many weeks recovery takes, what fraction of couples reunite, which sex takes it harder — were run through the fact gate, and none of them could be traced back to a primary source that says what the internet says it says. Rather than repeat them with a hedge, this site publishes no statistics at all.
So the pages explain behaviour instead: what an urge does over the following minutes, what changes when the inputs are closed, why nights are worse than days. Where an explanation leans on a body of research, the work is named in the sentence and linked on the sources page, which also lists the rules and the claims that failed verification. If a figure ever passes, it will appear there first, with its year and its method, before it appears in any sentence.
How to tell us we got something wrong
Email hello@breakupnotes.com, or use the contact page. Corrections are the most useful mail this site gets, and a specific one — the page, the sentence, and what is wrong with it — is fastest to act on. Factual errors are fixed within a week, the correction is noted on the page itself, and the page's modified date moves because the content moved. The full corrections policy says the same thing at greater length.
Disagreement is worth sending too. If a page reads as a verdict on your situation, or as a timeline in disguise, that is a defect in the writing and we would rather hear it than not.
Who writes this
I started writing this after the end of a long relationship, from the position almost nothing about the subject is written for: awake at an hour when advice is the only company available, reading pages that were selling something. Half of them promised to get someone back. The other half handed me a schedule for recovery and a stage I was supposed to be in. Neither described the thing that was actually happening, which was much smaller and much more practical than either.
So the method here is narrow on purpose. Take the question as it is actually typed at that hour, answer it in the first two sentences, and describe what can be described — what the next step is, what can safely wait, what a silence does and does not mean. Where a page would have to guess, it says so and stops instead. Nothing on this site carries a figure: the statistics list is empty and the claims that failed to trace to a named publisher are printed as rejected rather than quietly dropped.
What I will not write is the part readers most want handed to them, and that refusal is the whole editorial position. No page here tells you how long this lasts, whether they are thinking about you, what a message meant, or whether the relationship should have ended. I do not know any of that about my own, let alone yours. The address at the foot of every page is a real inbox, and what arrives there gets pages rewritten — but it is never printed back as somebody else's story, because a letter is not consent to be published.
What I arrived with
A search history of questions that felt too small to say to anybody: whether it was reasonable to be this unable to sleep, whether one reply would undo weeks, whether wanting them back at four in the morning meant anything at all. Everything I found answered a bigger question than the one I had, and answered it with certainty.
What changed the writing
Noticing that nearly everything that made it worse came from doing a later thing early — the long message on the first night, the flat decision in the second week, the search for meaning before the shock had finished. Order is describable. What an ending meant is not, so this site sticks to the half that is.
What this site refuses to advise
No strategy for being missed: no contact is described as a recovery tool and never as bait. No interval before you are allowed to feel better, because no such interval exists. No reading of their motives from a message. And nothing clinical — where the honest answer is a doctor or a therapist, the page says that and ends.
Tessa Mowbray is a pen name, and it belongs to this site’s editorial team rather than to a biography you could look up. The name exists so that a page has somebody answerable for it, and not to lend a page weight the text has not earned. There are no credentials behind it: nobody here is a therapist, a counsellor or a coach, and no page is written as though it were treatment. The portrait at the top of this page is not a photograph of a living person — it is an illustration generated with an AI tool, labelled as one wherever it appears, and it is there to give a byline a face rather than to tell you whose. Nothing behind the name is offered as a checkable fact: no qualification, no city, no employer, no dates. What the name does claim is one ordinary thing, which is the end of a long relationship — common enough not to be a diagnosis and not enough to make anybody an authority on yours. No reader is quoted here either: letters arrive and change pages, but a letter is not consent to be published. Drafting is AI-assisted and human-edited, and if a sentence here is wrong the fastest route to fixing it is hello@breakupnotes.com with the page address and the sentence you are disputing.
The same rule stated as policy, with what it forbids: bylines and pen names. What replaces a credential here is meant to be checkable rather than reassuring: named works where an idea comes from a body of research, an empty statistics list with the rejected claims spelled out on the sources page, and a stated boundary at the edge of every page. If a page here is wrong, you should be able to show that it is wrong without knowing who wrote it.
Where to start reading
If you came here from a search rather than to read about us: the sections are the first weeks, no contact and getting over it. The full index lists every page on the site, and the questions page answers the ones people actually type, including the folklore ones, plainly.