Jennifer Wright - It Ended Badly

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To Abe, Andy, Brennan, Chris, Colin, Dana, Davey, Gustavo, Jared, Jason, Lex, Liam, Morgan, Nate, Opus, Peter, Roby, Tim, and Tom

From whom I learned some things

And to Mary James (Grandma)

From whom I learned a lot of things

In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

B UDDHA

We are never ever ever ever getting back together. Like, ever.

T AYLOR S WIFT

If you are lying in bed right now, a pint of ice cream in one hand, a bottle of Scotch in the other, and this book clenched between your teeth (one tooth is missing from last nights bar fight), with tears streaming down your face over how much you loved, loved, loved your ex, let me commend you on how well you are coping. You could be doing so much worse. So much worse. You could be beheading your ex or castrating strangers or starting an exciting new life with a sex doll. YOU ARE A HERO. Your restraint exceeds that of the Dalai Lama, who is the happiest, most loving person I can think of. He cant even date, probably because if he did there would inevitably be tabloid stories of a drunk Dalai Lama speed-dialing his ex forty times in a row.

God knows I have done that. The most embarrassing moments of my life have all been spurred by breakups. I know there are people who handle romantic disappointment by talking calmly to their therapists, taking some time to grieve quietly, and reemerging grateful for what they have learned. Sometimes I pretend to be one of those people, but in reality I am someone who handles breakups by taking Klonopin, sleeping for sixteen hours at a time, and writing long, honest, heartfelt e-mails to my ex. And then some texts to make sure my messages arrived.

I have also been known to listlessly dump a pint of Ben & Jerrys Cookie Dough ice cream into a pan to see if it will bake into a giant cookie rather than going to the store for more cookies. It will, by the way, so thats not really embarrassing so much as it is a fun baking tip.

We know theres nothing better than love. Even a Ben & Jerrys Cookie Dough ice-cream cookie, while a close second, is not as good. (I have, admittedly, never tried heroin.) You dont even have to believe in love for this statement to be true. Love isnt Santa Claus. It is real emotion that results in altered brain chemistry. This seems obvious because anyone who has ever loved knows there is no pleasure greater. When I think of the things in life that I most enjoywintry mornings cozy in bed, old movies, good food and wine with friends, and the first cup of coffee in the morningI am so aware of how much better all of these are when shared with someone you love. Loving someone who loves you back is perhaps the only time we feel completely safe and joyful and kinder. Its like coming in from the rain, arriving someplace safe and warm.

When love stops, it feels like being outside in a hurricane. (Unlike heroin, I have been out in a hurricane for almost a full minute; a cool personal fact about how Im a survivor.)

And just as most people experience love, most suffer the heartbreak of breakups. A mathematician much smarter than me, using assumptions on the number of people in the world and how many breakups are average, very conservatively estimated that half a million people suffer a breakup every day. These breakups usually happen after about six months of dating. Evolutionary biologists found that people experiencing heartbreak have brain scans that mirror those of cocaine addicts in withdrawal. We do not handle breakups well. Humans are unbelievably resilient creatures in the face of most of the worlds horrors. We are brave in battle, heroic in the face of disease, and really just terrific on the whole until someone breaks up with us. And then we absolutely implode .

That such a state of love can be attained and then lost seems insane . No wonder we behave insensiblythe best feeling in the world has vanished. This is the perfect time to go crazy.

We often crash in ways that horrify ourselves. Later, when we look back, we often obsess about stupid, angry, or, in retrospect, just plain weird things we did. Perhaps you were very bad at your job for a while or showed some irrational behavior like throwing thingscrumpled-up letters, old CDs, tiny animal figurinesagainst a wall. Or you might have been more creative. Why did you think making a heart-shaped mosaic of chopped-up tie pieces would bring anyone back? That never won anybody back! I firmly believe that one day the ladies of Icona Pop will think about how they threw their exs belongings into a bag and kicked it down the stairs and will reflect, Maybe that was not my finest moment. In that hideous afterglow, we are all left wondering if we are the worst person ever. Heartbreak has the potential to make everyone a worse version of themselves. When my friends do that, I hold their hands tenderly and tell them, Youre not the worst. Norman Mailer is the worst. Norman Mailer is always the worst.

Norman Mailer actually is the worst, but well get to that later in this book.

If your breakup makes you behave like a tormented, crazed shell of your former self, you are not alone. Some of the most notable, most talented people in the world have gone absolutely nuts in the face of romantic disappointment. Edith Wharton. Oskar Kokoschka. Oscar Wilde. Awesome men and women who have left profound artistic legacies for the world have crumbled in the face of heartbreak. The notorious people of historywho have left so-so legaciesgo even crazier. Think how Henry VIII just started lopping off heads. Anna Ivanovna locked people in an ice palace. Things got weird.

There is a great scene in the classic movie The Lion in Winter (1968) where a group of men are waiting to be killed. One says that he is determined to die nobly, and a second replies, You chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered. The first responds, When the fall is all there is, it matters. There are many situations in lifecertainly breakupswhen were not going to get what we want, regardless of how we behave. We can choose whether to fall badly, like Nero, Henry VIII, Norman Mailer, and many others in this book. Or we can try to fall well, like Anne Boleyn and Oscar Wilde, and to handle our suffering with poise and elegance.

Most of us fall somewhere in between.

You may think that everything was sublimely romantic in past eras, and knights pledged themselves to ladies forever, and Mr. Darcy was always riding about on a horse ready to marry someone. Thats never been the case. History isnt the present, but its not that different and certainly not any better.

The disappointments surrounding love today were experienced just as much, and often with more terrifying consequences, by humans in the past. In any era, love and heartbreak preoccupy everyone who is not a saint or a psychopath. Love and its aftereffects are the main preoccupation of good people, bad people, most all people. You know, maybe even psychopaths are affected, because look at Emperor Nero. Or take the Borgias, who were known mostly for poisoning their enemies. And orgies. Lucrezia Borgia did not plot political overthrows at night, lying in her bed. She went to sleep preoccupied with worry that she was going to run into her ex-husband and it was going to be so weird.