The Third Way. Part 1.

This is the first part of the autotheoretical essay about breakups, in which I discuss how we break up, what we love and what we grieve in the post-breakup times.

Introduction

Breakup

Imagine.

You work, meet up with friends, travel, walk your dog, have sex, cook dinners, go to the movies, and play tennis. One day, your partner announces, “We need to break up.”

You go to work, but you can’t concentrate on the tasks. You go to see friends, yet you can’t engage with their stories. You think you need to eat at least something, but you have no energy to cook. The familiar world slips away. Something important in it crumbles like cold night sand. Reality twists into kaleidoscopic glass. On weekends, when you don’t have to work, you find yourself in bed with a laptop, a bag of chips on the pillow next to you, and an empty beer bottle on the floor. You have no energy for anything.

Sometimes you turn on a YouTube video in the background to drown out the stream of thoughts. What went wrong, and when? What could have been done differently? Is it worth trying to talk again? What signs did we miss? How should we have handled that argument?

Every free minute brings a flood of tears. When you take a break at work and make tea, when you go to the bathroom, when you wash the dishes. It seems impossible to cry so much. Your face swells up so dramatically that it feels like it belongs to someone else.

Sometimes it’s impossible to stay indoors; you want to go outside, straighten up, take a deep breath. Emotional pain is felt in the body just as much as physical pain. As Berit Brogaard, the author of On Romantic Love: Simple Truths About a Complex Emotion (2015) writes, sudden breakups can, in some cases, lead to post‑traumatic stress disorder, while in others they trigger “broken‑heart syndrome” (medically known as stress cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the contractility of the heart muscle decreases).

When there are no more tears left and the avalanche of thoughts slows down, you fall into a black hole. Your legs futilely try to find support, you flail in a vacuum, your head is squeezed by a tight hoop. Thoughts float chaotically in a cosmic haze, constantly reminding you of themselves. Something is wrong with me. I’m flawed. I’m broken. The scariest thing begins — an existential crisis.

When you become close to someone, you built up expectations. You invested a lot in the relationship with your partner, and they invested a lot in you. Your shared life is already laboriously unraveling into yours and theirs. You leaned on each other, discussed important decisions. You were there when one of you needed support. But now you are alone.

Who am I without my partner? Do I really enjoy playing tennis, or did I only like it because my girlfriend did? Do I truly hate leftists, or was it convenient for me to adopt that point of view?

In the chaos of life’s circumstances, you thought: no matter what situation we find ourselves in, emigration, the death of loved ones, pregnancy, a pandemic, the main thing is that we‘ll get through it together. But now you are alone.

Brogaard writes that a breakup leaves the past untouched but erases the future you dreamed of. The most painful losses are those that rob us of hopes and expectations. They turn us into different people, with a new, frightening, and uncertain future. This is an existential crisis we are forced into.

I only partially agree with Brogaard. A breakup, especially with someone with whom you built joint plans for the future, truly throws us into the unknown. Yet, in reality, the future has always been and will forever remain uncontrollable. The process of breaking up is merely a magnifying glass through which we view the inevitability of existence. And it takes a great deal of courage.

If we accept this, it becomes easier to live, because in reality, we experience everything alone. We can ask friends for help, we can seek support from those who are going through similar experiences, but it is only our task to experience the horror of realizing death or the loss of the familiar. We are faced with the necessity of existence. What should we do about it?

Doubts

When I thought about writing an essay on breakups, I got bored myself. Isn’t this the driving force of life? Love? Rejection? Breakup? Love and then breakup again? I was afraid to explore this topic, afraid to get bogged down in endless, repetitive words. We suffer, we mourn what was and what could have been. Then the healing journey begins. I swear, the very phrase made me feel nauseous. Breakup is not an illness that needs to be healed. It is a state in which we feel loneliness and our smallness more acutely than outside of it.

But let’s suppose the breakup happened, and now we are on the healing journey, learning to live anew and seeing the world in its fullness again. The life we grieved over no longer appears before our eyes as a canvas every time we blink, and the flow of tears stops. A new stage begins.

On the first day of my research, I read a couple dozen essays on the healing journey. I close the browser and think that this is getting me nowhere. I’ve heard it hundreds of times, this cultural narrative haunts us everywhere, not only in books and movies, but also in conversations with friends. How many times have I told myself the same words, that I need to mourn and then move on? I always felt like something was missing. But what?

I wonder if there is any point in writing more on this topic. Even if I end up writing another piece about the healing journey, I give myself a chance to try.

Love and Grief

It may be that talking about breakups should not be framed through healing but through love — through what we love and what we lose, and therefore grieve.

Philosopher Pilar Lopez-Cantero writes: “Loving is a kind of valuing another person that involves or consists in concern for the beloved. That concern is (1) non-instrumental and (2) personal.”

By instrumentality, Lopez-Cantero means that when we love and care, we do so for the sake of love and care itself, without expecting any other reward. Yet, it is perfectly normal to want reciprocity from the object of love, writes Lopez-Cantero, referring to philosopher Sara Protasi, who distinguishes between romantic love and romantic relationships. Protasi argues that one can exist independently of the other. The difference between these concepts lies in the condition of reciprocity: while love is an individual feeling, it is impossible to enter into a relationship unless both people want it. It is also possible to enter into a relationship without love. Protasi calls such a case “social relationships” because they are approved (and even expected) by society, such as dating, and can be institutionalized, such as marriage. Since people who love each other enter into social relationships, there is a social expectation that such relationships imply love. Thus, love itself, even if it wants to be reciprocal, is not necessarily instrumental.

Lopez-Cantero moves on to the second component of love — personal character. In this regard, she discusses two underlying concepts of love as value: the property view and the relationship view, each of which offers its own meaning to the phrase “I love a person for who they are.” According to the property view, we love a person for “the intrinsic qualities that make them who they are. For example, that they are charming and loyal — as opposed to other qualities which are not intrinsic, like say that they eat a huge amount of pizza and they have blond hair.” According to the relationship view, we love a person for the relationship we have with them. For example, we love someone because they are our brother, sister, or romantic partner. These two concepts explain the reasons why we love and are mutually exclusive. If we understand what we love, it is easier to understand why we grieve when we break up.

The researcher notes that breakups entail many losses: some of them are instrumental (loss of financial stability, loss of someone who would proofread your essays or go with you to underground music concerts with only twenty people in the audience), while others are internal (loss of self-esteem and validation). If we consider what we have lost to be important (I would also add that we were emotionally attached to it), then the loss leads us to a particular kind of emotional pain: grief. But what exactly do we grieve for when we break up with romantic partners?

Lopez-Cantero suggests three components: (A) the person with certain intrinsic qualities, (B) reciprocity, (C) a relationship constituted by shared activities. If we accept the relationship view, then the object of grief will be (C) a recognized romantic relationship that has developed from shared activities and is an expression of (B) reciprocal love of (A) a specific person with certain internal qualities. According to the property view, when we break up, we grieve for (A) a specific person with certain intrinsic qualities, with whom we were in (C) a recognized romantic relationship, defined through shared activities that are an expression of (B) reciprocal love.

Thus, regardless of which conception we adopt, we still arrive at the conclusion that there is no single unique element that determines the grieving process.

Each concept attempts to identify the core element of love, but this aim distorts the essence of love: if we grieve over the loss of a valued object, and if there is no single object for which we grieve independently, then these objects cannot be valued independently of each other.

Lopez-Cantero concludes that if love is a value, then the value of a person and the value of a relationship are interdependent and non-instrumental.

Experience

I was inspired to write an essay about breakups a few months ago, when I broke up with L., with whom I had been together for two years. The breakup with L. became one of my favorite life experiences. It was different, it fell outside the traditional possibilities for ending a relationship: breakup or death. It showed me that there is an alternative path.

We broke up when we loved each other, but knew we couldn’t be romantic partners. Even before we broke up, we discussed how we would be great friends. And we are. We haven’t disappeared from each other’s lives; we see each other regularly, discuss issues that matter to us, plan activities together, and, in general, continue to care for each other. It would seem that everything is going well, but I feel terribly lonely in this experience. When, on New Year’s, we went away for a week to the countryside to rescue my dog from Berlin’s fireworks madness, I was asked countless times if we were back together. Someone wondered if we have sex. Others told me that people who are friends with their exes are likely to have a history of psychological trauma.

Those questions don’t irritate me. I understand how difficult it is to go beyond the discourse of relationships-not-relationships when we have been exposed only to very limited models of human interaction since childhood. My friend and I are predicting the future on a random “Sex and the City” episode. She names the number of the episode that should tell us something about me: it’s the last episode of season 2. The episode is about whether you can be friends with an ex. Carrie meets Mr. Big, but discovers she’s not ready for the fact that he’s engaged to Natasha, even though to Carrie, he had said that he didn’t want to marry. Carrie gets angry and makes a scene in the restaurant. Miranda sees Steve on the street and pretends not to notice him. Steve shows up at her place and says that it hurt him. They agree to have dinner together as friends sometime. After dinner, they have sex and come to the conclusion that they cannot be just friends. The episode concludes: friendship with exes is impossible.

I don’t know how to talk about what’s going on between L. and me. It feels odd to call him “ex.” What kind of ex is he when he’s still in my life? Did we really break up? What should we do when either of us fall in love with someone else? How do I explain to a new partner that my ex may be very much present, but not longer romantically, just in a friendly way? Or maybe a little more than friendly, but still not as a partner? These questions make my head spin. L. doesn’t know the answers either.

The path that L. and I have chosen together runs between the components of love identified by Lopez-Cantero: (A) the person stayed with me, (B) the reciprocity of our relationship has not disappeared, (C) but its nature has changed. Does this mean that we haven’t broken up? Did it mean that I wouldn’t grieve? What does it all mean?

My breakup with L. revealed new sides of me. In the days after we made this decision, I didn’t just pity myself and run thoughts in circles, but I stared at the existential horror that rose from the depths of my being. I found myself in familiar situations, but now without L: they seemed like a new life that I didn’t know how to live. I sat in a work meeting that lasted literally the whole day, staring out the panoramic window and not hearing a single word my boss said. After the meeting, we all drank beer, and I was one of the last to go home. I didn’t want to. A couple of days later, my colleagues got together for bouldering. The last thing I wanted was to exercise, but I went to the other end of Berlin anyway because I wanted even less to chew over these thoughts while lying on my bed with a bag of chips. It was unbearable to think that I had to redefine my life from scratch. That’s when I decided to write about it, about the sharp sense of dread I found myself in, thrown into an unstable and chaotic world alone.

I search for this feeling on the internet: I read posts, articles, essays, Reddit threads, Quora answers, and watch blogs talking about experiences (one of the most touching). The narrative is universal: we are hurt, we are scared. These materials so insistently show the most vulnerable sides of people that at one point I feel uncomfortable reading about their suffering. Therefore, before diving into the horrors of post-breakup life, I decide to talk about my significant breakups.

There were two terrible ones. One was terrible because my ex-partner deliberately acted like a jerk. I think he was taking revenge on me because I had decided to end our relationship. This revenge seemed utterly senseless. I remember the feeling of emptiness that seized me, not even from the thought that he had left, leaving me with financial debts, but because I had shared three whole years of life with him. We had pets, we lived together, we knew each other’s parents. Now I look back on that period and feel terrible for the twenty‑one‑year‑old version of myself who fell into that situation and fled reality as often as possible. I feel sorry for him too. I can’t imagine how deeply wounded you have to be to behave like that.

The second breakup was terrible because I was stuck in its aftermath for several years. At that point, we had been living together for several months. I suggested that he moves out to think about what to do next, and he agreed. Then he wrote that since he had moved out, we might as well break up completely. He asked when it would be convenient for him to come pick up his things. I asked if we could talk. He replied that we didn’t need to talk, that our conversation would inevitably lead to us abandoning our decision to break up, and that it was better to leave things as they were. I kept asking him afterward whether he was willing to discuss what had happened, I tried to contact him in every way possible. He wasn’t interested. More than six years have passed, and I still don’t know why we broke up. It was painful because I thought that this partner was the one with whom we would be able to move beyond a “normal” boyfriend‑girlfriend dynamic. For example, he told me how he loved all his ex-girlfriends, saying, why hate them? And I thought, hmm, really, why? It was in our relationship that I fell in love with someone else twice, and we were able to discuss it openly. At one point, I had another romance, and they both knew about each other. In fact, they were friends. It wasn’t a perfect non-monogamous relationship — I don’t think they ever discussed it with each other — but it was my first experience of realizing that one can live differently from what is considered normal, and I love that experience. That made it all the more painful to see him leave me without a single explanation.

Both times, the need to reassess my life led me to dark places: depression and addiction. Both times, I lost people, lost relationships, lost reciprocity. But that’s not the only thing that set these breakups apart from the one with L. The most important and most puzzling to me, was the abrupt rejection of me as a person after what happened. I couldn’t wrap my head around how one could be angry at someone you loved and ignore their pain. As if, by breaking up with a person, you stop being responsible for them. Why?

I broke up with his friend about a month later. That turned out to be a good experience. I messaged him saying what I wanted and expected. He replied that he couldn’t give me that. I love this experience because it was the first time I was able to tell a romantic partner what I really wanted. Of course, it hurt to be rejected, but I was so happy that I could be honest. I am also proud of him for being able to be honest, too.

The idea that hating one’s exes is weird stayed with me for a long time. If I once loved a person, why doesn’t that love stay with me forever? Because they later acted like assholes, and the qualities I loved in them faded in comparison to the newly discovered ones? Yet there are still some of them toward whom I feel love.

I write a part about my breakups on the first day of working on the essay. On the second day, I erase and rewrite. On the third day, I erase and rewrite. How do I tell my story without making other people the source of evil? On the fourth day, I erase and rewrite.

While I’m pondering about what to do with this section, I recall that I had two other breakups that didn’t hurt as much. They shared one quality: I knew when they would end because they both occurred right before I moved to other cities. Of course, I was sad that these people had left my life, that our relationships would no longer continue. However, there were no expectations for the future. I didn’t have to grieve our shared plans. Perhaps this is the missing element in conversations about grief after breakups?

My friend and I are discussing our breakups. She asks, what about F.? I start to think about it. I read through our messages and remember that he disappeared for a couple of weeks when I really needed to hear from him. It wasn’t even about breaking up with a romantic partner, because we were never in a relationship: F. was the only person I could talk to when I was severely depressed. And then he vanished. It hurt a lot. We were only able to talk again after several weeks and discuss what had happened, and we decided to try to be “normal” friends. After that we met only once, since we live in different countries. First, we wrote to each other a lot, but less and less over time. Once a year, I wish him a happy birthday, and we exchange a few messages. He always stops responding first, but I’m not angry with him. I’m always happy to hear how he’s doing.

On the fourth day of working on the essay, I go to the opera. The characters repeatedly say “piano, piano” to each other in Italian. I remember that F. used to say “piano, piano, Katenka” to me when I was feeling down. I smile with a sad and grateful smile.

Existential crisis

After a touching section about pain, love, and gratitude, I want to return to the question of what to do when existential dread overwhelms you after a breakup.

In her essay on Kierkegaard, philosopher Skye C Cleary writes that he distinguished three stages of human existence: aesthetic, ethical, and religious (Kierkegaard was a Christian, but he treated the institutional church rather punk‑ishly). Cleary notes that each of these stages offers its own worldview, and each can serve a salvation from an existential crisis.

The aesthetic life is the life of a child: enjoying short-term solutions, filling the inner emptiness with abundant possibilities. Endlessly scrolling through dating app profiles, worrying that one day our ability to choose will be taken away, and therefore avoiding commitments, entering into yet another affair without thinking about the long-term consequences — these are aesthetic choices that do not significantly shape our personality.

One can grow from the aesthetic to the ethical by taking responsibility for one’s life. The price of this transition is to pause, accept the inevitability of existence, and face despair. Cleary writes, “To love despair is an adventure in moving to a higher mode of self-development.” The ethical mode is guided by morality: we recognize that every human life matters and that every choice we make impacts the surrounding world. We act in the world based on honesty, openness, and generosity. To survive existential horror, we must take responsibility for our own lives and those around us, relying on moral principles.

Philosopher Marie Robert offers a similar approach to breakups and overcoming their consequences in an essay in Literary Hub magazine, drawing on Kant. She writes that Kant’s own life “was pretty drama-free. Most of his days were identical — all he did was meditate and teach.“¹ In a Kantian way, we can approach the topic of breakups from the perspective of reason, which is tied to morality. Morality dictates action according to moral laws, the categorical imperative². According to Kant, passion blinds us, preventing us from thinking clearly and rationally. Thus, to get through a breakup, we must tame passion and act rationally.

Kantian passion resembles Kierkegaard’s aesthetic: it distances us from ourselves. Both propose going further and taking responsibility: Kant explains this through the moral imperative, and Kierkegaard through ethical existence. It seems to me that both are pure intellectualization of experience. Passing through pain that manifests in the body and mind, attempting to think clearly is perhaps a truly superhuman task. So I keep searching for further answers.

Philosophers Bouke de Vries and Daniel Villiger, working within the paradigm of applied ethics, propose an algorithm that can be used when deciding whether to initiate a breakup. If a decision cannot be made rationally at a lower level, move on to another.

Level 1: Assess the moral values that play a role in the situation.
Level 2: Imagine what will happen after the breakup, based on the experience of previous breakups.
Level 3: If it is difficult to imagine, consult with someone who has had this experience.
Level 4: If a instantaneous decision is impossible, divide it into several smaller decisions, for example, initiate a break in the relationship.
Level 5: If nothing at the previous levels helped you decide, consider whether you want to find out what it’s like to be without the partner. If you are curious, you may rationally end the relationship; if not, you can rationally keep it.

This model is aimed at those who are unsure whether to initiate a breakup, but it seems it could also be useful for rationalizing a situation where you have been unilaterally broken up with.

When I read articles about a rational approach to the most emotional aspects of life, something constantly interferes with me. Rationality and morality are great, of course, but I want to free myself from pure reason. I am tired of moral choices grounded in the traditions of Christian teaching. I want to choose something else!

I find the “something else” in the last stage of human existence according to Kierkegaard in the religious. He notes that ethical existence, which is based on Kantian rationality, is not perfect in itself, but it can bring us closer to religious existence. The path to the religious lies through absolute despair, in which we deny our own self and strive to erase the boundary between Self, God, and the world. For him, the absence of this boundary is absolute freedom: the highest way to live.

Do you know that feeling when you live outside the capital, then you go to the capital and are overwhelmed by the flood of people, ideas, events, buildings, subway stations, streetlights, police? It’s like a breakup: objects in reality are not new to you, yet they feel alien, roads lead in unknown directions, buildings sprout up where you least expect them. In such a situation you could simply leave the capital, or you could stay in it. Observe the layout of the streets and alleys, the height of buildings and bridges, the direction of light and shadow. Observation reveals important qualities that we strive for. Peace. Tranquility. Harmony.

Chaos is scary until you become part of it.

It seems I finally understand what this essay is really about.
To be continued in the second part!

1. Although I later find Kant’s breakup letter, where he writes: ”For our entire relationship, I was absolutely and irrevocably miserable.”

2. Which Kant derived from Christian dogma.