Rosie Wilby - The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak

To outsiders, eccentrics, mavericks and all those who have been dumped in a broader sense.

Contents

First, my thanks go to my agent Cathryn Summerhayes and my editor Matthew Lowing. Without their initial enthusiasm and encouragement, this book would never have happened. And to the rest of the brilliant team at Bloomsbury who worked on this project: Holly Jarrald, Katherine Macpherson, Alice Graham and Lizzy Ewer.

I am so incredibly lucky over the last few years to have become friends with the incredibly talented author, actress, musician and all-round fierce feminist force of nature that is Abigail Tarttelin. Her insightful feedback on my early drafts was instrumental in the editing process. Make sure you read her awesome books Golden Boy and Dead Girls as soon as you possibly can.

Special mentions go to The Breakup Monologues producer Dave Pickering, one of the worlds most compassionate and ethical humans, and to all of the podcast guests and interviewees who shared their stories. Also to Tim Schoenert for his excellent proofreading skills, Katie Margaret Hall for her friendship and festival research, and to superstar role models and cheerleaders Jac Nunns and Ange West for supporting season four of the podcast.

Further thanks go to Arts Council England and Bradford Literary Festival for supporting the very first live pilot stages of The Breakup Monologues and to the British Podcast Awards and Wellcome for supporting the podcast mini-season My Chemical Romance? which provided the material for the chapter of the same name.

And a big shout out to my Radio Diva family Heather, Rachel, Jonathan, Linda, Fiona, Carrie, Roxy, Danielle, Jacquie and Fizz. Although the show is no more, I learned so much. The spirit of what we created lives on and continues to inform my work.

High fives to inspiring female creatives everywhereespecially to Viv Groskop who, despite juggling a phenomenal number of things, never seems too busy to tweet a supportive message about a colleagues work. To Kal Lavelle for kindly allowing me to reproduce some of the lyrics of her awesome song. To Kathy Labriola, Jacqui Gabb, Kate Leaver, Meg-John Barker and Sally Holloway for sending me copies of their books and allowing me to quote from their work. And to Jen Brister, who got onstage for an impromptu double act with me at the Women in Comedy festival when I was having a meltdown after my breakup with Nice Ex-Girlfriend.

Finally, of course, Id like to send all my love to my darling Girlfriend. Every day is an adventure with you. Thank you for opening my eyes to so many things, not least to the brilliance of dogs.

Heartbreak is universal. Whether you are male, female, trans, non-binary, gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual, polyamorous, monogamous, young, old or somewhere in between, we all seem to navigate a similarly emotionally perilous happy-sad terrain in the unfortunate (or as it turns out sometimes, fortunate)

But if you really want to know about breakupsyou should ask a lesbian.

Yes. Thats right. A lesbian.

I dont mean you should just rock up to a lesbian bar and start quizzing the first comfortably-shoed woman you see about ghosting, conscious uncoupling, rebound flings, heartbreak, addiction, serial monogamy, loneliness, grief, attachment theory, anti-love drugs, rebirth, transformation, personal growth and all the other sorts of things youre going to be reading about in this book. For a start, youll be hard pushed to find a lesbian bar. Most of them have closed down.

No. I mean that lesbians are the unofficial, unrecognised world champions of breakups. Statistically speaking, we go through more breakups in a lifetime than anyone else. with an ex more frequently than anyone else. After all, its a small communityand sometimes theres nobody else to be friends with.

So trust me when I say Ive got some relevant life experience and a useful perspective on this topic useful for lots of people.

Straight women! Ive got your back. I know how it feels to get dumped as a woman.

Straight men! Ive got your back too. I know how it feels to get dumped by a woman.

And queer people. Ive got your back too, because youre my family and I love you. Simple.

So who the hell is this lesbian telling you to read her book?

Im a professional comedian, radio presenter and compulsive serial monogamist. In 2016, I started obsessively exploring breakups in my work. I was concerned that perhaps I had been wasting years and years of my life expending so much energy on relationships that did not endure. Surely real love was supposed to last? I was on a quest to figure out how to finally settle down and stay with my awesome new partner. Lets call her Girlfriend.

It may seem odd how much of this book about breakups I spend talking about a relationship Im trying, fightingwayward sun-browned stems of ivy that creep up from our neighbours garden and are slowly but surely obscuring the view from our bedroom window. And sometimes we ourselves can become entangled with the strands of our relationships in unhealthy ways that obscure our view. Sometimes, like it or not, it is time for a spot of pruning.

After touring a solo show all about my own most painful separation, somewhat ironically titled The Conscious Uncoupling , I began speaking to other comedians, authors and academics about heartbreak. Initially this was a live chat show called The Breakup Monologues. I had no real plans for it. I would probably start writing and touring another solo show about something else entirely. I would resume grinding away on the comedy circuit. But the discussions were so interesting and fun that I thought I really had better start recording them for a podcast. A new journey began. I wanted to get to the who, what, when and how of breakupsand, more pertinently, the why? Why the hell do we do this to one another?

Grounds for Divorce

Under Turkish fifteenth-century law, a woman had the freedom to divorce her husband if he did not provide her with enough coffee.

In the twenty-first century, relationships are more likely to end due to one of the big seven reasons identified by my friend, the author, nurse and counsellor Kathy Labriola:

Sexual problems (including mismatched libidos and affairs)

Incompatibility around money

Domestic issues arising from living together

Drug and alcohol addiction

Untreated mental health conditions

Abuse (physical, verbal or emotional)

Conflicts over autonomy and intimacy

Heres a rundown of my most significant breakups in reverse chronological order and an attempt to categorise them according to Kathys list.

Nice Ex-Girlfriend (20112016): Technically, I suppose you could call this a sexual problems breakup. I was on the rebound when we met, still bouncing around all over the place, looking for answers, drowning in existential angst. Real intimacy felt like a wobbly, tearful step too far. Yet we established a loving bond, one that it seemed nonsensical to discard. After moving in together, we operated like a domestic dream team easily slipping into egalitarian roles and routines around bins, cooking, shopping and cleaning. As the years wore on, however, I missed the heady sensation of actually being in love. I wondered if she did too. We talked, largely hypothetically, about non-monogamy. If your relationship is great in every way except sex, then cant you just outsource that bit? The answer, for us, was ultimately no. But we remain friends.