Wild Advice for Those Who Have Lost Their Minds Over an Ex

The world is not short of advice for those who are struggling to get over their exes. The problem is how much of it is extremely sensible and therefore, in its way, utterly ineffective, for what we are dealing with in heartbreak is not some administrative malfunction for which one or two handy pointers will swiftly return a sufferer to the norm, but a wholesale and long-term loss of command over one’s emotional constitution – for which the most apposite response may be limitless acknowledgement of the scale of the crisis, unbounded compassion and a heavy emphasis on the utter reasonableness of madness.

Here therefore are a few slightly less conventional pieces of advice for those who, ten months or fifteen years after a break-up, are still finding few more compelling things to think about today than their lost love.

Don’t expect to get over this any time soon

Severe damage is done by those who, out of great kindness, frame heart-break as something that we must all inevitably get over with time. 

But what if there were no ‘shoulds’ in this area. What if we let the pain last just as long – and not a minute less – as it needs to, which might be three months, ten years or the rest of one’s life but in any case, considerably longer than one’s sensible married friends seem to think it should last. What if we recategorised this as a chronic illness rather than a passing cold. What if we didn’t compound our sorrows by setting bounds to them and then castigating ourselves for trespassing them. What if we assumed – very darkly – that we would just never get over this.

Build the loss into your identity

What if, at the same time, we were to put the loss at the front and center of everything. Not relegate it to some embarrassing corner of our biographies, but build it squarely into our sense of self and presentation to others. We might say henceforth that we aren’t just someone born in this or that country in this or that year with a certain job and set of hobbies but – as importantly – someone who lost an extraordinary person fifteen years ago and that to know us well must be to understand, honour and never forget the resulting still-open incision in our souls.

Give madness free reign

Of course it’s not entirely mature to be found sobbing in bed mid-afternoon holding the stuffed huskie they gave you seven years ago from a shop at Oslo airport. But let’s not compound our losses by an unfair attachment to one’s dignity. 

So write (but try not to send – or do…) that very long letter outlining to them why they must regret this. And then, a bit later, that other letter saying how much you adore them. Even write the letter you hope they are one day going to send you, filled with phrases like ‘I’m so deeply sorry. I see now, finally, how right you were; that you are the only person who can understand me, that I belong to you and to no other…’ Even make the wedding speech (‘after a few bumps in the road…’). There are no rules here.

Don’t merely hate them

All the kind people around you have naturally tried so hard to convince you that they are no good. And they did – of course – behave abysmally at times, especially at the end. But in private, celebrate their gorgeousness. Idealise them until even you can sense that you’ve reached some limit to what others bluntly call reality. Adore them with infinite imagination until – eventually – it slowly starts to occur to you that you’ve lost an often quite annoying latterly very selfish human, rather than a celestial visitor with penetrating intelligence and beautiful hands.

Break the wise rules

Of course you should never call them; naturally you shouldn’t beg them to return. It’s entirely necessary to block their number. But there are grave dangers in trying to be so grown up one never allows oneself to mature; there are certain blows to the ego from which one can only ever recover through unguarded humiliation. Make yourself abject and silly, try everything and watch it fail, observe yourself descending into a mockery of your former coherent self. Sink as deep as the pain commands.

If need be, stay ‘too long.’ Get back together seven times. Try to persuade them in lengthy phone calls. Live the impossibility; don’t just intellectually assume it and then suffer from your emotions never following suit. Properly experience why things can’t be until the lesson sinks in authentically rather than logically. Tire yourself back to health.

No one can make you wise one moment ahead of time – or in your place. The best way to recover sanity is to allow madness to have its full, unfettered, horrific, necessary run.