Guts, mostly. In losing anything in your life, the first step to feeling better is admitting that it’s a loss. I’m two-and-a-half months past a breakup that I never thought would happen, and I’m going to share with you what that looks and feels like.

Spoiler alert: It’s going to be OK, and I only ate one entire carton of ice cream, so that’s pretty impressive.

Let me give you one word to describe my past dating experiences: mismatched. Best example? A boy who lived for electronic dance music, when the closest I get to that is Electric Light Orchestra (basically, a band your dad probably dug in high school).

But this one was different. We shared common values, interests, and passions. Our families adored each other, and his mom and I would have tea parties when I was in town for the weekend without him. I’d convinced myself that this was it. Before we called it official, I hesitated and my friend told me that I felt that way because it was going to be big. She was right – it was. It was a relationship that I don’t think either of us thought was going to end, but it did. And I survived, and I came out even stronger and happier.

I remember in the last month or so before we broke up, there were nights I would wake up in the middle of the night breathing hard with my stomach twisted into a knot because I had dreamt that we broke up in some awful, malicious way. I would roll over to his side of the bed and nudge him awake so he could tell me it was just a dream and I could fall back asleep knowing all was well.

I’d never had a love like that before. I’d never had somebody who I was so terrified of losing that I would literally have nightmares about it. And then, suddenly, the thing we feared so much happened. It happened, first, over the phone when I sat in my car in suburban Wisconsin bawling my eyes out in my empty middle school parking lot.

It happened when we sat in Union Station that night crying together in the food court (I’m glamorous). It happened one Friday night in my apartment where I handed him a pile of his college T-shirts, books, and the toothbrush he kept at my apartment. It happened every single day for two weeks when I would walk home from work, or the gym, or the train, and cry as I dredged along the icy path to my house.

I lose a little piece of him every day. I lose a piece of him when I make a joke he would have laughed at and I don’t hear his chuckle. I lose a piece of him whenever I need someone to look over a paper at the last minute and I can’t call him. I lose a piece of him whenever I read a book that shakes me up and I can’t say, “You have to read this.” It’s hard. Breakups are hard, and there’s no sense in rushing ourselves through them so we can say we’re doing awesome, and “Look! A new me.” There’s no sense in acting recklessly and behaving as if that person was never a part of who we are.

There are all these formulas for how long it will take to get over someone. Half the length of your relationship, 20 bottles of wine, miscellaneous flings with guys you don’t have anything in common with, a solid dose of Bob Dylan, infinite manhattans and half-priced post-holiday chocolate. False. There is no number or indulgence in Hemingway-like vices; instead, there is a moment I call the "OK Moment." Here’s when it happened for me.

A few weeks ago, I was walking home late from the train after a day that pulled me out of my head and got me excited about the world for the first time in a long time. I freaked out in a Shakespeare class that made me remember what I love so much (words, words, words). I shared French macarons with my Big and Little, who met for the first time. I trained for my new position in my sorority and sat in on my first executive board meeting. And best of all, at the meeting and dinner afterward, I was reunited with my best friend at DePaul, who had just returned from study abroad.

My OK Moment happened late that Thursday night walking home from the train when, for the first time in a long time, I cried happy tears instead of sad. My OK Moment was when I realized this: It’s over. And I want it to be. I want it to be because there are way too many awesome and beautiful things happening in my life and every single day in the world for me to spend another second being bummed out or hopeful about something that isn’t going to happen and shouldn't happen. Yes, it was hard, and yes, I was sad. But here’s the thing about breakups that we never tell each other: They suck for everybody involved. That wasn’t an easy decision for anybody, and all people who were connected to the two of us had to grieve it too. Another thing we can't seem to get into our heads? You have to learn how to love and lose before you find that person who shakes your world up even more and gets you half-price post-holiday chocolate on good days, too. Someone who doesn't care that your room is always messy and you drink enough coffee to necessitate a line-item for it in your budget.

The biggest moment will be this: when you decide to say “OK.” The OK Moment is the moment where you stop disagreeing and waiting for something cosmic to happen so that everything changes and your cards are reshuffled. It’s when you decide that this is ending for a reason, and the reason is to make you a better person. It’s the fifth stage of grief – acceptance – and it’s when you’re ready to move to something that’s just for you. Because, at the end of the day, this is your life that you get to live, and that’s a really cool gift, definitely not one that you should waste a day of being sad.