How Do You Handle a Breakup?

About this test

There is no correct way to get through a breakup. There are mechanisms, and they're fairly stable: some people cut clean, some keep a thread, some fill every hour so the emptiness never gets a turn. It's easy to laugh at the mechanisms — they're visible from a mile off — but never at what they're protecting. A breakup hurts for a simple reason: you lose a person and the version of yourself that existed alongside them.

This test describes six ways of coping without crowning any of them. Each has a real strength and a specific blind spot, and most people recognise two in themselves: a main method, and a backup for when the first one gives way.

If a breakup has had you on the floor for months — broken sleep, no appetite for anything, unable to work — that's the kind of thing worth raising with a professional. An online test describes a style; it stands in for nobody.

How it works

Sixteen concrete situations, one answer each. Every answer points at one of the six profiles, and the one that comes up most often wins. No profile beats another: they mainly differ in where they put the pain.