Episode 122 - Writing

Transcript

David: 0:14

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:17

where two friends who are also professors show that philosophy is not just some ivory tower pursuit, but can help you understand your everyday problems. If not, well, get over them.

David: 0:28

I'm David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:30

And I'm Ellie Anderson. There was a New Yorker article recently called The New Business of Breakups, in which the author, Jennifer Wilson, went through what we might call a whole cottage industry for breakups that has emerged in recent years. She talks about a hotel that offers a program called Healing Heartbreak, where newly single guests can undergo a full body exfoliation treatment to symbolize the scrubbing away of the past. She also discusses an app called MEND, which leads you through a 17 module online course that will, quote, turn your breakup into a breakthrough, and all sorts of other things. It's just like Basically, yes, this new cottage industry of helping people overcome breakups is a thing.

David: 1:18

I really want to believe, Ellie, that you have either been to this hotel or worked your way through the modules of one of these apps. Please tell me that that's the case.

Ellie: 1:28

Well, no, in fact, it's the case that I wish I had created the 17 module online course about turning your breakup into a breakthrough, because I feel like I could kind of slay with that. And I do hope that perhaps in the future, I will be teaching one of the in person classes at this, like, Heartbreak Hotel because it sounded, honestly really beautiful. One of the locations is in the Yucatan.

David: 1:52

Oh my God, Ellie, 10 years from now, you're going to be a sham guru for emotional heartbreak, selling tickets at 10, 000 for access to one of your emotional mending workshops in the Yucatan or in Bali.

Ellie: 2:06

I know, right? Well, okay, you know that real talk. I actually really love a lot about the self help genre. And so, Yeah, I do think it's problematic when it becomes just like a cash grab. So no, I will not be charging 10, 000 unless by the time I actually start doing them, inflation has skyrocketed so much that 10, 000 is no longer that much money. But I actually think it would be really cool and special to be part of a retreat program that's helping people overcome breakup. So I don't have a problem with these kinds of programs at all, but I think Wilson's trying to point to the fact that they have become an industry of their own. And what does that say about, you know, our approaches to self help, self management, as well as, I mean, I would add the vaunting of romantic relationships in our everyday life. The idea that they're just a be all, end all, so that we will spend so much money going to a retreat to get over one, you know, we're not going to do that for like getting over a job loss or, I don't know, what would be comparable.

David: 3:02

Or like a loved one, the loss of a loved one,

Ellie: 3:05

Yeah, there are grief retreats.

David: 3:07

Yeah, there are grief retreats for sure. So there are two ways you can go about this. Now I am giving you free consultation on your future business model, Ellie. You can go the route of helping people come to terms with the fact that the end of their relationship is not necessarily the end of their life objectives and the vision of themselves that they've harbored in the past, or you could really cash in on the monetize ability of this opportunity and combine this workshop about how to get over your breakup with like a speed dating where like all the people who are recently broken up with pay an extra fee to start meeting the other people who are recently single. And so you actually send people back into the world with a relationship that's probably less likely to succeed than the one that originally got them there in the first place.

Ellie: 3:53

David, you are so sweet and so naive not to realize that almost all of the people signing up for this are going to be people of a certain gender and not necessarily people who like those of that same gender, right? Like, I would venture, I would wager that At least 80 percent of these folks are straight women, so I don't know how well that's gonna work. But, you know, it's a sweet try.

David: 4:19

To be honest, if your output is like 80 percent lesbian turnout rate, I think this would be a success

Ellie: 4:26

just becomes it becomes like a lesbian separatist, like, conversion therapy thing.

David: 4:33

Yeah, they start like buying land and creating a commune for alternative family structures.

Ellie: 4:39

okay, this is getting more and more interesting by the minute. what do you think about this cottage industry of overcoming breakups that Wilson is talking about.

David: 4:49

Well, the cottage industry might be new in the form in which you described it, but for a very long time, people have been. talking about the difficulty of breakups and giving advice to others about how to get over the loss of a loved one. So here I'm thinking about the Roman poet Ovid who wrote a text in the first century of the Common Era called Remedia Amoris, Cures for Love, where he gives readers a number of practical recommendations, which include picking up a new hobby and taking a trip at once. As soon as you get dumped, buy a plane ticket and go to Bali or go to the Yucatan.

Ellie: 5:33

I mean, these seem like very standard things to do after you go through a breakup. Like, we love a post breakup pottery class or a little trip for a treat.

David: 5:44

Yeah, so we love some of them even in the present day, but the ancients also had some other maybe less intuitive recommendations. So for example, phlebotomy, bloodletting, avoidance of rich foods, and also, this one I kind of believe, drinking plenty of water.

Ellie: 6:05

Yeah, I also feel like a little health kick is a classic post breakup thing to do, right? Like, oh, I'm going to get all healthy. So drinking water can fit in with that. I guess actually avoiding rich foods would too, but yeah, maybe the bloodletting will leave out.

David: 6:19

No, the bloodletting needs to come back in. We need to let out all the bad blood, you know, like bad romance, but isn't the title of a Lady Gaga song?

Ellie: 6:29

Yeah, I'll leave it to David to come up with the cultural references that are at least a decade old.

David: 6:34

I know it is also inaccurate because I don't think she mentions blood. So nevermind, forget that.

Ellie: 6:39

She doesn't mention blood. However, on the bloody note, I will say, I do think even bloodletting, which I think is terrible advice after a breakup, is still better than an option from another ancient figure. This is Dido, granted a mythical figure. Dido's kind of the queen of a bad breakup. I think Jennifer Wilson mentions this in the article that we've been talking about. Because Dido, after her lover Aeneas deserts her, kills herself using his sword after building an effigy of him to burn alongside her.

David: 7:12

Oof, I guess she really needed that 16 module course on how to turn your breakup into a breakthrough.

Ellie: 7:24

Today we are talking about breakups.

David: 7:27

What is lost in a breakup? And what are the silver linings of getting dumped?

Ellie: 7:33

How can we get over breakups?

David: 7:35

And what can laws against domestic abuse and stalking tell us about how society views breakups? Breaking up, as we all know, is a really hard thing to do. Since we live in a society with high divorce rates and also with many non marital intimate relationships, Few experiences in life are so common, yet so painful.

Ellie: 8:04

And yet, because our society prizes romantic relationships so highly, really considering them in many ways to be the most important kinds of relationships, we tend to also consider them particularly tough to overcome after they end. And we usually think about the end of romantic relationships as happening in one of two ways. Either, they end in death, or they end in breaking up. And I think the fact that we really only conceive of those two ways for relationships to end, which are both quite heartbreaking in most cases,

David: 8:36

Yeah.

Ellie: 8:37

we don't really consider the possibility that there could be alternative ways of ending romantic relationships if we didn't have the strong expectation of monogamy. Because I think the idea that it's either heartbreak or death is baked into the conception that you have one particular romantic partner at a given time, such that you need to end a relationship in order to start a new one, right? There's really different from friendships where it's like friendships, we have options of they fade away because someone moves away or you kind of don't see them for a while and then you're back in their life again and so on and so forth. There's tons of different gray areas around the ends of friendships, not so much with romantic relationships. And I would say that's because you have to have a really clear expectation of when one relationship has ended in order for another relationship to begin. If you're a monogamous person, which most people in our society are, and even if we aren't, we tend to have kind of monogamous expectations baked into our psyches due to our acculturation.

David: 9:38

And even though sometimes we talk about romantic relationships as like fizzling over time, the expectation is that that fizzle has to culminate in a talk that formalizes and finalizes. That the relationship, right, like then we broke up officially. And I think that this cultural discourse that we have around the possible ends of a relationship, either it breaks or one of the members in the relationship passes away, is what makes those ends so painful, especially when they don't culminate in death, right? Because it's almost as if you are ending something that society tells you you ought to value All your life, right? Until death do us part. And that's one of the reasons why when we do experience a breakup, whether we initiate it or we are on the receiving end of it, we want to know how to get over them as quickly and as painlessly as possible. As you mentioned, Ellie, there is this whole industry that sells quick get over your heartbreak fixes and rituals and trips And one worrisome trend about this industry is that it's increasingly moving into the realm of medicine and biotechnology, with experts now envisioning chemical solutions to heartbreak.

Ellie: 10:56

Oh goodness hit me with this.

David: 10:59

Yes, and it is a hit. There is an article that came out in 2013, written by several philosophers associated with Oxford University, entitled, If I Could Just Stop Loving You. Anti love biotechnology and the ethics of a chemical breakup. Where the authors talk about the ethics of literal anti love potions, which we know have been part of the history of ideas and literature for a very long time, since Ovid, Shakespeare talks about them, Lucretius talks about, you know, there being a potion that you just drink and it fixes your romantic troubles in a second. And the authors argue that now medicine and biotech have advanced to such a degree that maybe the possibility of that dream is within reach. And they talk about three different ways in which modern medicine and biotechnology can give us a quick chemical solution to the aches of a breakup. One is you can just fix the lust, right? Like if you take somebody's lust away, it means that they won't love other people and they won't be pining for the person that dumped them. And so, you know, you give them literally, listen to this, chemical castration, which is something that has been used in penal contexts. You can use SSRIs also because they have an effect on your libido. If you don't like that, you can also target attraction where you intervene at the level of the body in order to prevent people from being attracted to one another. And we know, for example, that there is some anti OCD medication that seems to have this kind of consequence because some people think that love is a kind of obsession. And so if you fix people's obsessive tendencies, then they won't be able to love because love is fundamentally obsessive. And the third and last one that I just want to mention here is there are these proposals for anti attachment chemical solutions that are rooted in neurotransmitters during pair bonding. So you basically prevent people from experience like the serotonin or the dopamine hits that they get when they see the loved one as a way of preventing them from caring when the relationship comes to an end.

Ellie: 13:21

I wish the listeners could see my face right now. It's just like the same kind of profound weariness that I express with respect to so many completely misguided ideas in the contemporary world. David, this is unhinged. I'm sorry.

David: 13:42

It unhinged, yes.

Ellie: 13:43

First off, okay, let's think about the picture of love that this puts forward. None of these are actually targeting love. At most, they would target Limerence? So I'm really interested in the difference between love and limerence. I think we might have talked about it on the podcast before. I'm working on an article on this, and I have been for a while. But so, limerence is a state of infatuation or obsession, and I think it's really important to distinguish it conceptually from love. So I don't, I mean, obviously when we're talking about anti lust drugs, the idea that romantic love is reducible to lust is just like so narrow minded, so deeply wrong. I want like the entire asexual community to rise up right now and just like take down this absurd idea. Second, the idea that like love is a sort of obsession. I think that is definitely true of romantic limerence, but I don't think that needs to be true of romantic love. I mean, come on, I've, I've experienced those obsessions, you guys, but I also think I've experienced love. And I think that they're very different kinds of experiences. And then this anti-attachment so I don't know anything about those medications or whatever that are attacking our attachment. But that just seems like so how would it target the individual person that you're obsessed with versus just targeting your very interest in life like yeah, I mean, wouldn't it lead to you not being if even if it worked, wouldn't it lead you not forming sustainable relationships with anyone maybe experiencing anhedonia or just like this loss of kind of interest. I guess if you're taking the SSRIs, maybe the anhedonia would be mitigated, but this just seems so implausible, but also like profoundly undesirable, misguided, all the things to me.

David: 15:30

Yeah, and unethical. Let's just use that term. Although the authors of this article ultimately come to the conclusion that even if these technologies are not available in the form in which they envision them in the present, their point about this is about the ethics, would these drugs be ethical if they were put on the market? There are four authors to this paper, and they all conclude that the answer is yes, that all of these would be ethical because they have this kind of libertarian attitude. Where they, equate love with a chemical process that's happening in the brain or in the body. And so you also wouldn't be able to target it to the right level of granularity because think about chemical castration. The same thing with anti OCD medication. It just takes away your capacity for lust or attraction as it is defined. And so,

Ellie: 16:20

I forgot chemical castration was even on the table. My last remarks were just limited.

David: 16:24

Yeah chemical castration is on the table.

Ellie: 16:26

Okay, David, that makes it so much worse.

David: 16:29

As an ethical choice according to these philosophers from Oxford.

Ellie: 16:33

Yeah, but so this is something I do want to probe a little bit further because when you say an ethical choice, it just, they're just saying as libertarians, they feel like these drugs should be legal for people to use for the purposes of trying to get over a breakup. Is that right?

David: 16:48

Yes, correct. Although they also draw some conclusions that are really troublesome because of course you can use these drugs in many other ways other than just getting over a breakup. So at some point they raise the issue of what if we had the technology available that would allow somebody to change their sexual orientation, which clearly is a chemical process in the body.

Ellie: 17:10

Yeah, in their minds.

David: 17:11

But yeah, but if it's there, what if somebody could take a pill that would make them. straight, assuming they were queer. So what are the ethics of that? And they're like, oh yeah, that sounds totally great because it enhances individual freedom by giving you a choice that you didn't have before. And so the possibility of eradicating sexual diversity for them doesn't even register as much of a problem.

Ellie: 17:35

but David, I actually don't have a problem with that claim. The idea that like if you did want to have access to these drugs, let's say, I mean, the problem for me is I just don't think that they're likely to work in the way that these people are saying that they might work. But if we, if we're just talking about access and legality, I'm no libertarian, but I don't a problem with having these drugs be legal and accessible to consenting adults, I certainly do think that there are immense political dangers, like for instance, you know, how would we protect children with homophobic parents from having these drugs foisted upon them and those types of things. But I think the basic question, if the question is about whether it's ethical for people to have access to this, I think the answer is yes.

David: 18:16

Mm hmm, Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that the answer is entirely yes for me because I think the very desire for such a drug already speaks to, let's say, the homophobia or the transphobia that rules society such that that desire would guide medical research to the production of a new medical commodity. So why would somebody who is queer, say, ever feel the need to chemically alter their sexual orientation? Chances are the pressure is not internal or embodied. Chances are it's a social pressure. And so the medicine is not responding to a medical. need, it's actually responding to a social pressure and a social pressure that is founded upon injustice.

Ellie: 18:58

Yeah, but I think that takes us more back to the question of efficacy than it does to access. I mean, and I will say, I feel like there are a lot of straight women, if you take the hetero pessimist seriously, who would love to take that drug if it turned them into a lesbian. Going back to my lesbian separatist I'm just gonna give people those drugs at my weird lesbian separatist breakup retreat.

David: 19:18

For an additional fee, of course.

Ellie: 19:22

Okay, but I want to say something about what I think is valuable about breakups and moving beyond, you know, this question of whether we should have access to these drugs, which I think sounds ridiculous, because I feel like there's a lot to be gained from breakups, whether or not they're chosen breakups. So I think a lot of times when we talk about breakups, we're talking about being broken up with, but of course, sometimes we're also the ones breaking up with people, but that can also be a very, very painful experience. In my own life, I've really come to appreciate the time immediately after a breakup, even if that breakup is immensely painful. Because I feel like the time after a breakup is often like a breath of fresh air, a kind of coming home to myself. And like a breath of fresh air, especially when that air is cold, it's not exactly pleasant, but it's full of possibilities, and it's really renewing. I feel like after a breakup, you have to make a difficult choice about whether to ruminate, perseverate, like, chew it over, get obsessed, kind of go down that rabbit hole where you might end up wanting the OCD drug. And that's the easy road to take, at least for many of us. I mean, I have OCD tendencies myself, so maybe just speaking for myself, but it can get really easy to get in that obsessive, ruminative state post breakup. But if you are able to make the choice after the breakup to avoid that very tempting route and instead take up responsibility for refashioning your life, deconfecting from the relationship, sort of refusing the temptation of wallowing in nostalgia and reaffirming a sort of commitment to your own life, like re centering your life on yourself as well as refocusing your investment in other relationships. That means that you're kind of putting the other person out of your orbit. And one way that a roommate in college of mine put this to me was clean pain versus dirty pain. Like there's a horrible pain after a breakup, but the clean pain is the pain that comes from breathing in that cold fresh air and just kind of continuing to go on with your life and reorienting yourself. Dirty pain is that wallowing the, you know, messy on again, off again type of thing. And yeah, I feel like It's not always within our power to make that choice, but I do feel like over time in my adult life, it became easier and easier for me to take that road towards clean pain versus wallowing in the dirty pain. And that's allowed me to see the beauty that can emerge after a breakup.

David: 21:54

Yeah, and I think that's something that. We can do better. the more breakups we have, right, because once you are familiar with the terrain, you are familiar with your own way of navigating that very difficult terrain where you often have the impulse to want to blame the other person about everything that went wrong in the relationship, but over time, you are sort of forced by your own thoughts to acknowledge your role in the breaking down of this union, whether it's a marriage or just an intimate relationship. And aside from the fact that it can be this kind of fresh air that allows us to think about the distinction between these two kinds of pain, I'm here reminded of her recent interview with Mariana Alessandri and her claim, inspired by Unamuno, that sometimes it is in pain that our capacity for empathy just expands. Because I remember when I broke up with my ex when I was in grad school, which was, I mean, up until now, the only breakup I've ever had.

Ellie: 22:56

Wow.

David: 22:56

I remember that it really changed my interpretation of my mother and of her past and current relationship in a way that I never understood before. You know, questions about why does somebody stay with somebody else? What is it that attracted them to them in the first place when maybe that choice doesn't register to you as the most logical one? And it was only when I understood The kind of raw heartache that comes with leaving somebody that you love behind, or being left behind by them, that I then looked at, you know, members of my family, in particular I'm talking about my mother, who had had a couple of relationships that I was, you know, honestly kind of bitchy and judgmental about and it was just, the pain itself of the breakup that expanded my circle of moral concern in such a way that she suddenly appeared in a new light.

Ellie: 23:52

I can't believe you've had only one breakup.

David: 23:54

I know I need, well don't tell to my partner. I was going to say, I need more experience.

Ellie: 23:59

I know because you said we get better and better at them over time.

David: 24:03

Yeah. And I, so I do think that's true. I do think you learn a certain kind of skill in emotional processing and coping with pain, the more of it you have. So who knows? Maybe like maybe having other kinds of pain can also give you that skill that is transferable. so I'm not necessarily suggesting that people go out there and just break up their relationships in order to beef up their emotional CV.

Ellie: 24:29

I know, right? Like all avoidantly attached people right now are hearing that point, like, oh, I got to do more breakups. It's nice to think about breakups as opening up our capacity for empathizing with other people. I have very complicated feelings about the concept of empathy, but I do think this sense that we can understand others better through experiences of breakups or understand their emotional pain. But at the same time, I think what is most salient to me with breakups is How they can turn us back into ourselves and enable self actualization. And in addition, what I was mentioning before, one of the things that fascinates me about breakups is that they often end up changing the ecology of the self such that you incorporate parts of the other person that weren't there before into your own psychology. And that might sound like a trite statement at first, but I want to unpack it a little bit. So what happens in a relationship between two people is that there's a polarization of different characteristics, values, et cetera. In one of my relationships, for instance, I was considered sort of the more introspective one because I meditate and I journal. And the person that I was with was like a lot more sort of active, kind of sporty, out there in the world, whatever. And we're still friends. I absolutely love staying friends with my ex. This is a core value for me. It's been passed down from multiple generations of women in my family. We love to stay friends with exes. So we're still friends. One of the interesting things about our breakup is that after it happened, the guy that I was with started meditating and journaling himself, and they became really important parts of his life. But it was almost as though, even though I had kind of gently encouraged him to try out those practices when we were together, because I thought that they might be helpful for him, that was my role. It was like he would be doing my thing if he were to do that while we were dating. But then once weren't dating, that polarity fell away, and then he could adopt that for himself. And another funny example of this was the guy who dumped me brutally that I talked about in our emotional labor episode. It wasn't really a full on romantic relationship. It was more of a situationship. But after we broke up, I saw months later, because I kind of like, I think I talked about this in the episode too, I kind of stalked his new girlfriend afterward. That was a case of obsession. That was dark.

David: 26:47

Needed that anti OCD medication, Ellie.

Ellie: 26:49

I, no, I needed to, I needed to overcome it existentially through renewing my commitments to my life. But I saw she posted on her Instagram that she was taking a philosophy class and this was after he had dumped her as well. So in my mind, I think what happened is that our breakup led him to get interested in philosophy. Then, when they broke up, she got interested in philosophy.

David: 27:14

It is the trickle down theory of philosophy. We're all philosophers because the people that have dumped us were themselves dumped by philosophers.

Ellie: 27:22

Or in this case, the guy who dumped me got interested in philosophy because of the person, you know, he had dumped, which was me. So, anyway, I offer that as a thought on one silver lining of breakups.

David: 27:34

No, I really like that. And it just reminds me of the fact that in that previous relationship I had, my ex is the one that cooked, and he loved to hike. Those were like his two little things. And, you know, I picked up hiking from him and I continued it afterwards. And I picked up cooking from him and I continued it, such that now, of, me and my partner, I'm the one that cooks more frequently. So there is definitely an absorption and reprojection of things through exposure that will always carry a memory, actually, of the previous partner. Because sometimes I do think about my ex when I cook something that either he taught me to cook or I, you know, enact a little skill that he taught me to enact. And so the relationship may have ended in that culturally sanctioned way that we are not together as partners, but the trace of his influence upon my life continues, sometimes in very, very subtle ways, but that are nonetheless undeniable.

Ellie: 28:40

And if you've succeeded in choosing the path of clean pain rather than dirty pain, then that reminder of him is just gonna be a sweet, kind of gentle and distant thought rather than a kind of creepy effigy that you're burning along with you like Dido.

David: 28:57

I love a creepy effigy.

Ellie: 28:58

Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly Zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast. com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay student assistants a fair wage. We've seen that breakups can have a silver lining of opening us up to new paths of self actualization, even when they're really painful. But we haven't yet talked about what exactly is lost in a breakup. And this is a question that the philosopher of love Pilar Lopez Cantero has an interesting account of. She asks, when we're grieving a breakup, what are we grieving? The philosophy of love tends to give two answers to this. We're grieving the loved one and or we're grieving the loss of the relationship with them. But Lopez Cantero suggests that we're mourning both, and they're not like independent objects of mourning or grief, but they're actually interdependent in a crucial way. And she gives an example here of a couple in order to illustrate this. Aurora and Diana were in a romantic relationship until Aurora broke up with Diana. After the breakup, Aurora disappears. Diana didn't choose the breakup and still loves Aurora. And she loves Aurora really for who Aurora is. She experiences intense pain because of the breakup, missing Aurora every day. And then after two months, Diana, still not over the breakup, poor soul, Aurora shows up at Diana's door and says, I want to be in your life again. I miss you. Please let me come back home. La da da!

David: 30:46

Oh my god, come back as partners or just like as friends?

Ellie: 30:49

So here's the catch. Poor Diana realizes it's not because Aurora wants to get back together. Aurora only loves Diana as a friend, basically wants to be friends, be in Diana's life, but not be romantic. And so Lopez Cantero says, well, Aurora has returned, but it's obvious that Diana's object of grief hasn't returned. Right? So the object of grief can't just be the person that we miss. So when we talk about missing somebody so much after a breakup, it's a bit of a misnomer because what we are also missing is the reciprocated relationship that we had with them. And we, we miss the fact that they wanted that relationship with us too, which is really like a property of them.

David: 31:32

Let's think about this a little bit because, I mean, for starters, the notion that you lose the person has always struck me as implausible for the very simple fact that the person lives, but aside from that, the rhetoric around it, the expectation that, okay, if I end this relationship, I'm losing this person forever, sometimes pushes people to embrace the belief that those who break up with you are dead to me from that moment on. And so it leads you to literally affirm their death as a way of making sense of the breakup. And so that's really messed up and dark. But it seems to me, and tell me if I'm wrong about this, because I have not read Lopez Cantero, it seems as if her view is just a version of the relationship account of what is lost in a breakup. What is lost is the specific relationship we had when we were a particular status relative to each other. Of course, we can develop a new relationship, like a friendship, a co working relationship, neighbors, co parents, so on. So would it be fair to say that for her, we're still ultimately losing the specific relationship we had with this person? Is it just like individualizing the relationship?

Ellie: 32:49

No, but she recognizes that there is an interpretation of her view that would suggest that. So there is, you know, one way of reading what she's saying that says what you lose is a recognized romantic relationship. For her, we can't say that the relationship is the central element because you also really do miss the person. And so grief is warranted by the loss of the person and by the loss of the relationship, but we have to consider those as interdependent.

David: 33:19

Okay, but I still don't see why that's not just an iteration of the relationship view since you can continue a relationship with your ex after the fact. The relationship doesn't actually disappear with that one person, it just takes a new form.

Ellie: 33:34

Yeah, and I tend to agree with that. I mean, Lopez Cantero addresses that explicitly, and some of the material in the article, although it's really interesting from a philosophy of love perspective, is a bit overly technical for what we're talking about in general. Already I'm feeling like so stressed out by the fact that there's so much I want to cover in this episode and we can't. But one thing I'll just say in response to that, David, is that I feel like. The condition for the possibility of me being friends with my exes afterward, which is almost always my intention after a breakup, because my view is, like, unless somebody does something really morally egregious, there still needs to be, though, a period, I think, of not talking to the person, or at least certainly not talking to them in the same way, in order for there to be the possibility of a new relationship with that same person in the future. So I would say the kinds of relationships that I have with my exes are obviously very different from the relationships that we had when we were romantic, but they're still with the same person. And that's what's so beautiful about them. Right? Like I can still enjoy so many of the things that I enjoyed about the person before. Not all of them, right? There are very different boundaries post breakup. But it's still them, right? It's just a different kind of relationship, but you have to let yourself mourn the loss of that romantic relationship, like let it die completely. No more embers before you can then start up the friendship. And I learned this the hard way in my first really tragic breakup in college where I kept reaching out to my ex. We'd mutually decided to break up. But I was having such a hard time, and I was used to going to him to help me deal with emotional pain, that I would like email him these really sad, long emails, and he got to the point where he was like, Ellie, you can't use me to get over me. Few pieces of advice have stuck with me the way that that one has.

David: 35:21

Yeah, no, I can definitely see that. And I'm thinking about these two accounts that we inherit from the philosophy of love about the loss of breakups, the person account where you lose the individual. And then what we've been discussing, which is that the specific relationship is itself what is lost. And I wonder whether there is a third option that we might want to consider here. And that is that it's not that you lose the other person or that you lose all relationship with the person or even your particular relationship with them, since that can evolve, but rather that you lose the version of yourself that you were when you were with that person. So when we enter into romantic and intimate relationships with other people that we consider emotionally significant, that last a long time, that change us, we develop, for example, couple routines, right? We start doing things on a certain time scale at certain times. We develop and cultivate shared hobbies or new hobbies that make sense in the context of the relationship. We create new ways of navigating emotional turmoil or emotional ecstasy, depending on, you know, where the relationship is at a particular time. And so we become a certain person with the people that we date. I am not the same person with my current partner, Rabih, than I was with my ex, Keith. Those two Davids are completely separate. And the breakup with Keith really meant, sure, losing my proximity with that person, losing the expectations, the activities that we did together. But part of what I had to learn to let go of was actually a version of David that felt still very close to me when the breakup was recent, but that, you know, with the passage of time became more and more distant. And now that other David is somebody that I see almost like a friendly stranger, somebody that I recognize and that I'm familiar with. But with whom I have a lot less in common than maybe I would have imagined. And so you lose, not the other person, but a version of the self that you created in that moment.

Ellie: 37:38

And I would add to what you're saying, you lose not just the self that you were in terms of the activities that you were doing with that person, but also who you perceived yourself to be in their eyes, the kind of recognition that you got from them, the sense of the possible future self you had when you were with them, because that really changes from relationship to relationship, and it seems like that third possibility, which I think is beautiful. I mean, I think, I think this is so right because I think the refraction of our own self images through the eyes of others is a key part of romantic relationships. I've written about this in at least one article. The ability to withdraw from the satisfaction you derive from that version of yourself and reaffirm kind of a commitment to yourself seems to go back to what we were talking about before. And I think would be a reason why you do need to have a period of not contacting the other person. And I think this can lead us into thinking about how, I think both of us, it seems fair to say, think that a period of no contact is a good thing after a breakup. But that's becoming harder and harder in the age of social media, because when I was in college, I could just not email my ex. But if I were in college now, I would be seeing them on Instagram. I would have to actively remove them from my life in order for them not to be constantly in my face, right? It's like It used to be so scary to see your ex at a bar. Now it's like, you just see them all the time on your feed. It's just, you know, it's so harder to go no contact. And that might be part of why our student assistants told us that there's, among Gen Z, a real trend right now of going no contact, of like, muting or even blocking exes for a time after a breakup.

David: 39:19

So I feel very conflicted, to be honest, about this recent talk about the no contact rule and the reason that I'm so hesitant about that is because at least in my experience when I had my breakup, I didn't have no contact with my ex. In fact, we stayed in contact continuously through the breakup in the weeks and months following. And in fact, the presence of that person. at that crucial time period proved very beneficial for me to process what was happening and help make sense of where I wanted to go. And so I think it's possible to kind of shift gears relationship wise with a person as long as, of course, you have faith in them to be able to do so without them trying to pull you back into the relationship or vice versa. And so I don't think it's a universal rule that you have to go no contact. I think in some cases, you know, especially if that person really is your best friend because you've dated for so long and they know you like nobody else does, maybe what you do need is their perspective, even if it's really difficult to do so at a particular time. Be that as it may, I do think you're right that even if you wanted to implement the no contact rule, social media and the kind of entanglement of our lives in this digital age make that very difficult. And I'm here thinking about something that's kind of silly, honestly, but that I think raises a serious question. How do you deal with things like Netflix passwords? Because, you know, that's a kind of gray area where you are interconnected with somebody else. They have your password. You see what they're seeing. So there are all these reminders in your life that you are still connected to them. But it sounds so petty to tell your ex, well, you can't use my Netflix account anymore. It sounds almost vindictive.

Ellie: 41:08

But you don't, you don't want to see what they're watching.

David: 41:11

I know exactly.

Ellie: 41:12

You see that they're watching Bridget Jones's Diary for the third time, you're like, oh, they're struggling.

David: 41:16

Which they refused to watch with you when you're, you know, like, it's like, who are they dating now?

Ellie: 41:19

Which was your favorite movie?

David: 41:22

And so there are. All these entanglements that continue that don't really fit very nicely into the no contact rule. So do you also tell your friends not to talk about your ex even if they're friends with them because that would constitute contact? There is a lot of ways in which the no contact rule seems ill fitted for a world of connection.

Ellie: 41:48

Yeah. And another app that. Our student assistants mentioned to me with respect to this, so thanks to Kristen and Bayarmaa for their help on this, is the BeReal app. Kristen pointed out that the BeReal app is, you know, this app where at a certain time of day, you're just asked to take a photo of what you're doing. And it shows both front facing and a back facing view. So it's meant to be really spontaneous, give people kind of a look at your daily life. But that also means that it's very intimate. You know, sometimes you might be watching TV on your couch. Other times you might be out to dinner. Other times you might be I don't know, whatever you're doing in your life on any given day. So it's a little bit different from Instagram, which might tend to favor the highlighted moments, like the moments that you want to show off. And so Kristen said that among her friend group, people talk about how they might feel bad removing their exes from Be Real because it's kind of awkward, like it's a statement to remove them from the app, especially if you're still on friendly terms. But you also don't really want to be seeing what your ex is doing every day and having that kind of inside glimpse into their intimate lives because that can catalyze, you know, that dirty pain that we were talking about earlier. When

David: 42:58

Yeah, no, that's exactly what I'm talking about. And so independently of what our views are about breakups, I think it's inevitable that we need to face up to moments of deep discomfort that involves seeing a person that either we know we hurt. Or that has hurt us, and I think ultimately working through those moments on the spot and afterwards is also the condition for the possibility of moral growth that comes from a breakup, right? Like part of what it means to have one of those breakthroughs is knowing how to manage yourself in the presence of somebody that you don't want to see. or getting to the point where you can see them without them having that deep control over your emotional state that maybe they did at the beginning of a breakup.

Ellie: 43:45

When we decided to do this episode, I read this book by Kelli María Korducki called Hard to do the surprising feminist history of breaking up. And there was a lot that I found interesting about it, but I will say I ended up being disappointed because it was actually mostly about recent history of relationships and not so much about breakups. And so I was sort of like, okay, did she write a book about romance? And then her publisher told her to actually make it about breakups. And so there was just a last minute change. But there were some fun factoids I want to share that Yeah, we're quite enlightening for me, even as somebody who specializes in feminist philosophies of love. So she talks about how breakups are a relatively recent phenomenon, at least in terms of the dissolution of marriages, right? No fault divorce was codified in California in 1971. And prior to that, people, in order to get divorced, had to argue that there was some spousal form of wrongdoing, which, often, as you can probably imagine, can disadvantaged women because they weren't believed as much as men. For instance, in the 19th century in the UK, men could file for divorce solely due to a wife's adultery, whereas women, if they wanted to file for divorce, had to prove not only that their husbands had committed adultery, but also bigamy. Incest, cruelty, or desertion.

David: 45:24

Oh, wow. I mean, cruelty is kind of like an easy one in the 1800s, probably for most men.

Ellie: 45:29

Uh, yeah. But maybe not for most women to convince men of. And the fact is, in a patriarchal system, a lot of women end up in marriages that are deeply unsatisfying to them for some form of protection. Most often financial. We are by no means in a perfect world in the present day with respect to this. That's still something that holds a lot of women to unhappy and downright abusive marriages. But it is the case, as Korduki points out, that the ability to get divorces, especially no fault divorces, has been a real factor in women's liberation. And to this day, women, who are likely to be less satisfied in their marriages than men are, are much likelier to initiate divorce proceedings than men.

David: 46:15

I can definitely see how changes in the law make it formally possible for women to walk away from relationships, especially marriages. But I would add that also changes in the economy and in society more broadly then also make it materially more plausible for them to do what was previously only formally possible, right? So like the legalization of divorce makes it officially possible that you can get divorced. But then having access to the workforce, having certain shifting social attitudes about what it means to be a divorced woman, then make it more plausible that women will enact those formal rights.

Ellie: 46:57

Mm hmm.

David: 46:58

Now, once breakups become let's say a social institution in our culture, something that we recognize, that we accept, that we talk about. I think what has happened, you know, I can't date this, but let's just say in the last like 50 to 100 years is that we have started perpetuating certain myths about those breakups and what they are and what form they must take that are really noxious. For example, There is a widespread belief that a breakup, especially in the cases of marriage, so I'm here talking about divorce, is an inherently wasteful act because you are, quote unquote, throwing it all away for selfish reasons, as if the relationship itself in its formalized form, as recognized under the law, were just like an inherent good that you should never walk away from, and I think that's a really dangerous myth

Ellie: 47:55

And there's also the myth that every divorce has to be emotionally devastating for both parties, which might make us suspicious of people who don't display what we consider to be the right amount of sadness or despair about their breakup, independently of whether they initiate it or not. You know, we think it's like weird if people are too obsessed with their breakup, but also if they're not sad enough about it. We almost see them as perverse or taking joy in what should be considered an objectively bad situation because we think that romantic relationships and marriages are so significant in our society.

David: 48:26

Yes, there are so many of these myths. There is this article entitled Breakups that was written by a legal scholar by the name of Deborah Tuerkheimer, where the author talks about other myths that are associated not just with divorce, but with breakup more specifically. One myth that Tuerkheimer believes has done a lot of harm for women's liberation in our culture is this idea that you often hear, which is connected to women's economic liberation, which is that since nowadays women can, you know, have their own employment, they have their own income, they have financial freedom, that must mean that they can leave a relationship whenever they want to. And that means that if they stay in the relationship, especially a relationship that is physically or psychologically abusive, they are implicitly consenting to the abuse. So the notion that there are no major obstacles nowadays to a breakup. And so no breakup means consent. Another myth that she talks about is that breakups are events that occur at a singular point in time, almost as if you could like take a photograph of a breakup, right? Like there's the day, the moment, the hour when a breakup happens.

Ellie: 49:43

The tears on the stoop holding the coffee that you got together.

David: 49:48

Yeah, or you know, like having a shout out, I don't know, at some bar where you just say, Well, I never want to see you again.

Ellie: 49:55

We have very different views of breakups, apparently. Very different imagery.

David: 50:01

I want mine to be very public and very scandalous. But she says in reality. Breakups take a very long time. They are processes that can take days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, precisely because of what I mentioned earlier about connection. We are so interconnected that sometimes really uncoupling and disentangling oneself from another person is not something that has a moment in time at which it happened.

Ellie: 50:30

Well, and that's especially the case for abusive relationships. A lot of feminist legal scholarship focuses on how hard it is for women in abusive relationships to leave their abusers. Many studies show that it's actually unlikely that an initial separation from an abusive partner will ultimately stick, and even those that do often require numerous attempts on the part of the women trying to leave their abusers. The feminist legal scholar Martha Mahoney has suggested that these kinds of breakups really take a while and aren't just a snapshot, one off type of moment.

David: 51:06

And I'm really happy that you are bringing this specifically to cases of domestic abuse, because that's precisely what Tuerkheimer focuses on in this article about breakups and the law. Obviously, there are many reasons why breakups happen. But often abuse is one of those reasons. And unfortunately, many of the myths that we have around love and relationship and commitment end up infiltrating the legal system, according to Tuerkheimer, and leaving women in abusive relationships in a catch 22 situation when they are trying to leave an abusive partner.

Ellie: 51:45

What exactly is the catch 22 there?

David: 51:49

So Tuerkheimer's main point is that women in abusive relationships get trapped between two equally horrible options. And legally speaking, the notion of a breakup, the way in which breakups are constituted in legal settings is at the center of this entrapment. Imagine a hypothetical woman named Sarah who is in an abusive relationship with a man. The law can intervene on Sarah's behalf using anti domestic abuse laws. But only if the abuse that she is subjected to is physical abuse, the kind of abuse that results in broken bones, bruises, so on and so forth. But if Sarah's partner is not physically abusive, but psychologically abusive instead, and uses tactics rooted in intimidation, manipulation, control, financial threats, so on and so forth. That behavior is not currently prosecutable under most domestic abuse statutes. So women can't really turn to domestic abuse laws to give them the kind of reprieve they need because of this bias. Now, this is where the breakup enters. If Sarah had broken up with her partner when all that behavior that was psychologically and financially and mentally manipulative was happening, suddenly the law treats the case very differently. Now the case is not prosecuted under domestic abuse laws. Rather, it's treated as a case of stalking, where Sarah, the law will say, is being stalked by her ex who is tracking her phone, following her around, you know, showing up wherever she goes out as a way of manipulating and intimidating her. And the benefit of anti stalking laws in the U.S., at least relative to anti domestic abuse laws is that they don't require physical injury to the victim, right? Like if you are being followed and tracked and somebody is violating your privacy, they are violating those laws, even if you don't have any broken bones or cut skin or bruises to show for it. So it's psychological rather than physical.

Ellie: 54:12

Okay, David, there is so much to unpack here, including just, like, all the straight up misogyny, but one thing that this is making me think back to is our earlier point that our society recognizes the ending of relationships only through breakups, which, as we've talked about, are imagined as clear cut and death. And I feel like this is a case where you see the damaging effects of that kind of narrative, which is, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense that you brought this up in the context of our myths around breakups because it seems like what's going on is that because our culture already counsels so much like a dark, weird shit in romantic relationships. so many toxic forms of attachment. It's like, well, you know, if that's happening within a romantic relationship, then there's nothing we can really do. But, oh, wow. If you've told that person that you don't want to be with them, that's where the buck stops. And now they're just a creepy weirdo that we can prosecute. Even though stalking is like famously hard to prosecute too, but that is another story.

David: 55:10

Yeah, no, and that's exactly the point here, that we tend to think of the law as being neutral in relationship to relationship status, right? Like, we want to believe that the law will treat a crime like a crime, independently of what kind of relationship you have with the perpetrator. In the past, rape was not recognized inside a marriage contract. Now it is. And she says, we think that that ended with the recognition of marital rape. But in reality, the breakup still is treated as this almost magical moment in somebody's relationship where if your partner is psychologically abusive towards you, it's not just that it's difficult to prosecute as domestic abuse. It's actually that the law doesn't even see it as a crime. There is no crime there. Even though anti stalking legislations, and this is a really important point, say nothing officially on the books about a breakup being necessary. But the courts just don't apply them in that way. And I think it's an example of how we just assume that like, hey, a male partner kind of just has the right to stalk his girlfriend or his wife as long as that wife or partner can't point to this magical moment when they were told that the relationship was over.

Ellie: 56:30

The reality TV shows that I watch certainly foster those evil and mythical illusions as well. It's like, I saw that your location was XYZ at 3 a. m.

David: 56:42

Yeah, exactly. And keeping in mind what you said, Ellie, about how difficult it is to prove that you've officially left, especially an abusive partner, women in these cases. actually have no tools at their disposal because the abusive partner can always say, Look, we were still in a kind of relationship. We were still living together. We were still in contact. But the dark reason for that is because the abuser ensured that the abused couldn't leave.

Ellie: 57:11

And, although we're kind of ending this episode on a bummer note, perhaps not a surprising note to end on for an episode on breakups, I do think that this raises broader questions for just how many material effects on people's health and well being, the kinds of stories that we tell ourselves about romantic love and its endings, can have. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our Overthink community on Patreon for bonus content, Zoom meetings, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 57:44

To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one time tax deductible donations, please check out our website, overthinkpodcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel, as well as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at overthink_pod.

Ellie: 58:00

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.