The Friendship Cure by Kate Leaver
Author:Kate Leaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-03-01T05:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER EIGHT
Friendship break-ups
BREAK-UPS OF ANY KIND hurt. Think of the last time you broke up with a romantic partner. Break-ups ache all over: your mind, your limbs, your ego. And I swear, if you concentrate on it at the right moment, you can actually feel as though your heart is breaking. The beats seem off-kilter, like the organ has all of a sudden forgotten how to thump-thump against your chest. You feel pain, actual physical pain. You feel anguish, very real anguish. You feel as though you may never recover from it — how could you possibly resume your normal life, what are you going to do, walk around with your chest gaping open? How can you mend a broken heart? Al Green and The Bee Gees didn’t seem to know. But at least when you break off a romantic relationship, there’s a language for it. There’s an agreed upon treatment plan and a mourning period and a set of rituals we all follow, as prescribed by our mates and pop culture. There are songs to cry to alone in a darkened room, there are movies to sob along to as you gorge on your junk food of choice, there are grace periods that allow you to wallow in your misery without the usual obligations to socialise or function. We know how to do romantic break-ups, we know what they look like and feel like and smell like. We’ve memorised the routine: listen to gut-wrenching ballads, watch something miserable on Netflix, binge on Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream. Tubs of it. Calories don’t count when you’re heartbroken; neither does bad body odour or sudden-onset hermitage. Break-ups are one of the few occasions we give our friends, our acquaintances, our idols and ourselves permission to feel an emotion fully until it releases its grip. It’s one of the few times we get socially sanctioned time to heal.
When I broke up with a boyfriend of seven years in my twenties, I moved back in with my dad and stepmom for a bit, played ‘Magic’ by Coldplay on repeat, ate only from the food group ‘cookie’, napped away the pain, sent woeful messages to my friends, watched endless re-runs of Friends on telly, and had long, animated conversations with my patient, elderly rescue dog, Lady Fluffington. These were my coping mechanisms, and I did them automatically because I knew the social protocol for break-ups. We tend to very quickly empathise with someone who’s going through a break-up; it’s that universal a malady. We all have hearts, they get broken, it’s a bitter fact of life. But there is comfort in the banality of the pain even at the time (though it also helps to imagine that there has never been so tragic a break-up and there never will be a more tragic breakup, not now, not ever, pass the cookies). Romantic love and its demise are things we have utterly digested as a species; we live them in reality and obsessively recreate them in fiction.
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