4 guides
The first weeks
What to do after a breakup, in order: the first day, the first week, and the decisions that can wait. Practical notes, no slogans.
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The first stretch after a breakup is mostly logistics wearing the costume of a crisis: where to sleep, what to tell people, what to do with the phone in your hand. These pages take the questions in the order they actually arrive.
The order matters more than it sounds. Almost everything that makes the first weeks worse comes from doing a later thing early — the long message on night one, the flat decision in week two, the analysis of what it all meant before the shock has finished. Each page here is scoped to the stage it belongs to, and says plainly what can wait.
The body gets its own page, because for most people this is physical before it is anything else: sleep gone, appetite gone, a chest that aches. That is the acute phase behaving normally, and it is treated here as maintenance rather than as a personality failure.
Nothing here promises healing on a schedule. It promises the next step, described plainly.
How to read this section
01
Do today, not the whole thing
The tasks on these pages are deliberately small — sleep somewhere, eat something, tell one person. Anything larger belongs to a week that has not arrived yet.
02
Decisions can wait; the phone cannot
Moving flat, quitting the job, deleting a decade of photos — all of it keeps. Muting them everywhere is the one thing worth doing tonight, because it stops the wound being reopened hourly.
03
The low point usually comes late
The first days run on shock and logistics. The harder stretch tends to arrive when the support wave recedes and the absence becomes ordinary — knowing that stops it reading as relapse.
Where this section stops
None of these pages will tell you how long the first weeks last, because nobody honestly can. What they can tell you is what the next step is, and which steps are safe to skip for now.
If sleep or food have barely happened for days rather than nights, or the sadness comes welded to hopelessness that will not lift, that is a health question rather than a breakup one — a doctor or therapist is the right reader for it, and going is not an admission of anything.