Why Some Breakups Hurt So Much More Than Others transcript

We're used to thinking of heartbreak as one thing, a single calamity with a single sort of pain. But anyone who's been through more than one ending knows a stranger truth. Not all unwilling endings hurt the same. There are, on closer inspection, three distinct sorts of heartbreak. It's worth going through them in ascending order of pain. For what distinguishes them tells us something unexpected about what heartbreak actually is.

The first and least painful variety we might call trying but failing. This is the relationship that ends because of incompatibilities that cannot, despite a lot of effort, be worked through. Crucially, two people know what the issues are. One person plays too much golf, someone needs to live abroad, they want different sorts of sex. The problems have names, they're laid on the table and turned over many times. Two people try very hard.

They go to therapy, they have discussions, they make concessions and draw up compromises that hold for a season and then quietly collapse. The relationship unravels slowly, in daylight, with both parties watching. When it finally ends, one is left thinking, "Well, it's really very sad that it failed, but I know why. They and I were simply too different." There is grief here, sometimes enormous grief, but it's grief with a shape.

The mind can rest on a narrative. We suffer, but we are not haunted. The second sort of breakup is more painful. We might call it the conscious fait accompli. Here, things end but without discussion. The other person comes to us one day with their mind firmly made up. They present us with a resolution, not a question. And by stripping us of agency, we are hurt a lot more. It's because of our attitude to politics or our conversational manner or our approach to work.

Fair enough, we want to say, but can't we discuss this first? Can't we try to improve?" But choice has been confiscated. We were tried in absentia and informed only of the verdict. And so we're left to ruminate endlessly on an unfairness that is added to simply missing them. I wish I could have entered their mind before it was set. I wish I could have made my case. The pain here is not only loss, it's exclusion from a doubt about us that we wish we could have had a go at answering.

Then there is the third sort of breakup, the most awful. The person leaving doesn't tell us why they're leaving. They don't give us any explanation at all. They may simply block our number or leave the country without letting us have a forwarding address. Or maybe they meet us, but they say they're confused. They aren't able to speak. Their minds feel foggy. Alternatively, they may force us to end the relationship by acting so unreasonably that we have no other option but to quit.

Then we're properly in pain. We have to bear the guilt of having left, and we also have no explanation to argue with, no narrative to rest on. This is the heartbreak that can take years to metabolize, precisely because there is nothing to metabolize, no reason, no account, no farewell, only an absence where an explanation should have been. If heartbreak was simply the pain of losing someone, all three endings would hurt equally, for in each case the loss is identical.

A person has gone. But they don't hurt equally, not remotely. The differing levels of pain teach us something key about our psychology, that we are hugely committed to explanations. We want to avoid suffering, of course, but almost up there with this priority is to know why we're suffering. Given the chaos of the third kind of heartbreak, in the ideal society there would simply be laws against it. Leave someone if you need to, but never, under pain of a considerable fine or even a stay in prison, do it without giving them a why.

What really breaks hearts is mystery.