For so long you’ve dreamt of the day she might be yours. Longer so after you realize you will never be with her, but that doesn’t stop the fantasies from barraging your mind every second of every day. When you’re not lurking her, you’re killing time before you lurk her again. Without her you have no motivation to do anything. Without her you would have no one to imagine to be proud of you. Earning money, having a career—these aren’t aspirations unless she’s somehow involved. The only reason you have your job title is because you imagine she’d approve, even though she’s never mentioned anything to you about it at all. You’re drowning for her, and you have no intention of coming up for air.

You exist in your fantasy with her more than you do IRL. If you could build a VR with her in it you’d never leave, except when she wanted you to earn more money for her. Whatever she wants, she gets, and you do so well giving it to her. Even your boss sees how motivated you are, giving you raises and high performance reviews left and right. But none of that matters—the best moments of your life don’t even seem to be real anymore, and you don’t really care. What makes you happy is between you and her and nobody else. When real life gets dull and bad, you simply imagine her enveloping you, holding you, making everything feel better. Nobody else has the ability to make you feel this way, and who cares, you never needed them anyways. It’s you and her against the world.

So how do you go from such bliss to complete nothingness? To deprive yourself of the one person in your life who gives you purpose? The short answer is that you don’t. The long answer is that it takes years of hellish back and forth before you come to the conclusion that it just doesn’t work that way. There’s no forgetting her, no moving on, no livelihood without her. How do you even go about reprogramming all those neuropaths to not think about her? How do you hijack your subconscious to not dream about her every night? How do you not pretend those dreams aren’t the best part of your day? You don’t. To forget her would be self sabotage. Whole swaths of your mind which were once dedicated to functioning for her would be rendered useless, leaving you vegetative, purposeless, as if you never existed.

You can fight it, but after all this time, an addiction like that only gets worse. Are there any real consequences, though? Not that you can think of. Nothing you really care about anyways. Why were you trying to quit in the first place? In her hold over you it’s so easy to forget.

TL;DR: you don’t.