One of our most powerful longings, in relationships where we have suffered (by which we chiefly mean relationships with our parents and our lovers), is for something we colloquially call ‘closure’. We may not always consciously know why closure is important, but we feel its absence keenly.
In the fantasy of closure, long after certain wounds have been inflicted, we imagine being able to sit down with a parent or an ex. It might have been months or decades since the difficult times. We will, in many ways, have moved on. We might be a high-earning executive at an important corporation. We might be in love with a beautiful and kind new partner, with whom we have plans to start a family. Nevertheless, something in us continues to feel responsible for an earlier version of ourselves: a little boy or girl who was roughly handled, who got shouted at repeatedly, who was humiliated and mocked. Or for a loving side of us that had to suffer the indignity of an affair, that had to watch their then-beloved partner slide away evasively and mysteriously, that wrote a succession of long letters that went unanswered.
Why Closure Is Important – and Why It So Often Eludes Us
That’s why we have called for a meeting with a now elderly parent who arrives with a walking stick – or for a tea with our ex who greets us warmly in a new bright-blue outfit. The fantasy might go something like this: ‘I felt from the first moment as if you favourited my sister; nothing I did was right. Why were there two rules in our family? One for me, and one for her …’
And the parent, who has thought about this at depth, who has spent hours reflecting on their role, who has ached to make amends, will say: ‘Darling, I know how much this has hurt you. I’ve tried so hard in recent years to make it up to you. I know you resent me fiercely still. What matters is to say how much I love you and how sorry I am for the pain this caused you …’ They might go on to give a backstory to their cruelty. They behaved like this because of their relationship with their own mother. They know why they were imperfect. They’re accountable. They understand themselves. They’re extremely sad about it all.
Likewise, the dream is that the ex-partner will have shown up with a raft of insights. They will have gone to therapy and benefited. They’ll have used the months since the parting to put together the pieces: ‘I didn’t dare to explain that I wanted a new start. I felt grateful to you but also so guilty. It’s from this that the affair came. It’s not excusable – you’ve every right to be furious with me …’
But though such poignant moments must exist – though there have, in the history of the planet, undoubtedly been such scenes by pyramids and waterfalls, in temple gardens and colonnaded arcades – we can confidently, quietly insist that they have always been the exceptions.
Far more common is ongoing dislocation and mystery: the parent who flares up, ‘How do you mean? Why can’t you be more grateful? Yet more moaning, I suppose.’ Or the lover who denies everything or vanishes into a sentimental fog: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t think very clearly. I’m sure you’re right. I must be going …’
We can come away with a dictum: if they were damaged enough to hurt us as they did, they won’t have the wherewithal to heal us as we hope. No one who could crush a five-year-old child or rebuff a caring partner will plausibly be able to turn around in years or decades and make it right. One either has the capacity for kindness and maturity – or one doesn’t. One either has tendencies to sadism – or one doesn’t.
This is not to say that we should stop seeking closure; only that we should stop seeking it from the very people who made it necessary.
Finding Healing in Unexpected Places
We need to take our longings to other, more effective figures: to wise therapists, to kind friends, to new partners, to substitute parents. These will be the ones who will explain, who will set pain in context, who will replenish our reserves of hope. In learning why closure is important, we also begin to understand that its source is rarely those who wounded us. There are people who can right our wrongs; they are just very seldom the confused, unformed people who actually wronged us.
There is nothing more natural, at the start of love, than to seek out happiness. We scan a map and plot where we might go later in the summer. A weekend here. A rental house there. Or what about a special time near…? We long to create memories, isolate beauty, enjoy our senses: a fish place by the river, an Italian hilltop town, a Belgian art gallery. We invite restaurant owners, shopkeepers and museum curators to delight us. Half the commerce of the world is about decorating the early days with joy – blissful moments that may one day deepen the pain after a breakup.
The Hidden Cost of Beautiful Beginnings
But if we are experienced at love, we know a darker truth. If love were ever to go wrong, these would be the centres of agony.
When a relationship collapses, it isn’t the painful bits that we ever focus on. We don’t lament that we argued. We don’t cry that there was a hideous scene of jealousy outside the museum. We aren’t furious that they constantly misunderstood our relationship to our brother. All of this has been paid for already. It’s old news.
What surges forward is something unexpected: the beautiful bits. The trip to the hills. The hotel room in Rio. The jacket we found for them in the little shop by the winding alleyway in Seville. The funfair in Helsinki.
We thought all these things had been laid to rest, that their recollection served no further function. But some nostalgic demon inside us insists on going to explore each one in ghastly detail.
And so, a wariness may befall us as a new relationship builds: by all means, let’s do the lovely things. Let’s not avoid the picnic in the park. Let’s book the holiday to the islands. But there is also a suspicion and a fear: a Greek island, again …? Another trip to a gallery? Dare we really risk doing this? Dare we stop the car and suggest a swim in a lake, take a picnic blanket and go and buy cheese and bread from a farmer? Can we truly bear the cost if things were to go wrong, if they were to cool, if six months or years from now, they said they needed some space or wanted to pursue a job in another country?
Understanding the Pain After a Breakup
There is no pleasure that isn’t an emotional catastrophe in waiting. There is no delightful moment that we won’t know how much we’ll have to suffer for until the end. The pain after a breakup is always rooted in joy. Call no lover happy till they die.
It is tear-inducing just how much can go wrong in love because we have failed to master a basic-sounding yet hugely important skill – one that would probably have been in place if our childhoods had given us the right experience: the art of saying how we feel, relatively close to when we actually feel it, in a way that can be heard, with gentleness and self-possession, before our affections are irreparably affected. This, in essence, is how to express your needs in a relationship: not with drama or accusation, but with sincerity and care.
The Risks of Being Too Accommodating
Imagine that we have been single for a long time. There have been many months, perhaps years, in which we wondered whether we deserved to be with someone, doubted our qualities and feared that love might never return.
Then, unexpectedly, someone comes into our lives who seems a delightful prospect. They look nice, they can talk properly, they are interested in us, and we had tender chats.
Then slowly, they begin to mention that they love sailing and that they share a small boat with friends out on the lake. Their excitement at being on the water is palpable. They are so keen for us to join them and enjoy their hobby. They mention an ex who wasn’t so enthusiastic – and what a pity that had been for them as a couple. The stakes feel high. So we go – of course we do – and we try very hard to be a good sailor. We compliment them on the (surprisingly tiny) boat, we admire the views, we help with the sails, we do our best with the stove. And then, after the third sleepless night, uncomfortable and exhausted, we can’t take it any longer. There’s a side of us that wants to scream at them for not noticing how ill at ease we feel, that hates them for their self-centred hobby and wants to swim to shore and never contact them again.
There are identical versions of this moment in other domains: the other loves long country walks. Or playing the guitar. Or talking about Hindu poetry. They garden constantly. Or they have a particular thing they like to do in bed which is painful and frightening.
Learning the Language of Our Needs
In a better-arranged world, we would have been trained for such moments from an early age. Alongside lessons in physics and geography, we would have learnt – in our Emotional Communication classes – how to speak about our most intimate needs without causing upset.
The teacher would have told us to begin with a fundamental conviction: our needs are legitimate. There isn’t anything wrong with us for not liking sailing or not wanting to go on exhausting country walks or not being thrilled by horses or being scared of old churches. These aren’t problematic positions – they are just us.
At the same time, it isn’t fair or kind to say nothing at all and then, when we are at the end of our tether, to start shouting our needs, acting out our rage and blaming them for not being able to read our mind, when we have never taken care to open up to them.
It is incumbent on them to listen, of course, but it is equally incumbent on us to speak. We have to find our way to a poised manner of imparting difficult messages. In this ideal school, there would be competitions testing us playfully on how to handle the most difficult messages in the most effective ways. There would be prizes for the victors and a marshalling of the best competitive spirit.
Example questions might include:
– You are frightened by their religious convictions. What do you say?
– You are uncomfortable with how close they are to their sister. What do you say?
– They think you adore their cooking, and you don’t really. What do you say?
To prepare, there would be modules on the constituents of successfully phrased complaints:
- Start with reassurance: ‘I love you a lot, there’s just this thing…’ ‘Please know that I’m only speaking because of how much I care about you, and about us…’ ‘My respect for you is boundless. I wouldn’t be here otherwise, it’s just there is this thing…’
- State your position with a calm conviction in your right to speak: ‘There’s an issue I have about sleep…’ ‘For me, poetry has always been a matter of…’ ‘I know most people don’t see eye to eye with me on this, but…’
- Give them room to disagree. They don’t have to adopt your position – only acknowledge the differences with grace. You aren’t looking for perfect alignment, just a good enough understanding. ‘It’s fine that we might not be on the same page…’ ‘I know you can’t agree with me on this, but hopefully…’
- And if, even after this, things don’t go well – if they become furious or start to blame you – then you have done yourself an enormous favour. You’ve caught the problem early, and now – with sadness, but also haste – you must remove yourself from the situation and look elsewhere. Someone who has no space for your politely worded complaints cannot, whatever other qualities they may have, be a person for you. How to Express Your Needs in a Relationship‘It’s been a pleasure getting to know you to this point, but I don’t think we’d be doing either of us a favour if…’
How to Express Your Needs in a Relationship
Ideally, we would have learnt all this at school. But it would, of course, be even better if the groundwork had been laid down at home. If, when our needs emerged, a parent was on hand to model for us how to say how we felt without causing discord on the one hand or abandoning ourselves on the other. It would help immensely if a parent had said, the first time we needed to go to the bathroom but felt an inhibition about asking: ‘You must always simply tell Mrs Jenson that you want to go. Put your hand up politely and they will understand.’ Or: ‘Just tell Sophie’s mother that you don’t like chocolate cake and you’ll be happy enough with something simple like bread and butter.’ And if this parent could also have lent us the sense that if someone has no room for our politely phrased complaint, then we have every right not to blame ourselves: ‘Well, that teacher doesn’t sound very kind, it’s not decent to behave like that…’
This matters because too many relationships falter on the basis that someone has lost their tongue. There is a limit to how long we can suffer in silence before love goes cold. We can’t keep having sex that makes us uncomfortable before we go off it entirely. We can’t keep sailing until we despise them for making us tired and sunburnt. We need to catch the problems while there is still goodwill.
It can seem that the enemy of love is being ‘difficult’. That, in order to be a good partner, we shouldn’t introduce too many discordant needs. But with time, we come to realise that the real enemy is not knowing how to express your needs in a relationship. We are allowed to be as complicated as we are – so long as we can explain how the world looks through our eyes. We don’t have to have ‘normal’ sleeping patterns, or ‘normal’ tastes in sex, or ‘normal’ views about animals. What we need is the skill of taking another person into our world so they can understand that we are at once good people and different people. We need a profound conviction that it is entirely possible to be ourselves and to be loved, so long as we have spoken gently. And that we won’t accept anything less – from them, or from ourselves.
We are, most of us, familiar with a particular kind of challenging human: the sort who seems unable to listen to much of what we might have to say to them. Their behaviour can be exasperating – yet it invites a deeper curiosity, one that touches on the psychology of not listening.
We mention we recently went on holiday to Greece … Really, they say, well they went there last year and there was a small hotel, and their friend said that … We explain that we suffered a flood in our house. What a pity, they reply, because here’s something about plumbing and the state of boilers in older properties. We note we have a colleague from Finland in our office. Well, during the Second World War, there was a battle near Helsinki where … There is nothing we might share – however urgent or sincere –that won’t very quickly be subsumed into one of their pre-existing, disconnected imperatives.
The Psychology of Not Listening
We’re used to considering such cases as stemming from a lack of manners. The person who talks relentlessly about themselves and their themes must – first and foremost – be rude. They haven’t been educated to consider others’ feelings. They have forgotten the laws of etiquette. They’re the equivalent, in the conversational domain, of a ruffian who wipes their mouth on the back of their hand or never writes thank-you letters.
But what appears as a lack of consideration may, in reality, stem from something far deeper and more psychological. We’re not dealing with an omission so much as a compulsion, not an excess but a deprivation. The person hasn’t just forgotten to listen; they’re unable to do so.
And the reason is poignant: fear. The non-listener registers an acute sense of danger whenever they are called upon – in company – to attune to another’s reality, as though there was a stark choice: either them or us. They vaunt themselves, circle their pet themes and chatter endlessly to fight off a terror of annihilation. It isn’t egoism or over-confidence, but an extreme feeling of fragility and invisibility. The non-listener must shut others out in order to keep themselves alive. If they were to park their concerns for even a few moments (to ask us about our work, or our sore elbow), they might feel there would be nothing left of them when they returned.
The Roots of Generosity
Inevitably, there will be a sad backstory. They cannot listen because – for a long time, in the early years – they were not the focus of anyone else’s interest or delight. No one was especially charmed by their drawings; no one remembered their smaller sorrows and pains. It wasn’t amazing to anyone else that they existed. They have grown into the over-zealous guardians of a sense of specialness that they should have received from others from the start.
Their behaviour only serves to evoke what an achievement it is to be able, at times, to be the one who asks the questions and takes the back seat. If we can do this sincerely, it will be because someone, somewhere in our past, dropped to our level and tried to imagine the world through our eyes. Amidst their own cares and chores, someone gave us room. We came to them with a drawing (of a buttercup and a giant spider) and they asked us for the origins of our inspiration. They listened carefully when we told them of our plans for an underwater world or our fantasy of a wand that could turn furniture into chocolate. It was such early generosity that now makes it tolerable for us to immerse ourselves in the twists and turns of another’s breakup or a second cousin’s house move. We aren’t so much polite as fortunate.
None of this removes the problem, but it may just give us something a little more interesting to consider the next time we are bored into a claustrophobic stupor by one of our fragile, kind, wounded non-listening acquaintances: a chance to reflect, with compassion, on the psychology of not listening, and on what early absences might have made such behaviour feel like a necessity.
At the core of heartbreak lies a particularly cruel belief: the belief in our departed lover’s profound uniqueness. In the wake of our abandonment, we are visited by the certainty that our companion can and never will be replicated. It was precisely their way of tucking in their sleeves, of leaning forward in a restaurant, of navigating a train station, of closing their eyes in a kiss that made them who they were. And therefore, our grief can – despite the many inconveniences – fairly have no bounds. It is one of the defining emotional tasks of healing after a breakup to confront this belief and slowly, patiently, dismantle it.
When hearing our laments, well-meaning friends may – with great kindness – begin to point out what appears, from the outside, to be an almost obvious truth: that there are eight billion people on the planet and that the departed lover cannot, therefore, be fundamentally irreplaceable. That we must be exaggerating the difference between one person and another. That we must be guilty of turning a standard human into an irreplaceable deity.
Yet such kindly arguments hold no more force than a parent’s insistence to a young child that their favourite teddy, Nonou, forgotten in the crack between seats on a transatlantic flight, can be lightly replaced with a visit to a toyshop. Whatever the fine reasoning, we return to our sodden pillow with renewed sorrow.
What We Truly Loved
To rescue ourselves, it may eventually be necessary to take on that driest of disciplines: philosophy – and in particular, the branch of it that considers the foundations of personal identity. We should dare to ask ourselves a peculiar-sounding question: what was it that we loved in our departed lover? At first, the enquiry may make little sense. We didn’t love anything as such – we just loved them: Roisin or Mateo, Keiko or Rajesh, Ximena or Yusuf, Layla and Santiago … There weren’t any reasons, there was only specialness, and now there is pain.
But we should stick at the question and, through our tears, try to tabulate certain ideas in response. What begins to emerge is that – in truth – our affection can’t ultimately have been just about their existence. It must have focused on certain qualities we perceived in them. When we reflect closely on why we loved them as we did, it was because of qualities: Roison’s tenderness, Mateo’s playfulness, Keiko’s sense of irony. In other words, though it seemed as if we loved a person purely and simply for themselves, what we really loved were a raft of qualities they harboured: their way of listening without judgment, their ability to find humour in mundane moments, their persistence in the face of obstacles, their curiosity about strangers’ stories, their talent for finding beauty in ordinary places.
Healing After a Breakup With a Qualities-Based Understanding of Love
Philosophy invites us to move from a person-based understanding of love to a qualities-based one; to shift from thinking that what made someone lovable was that they were Valentina or Kenji, Noor or Kwabena, to recognising that we loved them because they had a strong feeling of fairness or a dark sense of humour, an ease around children or a sensitivity to poetry
We might think this an arcane and incidental distinction – hardly worth the effort of making it. But it opens up an avenue for eventual recovery. For unlike a love of personhood, which is necessarily a singular phenomenon, a love of qualities of character exists free of any specific individual. Qualities, by their nature, are transpersonal – they are found across the species. They are the birthright of all humanity. Our lover borrowed them, made a temporary space for them, but they could not have created them or claimed a monopoly on them. They do not own justice or poetry; they do not have an eternal claim on humour or tolerance.
It can be a particular worry that, by starting up a new relationship, we will end up being disloyal to our ex. But according to this thesis, we can be properly loyal to a person we adored not by continuing to love them (when they no longer want us), but by continuing to love what we loved in them, in new people. We can shift our loyalty from the person’s name to the loveable qualities beneath their name – which we can search for and honour in a variety of alternative candidates, thereby preserving the basis of our affection despite the unwanted departure. By understanding more clearly why we loved them, we can loosen our obsessive focus on them. Our ex becomes less uniquely adorable once we become clearer about what we adored about being with them. We are not – by moving on from them – being asked to abandon what we loved. We’re being encouraged to locate those cherished traits in new domains.
When we say we miss them, it is, in the end, something narrower we are nostalgic for: good qualities. It is tenderness, worldliness, conviviality or open-mindedness we loved – first and foremost – not, inherently, the bodily envelope in which these qualities came to rest. We encountered these things in them and with them, and so it’s natural to assume, at first, that losing the person means losing everything linked to them. It’s true that we’ll never meet another person exactly like the lover again. They are unique. But the good things we met in and through them are general. They exist elsewhere – not all bundled up in one person in quite the same way, but distributed more widely across the human race.
Other versions of such smiles exist. Other versions of their sophisticated, slightly cynical take on life. Other capacities to make ambitious weekend plans or laugh at pomposity. In losing one person, we can’t logically have forever lost contact with the elements that made them valuable – elements that continue to exist, scattered throughout humanity, waiting for our curiosity and courage to re-emerge. Healing after a breakup involves this exact kind of shift: from the irreplaceable to the universal. We may have lost a person, but we haven’t lost – and don’t ever need to lose – what made them precious.
‘Cures for Love’ is the title of a self-help book written by the Roman poet Ovid in 2 AD that offers consolation and companionship to those who have suffered abandonment in love. In its pages, we find one of the earliest meditations on how to mend a broken heart. Forty-five years old at the time of writing and already on his third marriage, Ovid had extensive personal experience of heartbreak, and knew too of its often tragic impact on friends and acquaintances. ‘Why should any lover hang from a high beam, a sad weight, with a knotted rope round his neck?’ he rued.
As a keen reader of legend and history, Ovid was also versed in the role of heartbreak in multiple appalling mythological tragedies: it was heartbreak that led Dido, Queen of Carthage, to take her own life; that drove Medea to kill her children; that caused Circe to lose her mind; and that inspired the Thracian princess Phyllis to hang herself after her lover Demophon left her to return to his native Athens. This was no light or laughing matter. The end of love might kill.
Ovid’s Advice on How To Get Over a Breakup
Read today, Cures for Love (Remedia Amoris in the original) speaks to us in the tone of a wise, occasionally stern, always concerned and kindly doctor. Ovid’s advice ranges across the field:
— Have lots to do: ‘If you take away idleness, Cupid’s bow is unstrung… be busy, you’ll be safe’. Appease your yearning by going on a trip, entering politics or starting a business.
— Stop idealising the departed lover: ‘Tell yourself often what your wicked girl has done and keep every hurt she inflicted before your eyes.’
— Make an inventory of all the lover’s physical and psychological flaws and rehearse these every day: ‘I want you to become fluent in them!’
— Don’t beg or lose your dignity in front of your ex: ‘Though, unhappy man, you may be roasting in the midst of Etna, make it seem to your girl that you’re chillier than ice… She’ll soon drop her disdain when she sees your indifference.’
— Never go back to someone who has rejected you: ‘The door is wide open? Though you’re called to, pass by.’
— Be careful of any communication: ‘If you love but don’t wish to, avoid making contact.’
— Cut yourself off from the lover’s friends and family. Every reminder worsens the illness: ‘For you to reach dry land, it’s not enough for you to leave the girl. Say goodbye to her mother, sister and the nurse who’s in the know.’
— Beware of memories: ‘Rereading letters shakes a steadfast heart.’
— Delete photos: ‘Remove the wax images of her.’
— Stay away from music and theatre. Avoid poetry too: ‘Disloyally I banish even my own gifts.’
— Either drink so much you forget your grief – or drink nothing at all so you remember your wisdom: ‘if it’s anywhere between the two it’s bound to do you harm.’
— Have a lot of new relationships: ‘Vast rivers are thinned out through many channels; fierce flames die down when the fuel’s removed.’ (In case we want to inscribe this on the wall in the original: Grandia per multos tenuantur flumina rivos / Saevaque diducto stipite flamma perit). ‘Let her be just one of many to you now.’
— Spend time in the countryside. Get involved in gardening. Raise sheep. Cultivate vines.
— Surround yourself with friends; avoid too much solitude: ‘Fear seclusion, men who’ve been hurt by women, women by men.’
— Don’t get embittered or cross with exes: ‘That conclusion suits uncivilised natures.’
— Don’t get petty about belongings and presents: ‘Tell her to keep the gifts you gave her.’
— Forgive Cupid; he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
— Expect it to take far, far longer than you wish: ‘Put faith more in love being extinguished slowly than suddenly.’
Dignity in Shared Suffering
The advice is consistently solid and applicable. But its true power arguably lies less in any particular recommendation than in the idea that someone, over two thousand years ago, understood exactly – with a freshness that might have us checking dates in disbelief – what now feels utterly agonising in its novelty and individuality.
We, who are mired in the specifics of our story, can raise our eyes and situate ourselves more accurately – and redemptively – in a boundless, timeless landscape of loss. None of this began when they started pulling away after the holidays or before their friend’s leaving party; it has been going on since the time of Homer and Augustus, since Romulus abandoned Remus and Mark Antony forsook his duties for Cleopatra. Long before the Crusades, the Beatles, the Battle of Lepanto or the construction of Chartres Cathedral, there were men and women shattering one another’s faith in everything by smiling wanly and asking for a bit more space. This disaster has been unfolding for a very, very long time. It is no personal flaw, no reflection of a modern, technologically-inspired malaise. The affliction is encoded in our humanity.
But the ancientness dignifies the relentless crying we did in the bathroom last weekend. We aren’t just weak. We stand in a line of mighty lovers who have been felled by their partner’s changes of mind. We’re going through what the Queen of Carthage endured; we’re suffering as Thracian royalty did. We are partaking in one of the oldest, grandest forms of sorrow.
It may help that Ovid’s advice is expressed in an antique tongue we’re unlikely to understand. When he writes successore novo vincitur omnis amor (‘every love is defeated by a fresh successor’), it matters less what’s being said than that it’s being said in a Latin once spoken from the shores of Britannia to the banks of the Euphrates –in the language of those who built the Colosseum and the Pantheon, fought in the battles of Actium and Cannae, made goblets now held in the museum of the Vatican, and wrote down inventories of olive oil in the markets of Hispania. It is a cadenced, alien language that draws a line across time from the Roman Forum to the desk where you now sit, scrolling through your phone, pretending to work, eating too many biscuits, looking out at the trees, wondering where it all went wrong.
It’s not pretentious to delight when Ovid keeps referring to strange historical and mythological characters – when he tells us that ‘Callirhoe made Alcmaeon share her bed, lest he always love Alphesiboea.’ Or that Orestes’s pain after killing Clytemnestra was soothed by the friendship of the loyal Pylades. The allusions help relativise our mess. We, who’ve been ripped open by our perfidious sweetheart, who were going to go skiing with them next winter and start work on the garden together, can now make some unexpected suffering friends from foreign lands and eras. It hurts like hell; but at least it’s not – on top of everything else – in any way new.
How to Mend a Broken Heart
We need so much reassurance. We are terrified. The pain doesn’t seem to end. We so badly want someone to have walked this path before, and to tell us that there will be some kind of bearable conclusion. Ovid is sure there will be. He finishes his book by telling Cupid that he knows how to outwit him – and by reminding Dido that if only she had been able to take his advice, she’d still be alive.
Our little wretch from Instagram – who gashed our heart and destroyed our peace – may presently be partying without remorse in Brooklyn or Lima, Melbourne or Jakarta. We may be horribly alone with our betrayal and confusion. But we are, at least, it turns out, in very good company among those who have long wrestled with the timeless question of how to mend a broken heart.
For all its many inconveniences and agonies, heartbreak appears to have a longstanding and curious power to push artists towards some of their very greatest creations, to heights that they will never again reach once stability has returned: to such masterpieces as Face Value (Phil Collins), Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Odi et Amo (Catullus), Self-Portrait (Gwen John) and Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan). The link between heartbreak and creativity is striking – a testament to how loss can become a gateway to unexpected artistic truth.
Why should abandonment have such salutary side effects – and what, if anything, might those of us who have no plans to cut an album or paint a picture, but who may also have recently suffered a loss, derive from this phenomenon?
The Liberation of Not Caring
We might say that heartbreak encourages us, first and foremost, not to care anymore – and when we cease to do so, some remarkably true and essential things may emerge. By ‘caring’, we mean caring what the neighbours think, caring what it’s ‘nice’ or ‘wise’ to do, caring to be the good boys and girls we’ve aspired to be since childhood. Suddenly, under the weight of grief, none of it matters. We no longer give a damn what anyone thinks, so torn apart and wrecked are we. The person with whom we had imagined the rest of our lives has gone; everything settled and happy has dissolved, and nothing, truly nothing, retains its solidity. We might throw our belongings out of the window, shave our head, crawl naked across the central square, eat mud, spray-paint the apartment, swim out into the ocean and declare ourselves a horse or a lobster. We don’t care if anyone sees us weeping, or if we’re up at 3 a.m. walking in the park singing to ourselves. We don’t mind if we live or die.
And such drastic conditions, far from presaging artistic chaos, may offer precisely the setting in which – finally – we throw off convention, timidity and fear and do what we’ve always longed, but felt too inhibited, to do. Sorrow unblocks our channels of feeling. Desperate, we speak in our authentic accents. Against a backdrop of despair, we risk saying it like it really is. We push our thoughts towards their most dangerous, unconventional conclusions; we articulate ourselves with heedless, unfrightened sincerity. Convention hasn’t saved us; we may as well trust oddity and waywardness. We surrender to our rawest instincts. It’s the last throw of the dice – a final bid before the jump.
The Link Between Heartbreak and Creativity
The great essayist Emerson once wrote: ‘In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts.’ And it may be our grief that lends us the bravery to be newly faithful to these neglected thoughts – and thereby ushers in our genius. The standard ideas have led us nowhere, only to our present misery and solitude, so let’s trust a little more in what we’ve actually been thinking all along but have been too shy to dare to think. Through our tear-stained disinhibition comes creativity. Works emerge that seem to presage and articulate everyone’s real intentions; that speak of how humankind would always wish to speak to itself, were it not so scared.
Loss also helps us to notice what still remains precious. Most of existence feels plunged into darkness, excrement covers the earth – and yet, in the turmoil, one or two things stand out with new brilliance. We have to wait until we’re properly questioning whether we want to go on before we notice – as if for the first time – how ecstatic a flower can be, what gentle encouragement a tree might offer, what delicacy a fig can contain. The big pillars of contentment have been systematically blown up, but there is now room for the more neglected, yet in reality more essential, sources of joy to have their due. We begin to see the grace in a flock of birds, a field of lavender, an Emmental sandwich, a warm bath.
Great art is, in the end, mostly a business of some enlightened (though now we see, also heartbroken) person trying passionately to hold on to reasons to live, while telling us, in effect: notice the clouds; appreciate the apples; don’t bring things to an end before you’ve properly been awed by the spring, a child’s laughter, or four ducklings following their parents across a lake at dusk.
Another motive lurks behind artistic greatness: an intense wish for revenge. The abandonment has rocked the artist to the core. The rascal-like ex-partner is now with their best friend, on holiday in Morocco with the manager from the Berlin office or has run away to a cottage with a viscount from Austria. The sense of rejection and inferiority is beyond endurance. How could they do this to me? Why am I – with all my apparent brilliance, talent and sensitivity – not enough? What was missing? And from such shame and anger is born a new will to try yet harder, to make sure that the deserter will regret their perfidious cowardice for eternity. I may not be enough for you – you might think me boring or routine – but people not yet born will be stirred to the depths by the lyricism of what I am about to create. My work might not have satisfied you, but it will render your abandonment absurd for the ages. To leave the person who made In the Air Tonight (Phil), or Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (Vincent)… Be forever humbled by all that you’ve missed out on, all the sweetness and tenderness and complexity of the soul that you have turned away from – for Derek, Melanie or Luciano!
Later, of course, the artists recover. They forget about Derek – or Livia or Roisin, James or Akiko. The accolades come in and they find new, more loyal partners who love attending award ceremonies with them and will do up their Mediterranean holiday homes in soothing pastels (funded by royalties from their near-death experiences). And in the process, they grow pompous, happy and smug. No longer do they dare to see life with the freshness of despair. No longer does agony guide them towards the truth. They become frightened of losing the adulation of the crowd and so their output becomes sterile, imitative and largely forgettable.
The Gift of Suffering
None of this has to be about art narrowly conceived. It’s about how pain can keep us honest and how suffering awakens us to beauty and sweetness. It’s about the hidden gifts of loss and the connection between heartbreak and creativity. It’s about how we may have to wait until nothing makes sense anymore before we’re brave enough to pioneer true meaning.
It may – ultimately – be about allowing ourselves a moment of pride in our desperate state. There is very little that is fun about being heartbroken. It’s hard to wake up crying every morning for someone who is currently in bed with our old friend, or someone they hooked up with behind our back online. But there can be recompense in the ashes. We may never have thought so clearly before. We may never have been so alert or so alive. We may never have seen so much or been so kind. So much has been taken from us; and yet, we have gained a world.
‘Triangulation’ is a term used in psychoanalysis to refer to the way in which someone can be drawn to repeatedly introduce a third party into their two-person relationships, in order to reduce the risks that they unconsciously associate with singular dependence.
This theory posits that the ability to sustain a happy two-person relationship is never a given. It is reliant on a privileged emotional history; it is the fruit of a warm, sustained early dyadic relationship with a kindly and attuned parent or a caregiver. We will tolerate – and delight in – coupledom, if and only if, towards the start of our lives, we had an experience of focused devotion from another person: someone who held us tightly in mind, spent time with us and lent us the feeling that we satisfied them. Perhaps we were in the kitchen with them, neither of us talking much. They might have been busy with work while we sat in the corner with some bricks, but we knew they were there if we needed them, and we sensed how richly we existed in their imagination. We were their poppet, or their little monster, and it felt sweet – and more than enough. From this, we were able to draw a vital moral with a lifelong resonance: I can sustain another person’s attention, they won’t turn on me, two is sufficient, it can be safe, I don’t always have to look elsewhere, I can rely on someone, being in a couple can satisfy my needs.
It is no surprise that one of the most popular of all genres of painting in the Western tradition celebrates precisely these possibilities and pleasures: again and again, we see a mother and child depicted, satisfied in each other’s presence, wanting no others, cosy and at peace, while outside (in many works) the kingdom goes about its business and knights ride on horseback across a delicately delineated landscape. We project onto Mary and Jesus what we have all so badly wanted for ourselves.
Sadly, many of us have not been very fortunate in our search for dyadic experiences. Perhaps a parent was never there, or we felt that their most intense love was for a sibling. Maybe we had an impression that they were rivalrous and didn’t quite wish the best for us (they might have been prone to rage or sarcasm), or we felt that we had disappointed them in some fundamental way (we might have been born the wrong gender for them, or we didn’t like their chosen hobbies). From these crushing experiences, we derived another, less salutary moral: be careful never to depend on just one other person; love is highly exposing and threatening; men and women are a disappointment; spread out your allegiances to mitigate the agonies of forthcoming betrayals.
As a result, in adulthood, we may feel ineluctably drawn to weakening all two-person bonds. We may find ourselves flirting with others just as a relationship (in which we ostensibly believe) is starting to strengthen. An affair – whether imagined or real – becomes a necessary escape from the subterranean terrors of successful love.
But triangulation can take other, less obvious and less individuated forms. A ‘third’ can be anything that breaks the bond between the two partners. It could, for example, be a mobile phone that keeps cropping up between the pair and has to be consulted whenever the conversation grows too intense or meaningful. It might be a group of friends who continually have to be pulled in for meals, parties and holidays to ensure that closeness can be shattered and distance maintained (they may need to be contacted for their views in the middle of dinner or during a shopping trip). The third could be an obsession that removes a person from any chance of dialogue for long periods: a persistent worry about their reputation, anxiety about their appearance, an obsessive rivalry with a sibling, or a paranoia about something they might have done a decade before. The third could even be a therapist whom one member of a couple again and again uses to relativise their partner’s insights and perspectives: ‘Interesting you should think that – Ricardo thinks it’s actually about your mother …’ or ‘Kathryn wonders why I always have to ask you for your opinion …’
We should be generous with ourselves for our triangulating tendencies. We have them not because we are bad, but because we have suffered and because we were disappointed and terrified at an extremely vulnerable stage in our development. We might, with great kindness, try to explore our stance:
— How do I feel about dyads?
— To what extent am I tempted by a third?
— What are my thirds of choice?
— What might have gone awry in my early experience of couples?
At the same time, if we find ourselves in a relationship where the other person keeps finding ways to be elsewhere, we might learn to give a new, more encompassing name to their flights: we can say that behind the friends who keep being invited, the phone that is always drawn out, or the therapist who is wielded as a rivalrous source of authority, lies the pattern of triangulation.
With a deeper understanding of the concept, we may come to appreciate – perhaps as never before – what an extraordinary achievement of psychology and love it is to feel, at certain precious moments, as if two might very much be enough.
Imagine that we’ve been in the apartment by ourselves since the previous evening, and now, at the start of the weekend, it’s eleven in the morning. A succession of small bits of bad news has come in over the past twenty-four hours. Someone’s unhappy with our performance at work; a customer has complained about our attention to detail; we have a traffic fine to pay; the milk has gone off; a friend is accusing us of not caring enough about them – and then, the final straw: someone we very much hoped to see for dinner has cancelled abruptly, with an unconvincing excuse about their mother.
We try to keep the different strands separate, but eventually, in the stillness of the small living room, they coalesce into an overwhelming impression: we’re not very worthy, there’s something wrong with us, we’re ugly inside and out, we’ve been like this since the start, no one likes us, we’re going to die alone – unhappy and mediocre.
The impression is stronger than we are. We curl into a ball and can’t hold back a tear, which rolls onto and is absorbed by the grey-green sofa. Ten minutes pass, then another twenty.
Finally, we can’t take it any longer. We have to pull ourselves out of the spin. With a newfound urgency, we grab our jacket, run downstairs – and head for the nearby park.
This expanse of green was laid out by a group of enlightened planners and municipal engineers a few generations ago. There’s an inner and an outer circle, a small fountain, a playground and a statue of a man who pioneered research into bees. More importantly, the park has very little idea of us. It hasn’t heard of our place of employment; it doesn’t have any views on our romantic life; it couldn’t care less whether we are alive or dead – and this ignorance, far from crushing us further, has an immediately soothing effect.
A grand oak tree, which has been sitting patiently in this spot for at least a hundred and fifty years, has priorities blessedly far from our own: it’s pulling nutrients from the soil, showing its freshest new leaves to the sun, providing a nesting place for robins and an athletic park for grey squirrels. The indifference is not nature’s alone. There’s a person in scrubs on a break from the nearby hospital, sitting on a bench with a flask of tea. They might later be fixing catheters on the children’s ward or ministering to a dying nonagenarian. To their left, a little boy is playing tag with his father. His joyful screams are unabashed; it’s a game, but something very serious – about love and self-esteem and having a home – is being exercised. Overhead, planes – perhaps heading back from Singapore or Madrid – are locking onto the final approach beacons at the airport to the west. In the distance, a line of uncomplaining pylons is bringing in electricity from the coast to power hairdryers and video games: our strange, extraordinary, bathetic species, in all its glory, complexity and mundanity.
With all this in view, it suddenly seems not to matter quite so much that we may – or may not – be a wretch; that a lover has let us down (heaven knows they might have their reasons, and we aren’t perfect either); or that we should, in all fairness, probably make more of an effort with our career. The individual ego diminishes; we let ourselves dissolve into a wider realm. What happens to us no longer has to be the measure of everything. We are – in part – also the trees, the houses, the clouds overhead, the pigeon who has come to peck at a leftover sandwich and the young boy now being hugged tightly by his dad. Our ultimate fate ceases to concern us so tightly. What does it matter quite so much what we’re worth or where we end up? We rejoin the ocean from which we had been in frightened exile for too long.
None of the elements that have helped us to recover our balance care to articulate a theory of existence; yet they may have one nevertheless. The oak tree has its own distinctive silent take on love, achievement, success and power – as do the clouds, the robins, the squirrels and the contrails. Each one of them is whispering, very quietly indeed: matter less, forget more, open your heart, let go of your resentments, surrender.
We can be so much happier when we manage – for a time – to still the clamour of the ‘I’ and live less intimately with ourselves; when we stop insisting that everything that happens to us must say something profound about us; when we can wear our fate more lightly. We may end up alone, we may be foolish, we may be sad. None of it, the park tells us, might matter too much anyway.
We’ll cope after all. Perhaps we’ll go to the cinema alone tonight. Or have a drink on the terrace. We haven’t just taken a walk; we’ve had a covert philosophy lesson.
When we hear certain stories of devastating heartbreak – the kind where the longing and the suffering seem limitless – it is normal to conclude that the people at their centre must have possessed truly unusual qualities. These tormentors must surely have been paragons of beauty, intelligence, sensitivity and kindness. How else to explain the scale of the devotion they inspired and the sadness that followed their departure? Why else would the abandoned lover, an otherwise rational and purposeful individual, have spent half a decade dwelling on their vanished angel, at the expense of their work, their health and their friendships?
Until one day, we may have a chance to get a closer look at the people who provoked the romantic anguish – perhaps in a book or online, at a party or in the street – and we come face-to-face with a different and far less logical picture. This lover, the object of Olympian grief – this Penelope or Hercules, Juliet or Zeus – may strike us as having very little in common with the divinity we had imagined. Could it really have been for this humdrum, routine example of a human being, this perhaps shifty, coarsely spoken, tin-eared character, this mean-spirited and banal mind, that a person lost the will to live? For this that they stopped eating and abandoned their duties, wrote impassioned poems, tore their clothes and contemplated a fall off a cliff? It sounds extremely puzzling – and almost funny.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare helps us laugh at this form of incongruous passion. Under the influence of a love potion placed on her eyelids by a mischievous spirit, Titania, Queen of the Fairies, wakes from a dream and falls in love with the very first person she sees, who happens to be a grotesque character called Bottom, a local tradesman who (as a result of another bit of magic) sports the head of a donkey. We chuckle as the lyrically spoken queen declares the brutish Bottom the finest thing ever to have lived, as she strokes his long ears, purrs at his asinine neighing and compares him to the noblest lovers of history. We laugh at an uncomfortable truth: how easily love incites us to devote ourselves to inappropriate and unworthy figures, how blindly we mistake donkeys for angels.
In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the central character, a sophisticated and sensitive intellectual named Swann, arrives at a moment of sober realisation. For years he pursued a vain, status-conscious, unkind woman called Odette, whom he eventually persuaded to marry him – at the cost of his work, his reputation and his friendships. Now, finally, his obsession has waned, and he is able to take a cold-hearted look at the woman at its centre, reflecting sardonically: ‘To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I had my greatest love, for a woman to whom I wasn’t attracted, who wasn’t even my type!’ (It sounds still more bathetic and resonant in French: ‘Dire que j’ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j’ai voulu mourir, que j’ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre!’).
Why do we waste years like this? Because we are lonely, because we carry an intense longing to believe, because it is unendurable to remain clear-eyed about what other people are, for the most, part actually like.
But there may be another, more psychological and still more poignant, dynamic at work. All children are born with a love potion placed on their eyelids. When they awaken to the world under the glare of the hospital lights, they – like Titania – fall in love almost automatically with the first people they see, those whom they will in time come to call ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. These ordinary mortals ineluctably acquire something supernatural in their offspring’s minds. They will – at least in the early years – be endowed with all manner of perfections. They are felt to understand the universe, to be heroes and heroines of limitless strength and intelligence, capable of pulling off magical feats as varied as baking a chocolate tart and throwing a ball as high as a tree.
There is very little choice in this idealisation. Children don’t love their parents according to merit, rather according to need. A parent who is violent, busy, alcoholic or abusive will attract love no less – and perhaps even to a greater extent – than one who is kind, patient and attuned.
It is precisely the children who had to cope with the least worthy parents – the mothers or fathers who stood in relation to them rather as the crude Bottom did to Titania – who are especially prone, in later life, to lose their hearts to roguish figures. It is as if their childhoods trained them to make creative excuses for their own maltreatment, to hold on to a belief in a more or less endurable and moral world. It is easier for them to hate themselves than to accept that their own parents might have done them an injustice. With time, a child who had no alternative but to love a mother or father who did them ill may grow up into an adult particularly susceptible to ignoring signs of unkindness in their partners. Love may not feel real or true until it is bound up – as it was at its point of origin – with exploitation and suffering.
It may be for this reason that many of us reserve our greatest and most obsessive loves not for people who are particularly marvellous, but for people who feel, first and foremost, extremely familiar – familiar in their degrees of shallowness, absence or vulgarity. With luck, we will in time wake up from our slumbers and realise, in the cold light of dawn, with a great deal of self-compassion, that we may for a while now have been cradling not an angel but a donkey.