Notes on Heartbreak: From Vogue’s Dating Columnist, the must-read book on love and letting go

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Accepting that there were two of you in the relationship and that the end was not necessarily all your fault can be a liberation. Annie Lord nails down the heartbreak experience like no other and I think this is an extremely comforting read for people going through it, as I currently am. Writing about it really helped because it felt like I was still sitting in bed crying all day, but now it was also work. There have been novels and films and many thousands of poems, but now, after years of concentrating simplyon the process of falling in love, scientists are starting to look at the end of love, too.

The person I’m speaking to directly [in those sections] is a really idealised version of someone and as time passes my view of them becomes a bit more realistic as I was able to handle the truth of it and see the situation as a three-dimensional thing. But I love that it’s like that, and I wonder why putting lots of feeling into writing can sometimes be seen a negative thing?She talks about how clever he was, and how she wanted him to be more ambitious, encouraging him to apply for grants and courses he was not interested in. She was plodding through her days, managing to feed her kids and occasionally meet her deadlines as a science journalist, but constantly falling ill, getting thin, unable to sleep. And if you manage to get there, who’s to say you won’t catch the “ick” – that sick feeling where someone you previously found attractive suddenly makes your skin itch because they’ve done something (misspell a word in a text; ask for marmalade in a café) you find inexplicably, irrevocably repellent. I definitely think being a woman and being on the ‘dumped’ end of a breakup means you can get so much sympathy and support.

At this point, you will think you have forgotten, until sometime later when you do something so unbelievably them, so typical of who they were – such as stopping outside an estate agent’s and looking at the houses you can’t afford or making a neeeeowwwwww noise when a bike speeds past. I wonder how it feels for Williams, for her identity to have become so entwined with heartbreak and the very worst moments of her life. I found myself welling up as she discussed their inside jokes, and how they crafted a language that only they both understood.Heartbreak: if you’ve never been heartbroken, feel free to skip today’s missive, in honor of the re-recording of Taylor Swift’s genius breakup album, Red (which Rob Sheffield lovingly examines in the pages of Rolling Stone here , and which I’ve been listening to all weekend nonstop. You’d think in these circumstances I’d think about him less, but at this point he’s on my mind almost constantly, like this bit of food stuck in my teeth that I can’t get out, that is giving me a headache from the way I curl my tongue around to try to get at it. You probably don’t care much about either of those things, but because you can’t get angry at what you really want to – that you can’t be with them any more – you’ll go insane over them. I think breakups are often about repeated attempts to draft and redraft a satisfactory narrative of why a relationship played out the way it did until, ultimately, you just stop caring.