Heartbreak
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HEARTBREAK
Published in 2019 by The School of Life
First published in the USA in 2020
70 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB
Copyright © The School of Life 2019
Printed in Belgium by Graphius
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without express prior
consent of the publisher.
A proportion of this book has appeared online at
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Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material
reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the
publisher will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.
The School of Life is a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for
improving our relationships, our careers and our social lives – as well as for
helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours.
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www.theschooloflife.com
ISBN 978-1-912891-33-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Cover image: Diogo Sousa / p.63 Black Country Images, Alamy
CONTENTS
Introduction
Why Did They Leave Us?
Unfair Dismissal in Love
The Psychology of Our Exes
Why Did We Pick Them?
Attachment Theory – and Break-Ups
How Not to Be Tortured by a Love Rival
How to Break Up
How We Can Be Heartbroken Even Though They Haven’t Left
The Wider Context of Our Sorrow
Why We Require Poor Memories to Survive
Our Lover Was Not Unique
The Consolations of Friendship
The Benefits of a Broken Heart
INTRODUCTION
They used to love us. We used to have a future. We would fall asleep in
their arms.
We shared our fears and gave them a map to our insecurities. We loved their
sense of humour and perspective on our lives. We travelled with them,
understood their feelings for their parents, perhaps even decorated a home
together. They were our best friend.
And now we are devastated.
We dignify this special pain with a powerful name: heartbreak – because it
simply feels as if something essential, something fundamental in us has
shattered. We struggle to describe quite what we are going through.
Sometimes, for a few hours, it seems we will almost cope. Then we are
abruptly reminded that everything good has gone from the world. What we
feel most of all is alone – alone with the sadness and confusion, the anger
and the incomprehension.
One of the biggest ambitions of art has been to meet us in the dark, to join
us when we’re broken and lost – and to remind us of things which, at this
moment, we find hard to see: that our pain makes sense, that we are still
viable, loveable people, that we will recover and that, however individual
the precise details of our suffering may be, we are in fact participating in a
sorrow that is common to many.
Everyone we admire, everyone we find interesting has had, or will have,
their heart broken. Our heartbreak seems to cut us off from the rest of
humanity – secretly it brings us closer together.
What follows is a journey around the universal story of heartbreak.
WHY DID THEY LEAVE US?
They’ve gone – and what we need most of all is to understand why ?
What is striking is that, despite what friends and well-meaning
acquaintances tell us, we already know. It is us.
We firmly and naturally assume that the explanation has to do with our
miserable failings, our dispiriting character and our wearisome appearance.
They’ve gone because we weren’t good enough. They got to know us
intimately, far better than almost anyone else has ever done, and then,
inevitably, they saw the truth behind our characters and were horrified. It is
not the relationship that failed: We failed.
But, counter-intuitively, what seems most obvious to us in our hearts might
not actually be true. There is a famous experiment in the history of
psychology which pinpoints our tendency to project: that is, to read
decisive, clear explanations drawn from our minds into what are in fact
ambiguous situations in the world beyond us.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), as it is technically known, was
developed in the 1930s by the American psychologist Henry Murray. It
presents us with a series of images and asks us to say what is going on.
People tend to have quite specific ideas of what is happening in each
scenario. For example, based on the picture above, a number of conclusions
could be drawn:
The Thematic Apperception Test consisted of images, similar to this one,
showing provocative, ambiguous scenes.
• She is fed up with him; he is weak and a bit boring.
• She has just told him that their relationship isn’t working and that she is
leaving.
• He has just told her they have to break up and the reason has something
to do with their sex life. He is not as fulfilled as he wants to be.
• It seems to be about his parents. She wants him to distance himself from
them. If he doesn’t, she can’t be expected to stay around forever.
The power of the experiment derives from the fact that the image has, by
design, no definite significance: They’re just actors carefully asked to
assume certain ambiguous poses. The stories and the meanings come from
us.
This is often exactly what happens around our own heartbreaks. We may
never actually know precisely why the other person left us. However well
we know someone, they are never fully transparent to us. What they say
may be only a part of what is really on their mind. Their deeper motives
remain obscure – perhaps even to them. We’re presented with a fact – they
have left us – and onto that we project a meaning. But the meaning we give
to the fact comes, in large part, from us.
Admitting to ourselves that we won’t always understand another person’s
inner workings is an underused and powerful skill. At one of the
foundational moments of philosophy in ancient Athens, Socrates argued that
a huge component of wisdom lies in our capacity to accept our ignorance in
certain situations: ‘The wise know when they don’t know.’ This recognition
of not-knowing, and the reminder of our tendency to project, may be
helpful in easing us away from the more catastrophic and self-incriminating
interpretations of a break-up.
The lover who furiously told us they never wanted to see us again may, in
the hidden recesses of their soul, have actually been thinking: ‘I’m so sad
this didn’t work out; I wish I could find a way to make this work; you are so
lovely in many ways, but there’s something desperate in me that’s turning
away from your offer of love.’ The person who coldly texts us, ‘That’s it,
I’m out’ may, behind the scenes, be weeping at their own sense of loss and
failure rather than (as we imagine) gleefully celebrating the end of their
over-extended encounter with us. The person who says, ‘I wish this could
work, but I’ve got to concentrate on my career’ might actually be sincere
rather than (as we might darkly suppose) putting a polite cover over their
contempt for us.
The acceptance of ambiguity is liberating: We’re free to recognise that the
ending wasn’t necessarily all our fault; that there may have been forces at
work other than our own inadequacy. We’re still very sad, but the target of
our misery is a little more bearable: We can focus on the deep, sorrowful
strangeness of love and loss rather than suffering an extended, excoriating
confrontation with our own inadequacies.
UNFAIR DISMISSAL IN LOVE
Our lover has wounded us deeply. Our suffering is comparable to being
robbed or physically assaulted. In a way, this hurts more than someone
stealing our phone or bicycle. However, in those cases, there are big societal
mechanisms for addressing our suffering: There are insurance companies,
police forces, courts and ultimately prisons designed to restore justice. If an
employer suddenly decides that they can’t stand us, they usually can’t
indiscriminately drop us: All kinds of rights and safeguards have been
slowly and wisely established to protect our employment from whims and
cruelty. Culturally, we’ve focused our collective systems of justice and
redress around money, work and property.
But in an area that matters just as much to us – love and relationships – we
can’t contact a lawyer or go to the police with an accusation that someone
broke our heart. We’re on our own. Not only is there no easy way of getting
redress, there’s little on offer to help us deal with the pain. If we have a
toothache or a broken leg (which can be comparable to heartbreak in terms
of anguish), we are met by a society that has evolved sophisticated ways of
dealing with the problem and built enormous institutions to offer us skilled
help.
The point isn’t that we should be able to go to a lawyer or a doctor with our
complaint; we don’t want our ex-partner to be locked up or to undergo
some emergency surgery. But we can, in a utopian spirit, imagine a society
that has devoted itself with equal ambition – and over many decades – to
addressing the intense, common problems of wounded souls.
The broken-heart specialist of the future would carefully listen to our sobs;
they might prescribe that we read a particular book or listen to certain
pieces of music (like Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte – ‘Thus Do They All’ – in
which every lover is shown to let the other down). We could be invited to
examine our expectations of relationships and be coaxed gently but firmly
towards an understanding of just what went wrong and what we could
