Is There Anything More Universally Human Than Broken Relationships?
"I looked after the third one exceptionally well...he left me"
Outside, they made their farewells. Rickon sobbed and clung to Hodor’s leg until Osha gave him a smack with the butt end of the spear. Then he followed her quick enough. Shaggydog stalked after them. The last Bran saw of them was the direwolf’s tail as it vanished behind the broken tower.
George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
Ending is better than mending.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
While researching a comment I would leave on an essay from a writer whose perspective I deeply respect, my past clashed with my present. And it was a rather happy accident.
In early March 1994, I found myself in Zagreb, Croatia, as the war in various parts of the former Yugoslavia slowly wound down to a bloody, gruesome denouement. I was working for a humanitarian relief organization headquartered in my adopted hometown of Portland, OR. Sadly, my work involved learning WAY too much about what war does to those caught up in it- combatants and non-combatants alike. I heard stories- relayed by those who experienced them- that no human being should have to hear, much less experience. Most of those stories are tales I’ll never tell; to this day, I can hardly bear to think about them.
Given that the front line in Croatia was about 20 miles outside Zagreb, there wasn’t much in the way of diversions available to me. I was ensconced in a hotel just off Ban Jelačić Square, which is Zagreb’s main square. Fortunately, there was an English-language bookstore next to the hotel, so I bought every Stephen King title on its shelves and lost myself in those pages. As it was make-believe, King’s horrors were infinitely preferable to the horrors that existed not so very far away.
My memories of Zagreb, a city steeped in more than 900 years of history, are colored with suffering and death, the inevitable byproducts of living and working in a war zone, I suppose.
The war’s been over for almost three decades now, and I suspect Zagreb looks much different than it did when I was there. But, as I was looking at a map and trying to remember what Zagreb looked like long ago, I came across something that caught my attention- The Museum of Broken Relationships.
I’m fairly certain it didn’t exist during my sojourn in Zagreb, but I was captivated by the idea. After all, is there anything more universal, more central to the human condition than the wreckage of past romantic relationships? Most anyone who’s lived any life at all has tales of love and loss, each unique in the pain they created and the psychic scars they’ve left on our souls.
My husband of 31 years, bought a pair of stylish tan Boots to impress his –unbeknownst-to-me—then girlfriend/mistress. The affair was discovered when he fell asleep in a drunken stupor onto the bed, wearing said boots, iPad open and showing their lascivious ‘Wickr’ chats. After reading his chats and watching a video of his showing off the Boots to ‘Violet’, I proceeded to remove the Boots from his feet, place them into one of my shoe boxes and put it high into the closet. The next day when he asked about the Boots, I feigned no knowledge of them and that I didn’t know what he was talking about. Within a few weeks, he was out of the house and though he kept asking about the boots, they were my secret to keep, locked up nevermore to impress. Our relationship broken beyond repair and now after 3 years, we are today, December 3, 2019 officially divorced and so I mail these Boots off to the Museum of Broken Relationships . . . I’d love to write a song about Boots, but many before me have done so and thus to quote Tammy Wynette: “These Boots were made for walking . . . One of these days these Boots are gonna walk all over you!” For now, the Boots walk symbolically in the halls of a museum, still my secret.
Some lost relationships we can let go of and know that it’s for the best. Some set their hooks in us and never let go. They become part of the roadmap of our lives and serve as abject lessons and/or cautionary tales. Some of these relationships register as mere disappointments. Some explode like a landmine when something triggers a memory. Perhaps it’s a smell, a song, or the way a lock of hair rests on a woman’s forehead.
Some detonate like an IED, obliterating everything within proximity. It reminds us that the pain of a great lost love often lies just below the surface, unstable and liable to discharge for any reason…or no reason at all.
Relationships have always fascinated me. Romantic love is a universally human experience, yet there’s no rule book and no commonly understood and/or accepted set of unspoken guidelines or precedents. Accordingly, the roadmap of a relationship is as unique as the people engaged in it because only they can decipher where the map leads them.
D.'s stomach had a particular arrangement of body hair that made his belly button prone to collecting lint. Occasionally, he'd extract a piece and stick it to my body, which was sweaty after sex. One day, angry he'd disrupted the heavy charge that lingered in the wake of an orgasm, I met his oddity with my own: I put the lint in a small baggie and concealed it away in the drawer of my bedside table. Our relationship was tumultuous; as off-again as it was ever on. From time to time, he would remind me that he wasn't really in love, but I blithely ignored the warning. He gave me his lint, after all.
A romantic relationship has a unique language, rhythm, and set of expectations that only the two souls ensconced in it can understand. No one on the outside can hope to comprehend the emotional landscape of a relationship they’re not a party to.
The world occupied by a couple is unique to them. Every time we embark upon a romantic relationship, it’s a textbook case of two people flying an airplane as they’re building it. There’s no manual, no sherpa, and no app to guide you through the process. You have only your own experience, maturity, needs, peccadillos, and desires to get you from the start to wherever the finish line may be.
More often than not, of course, relationships end. I won’t say “fail” because not every relationship is destined to be the love that overcomes all obstacles in the grand scheme of things. Human beings are frail, fickle, immature, selfish, deeply flawed, and often confused about what they want. Most relationships have a finite lifespan. We seek to avoid pain by artificially extending that lifespan at our own peril.
Sometimes we don’t even know what we want, even as we take others who may have no idea what they’re getting into along for the ride. We think a relationship will solve our problems when in reality, the only and inevitable result is the entangling of another person in them.
In the final analysis, relationships end for reasons as unique and individual as any snowflake. “Failure” lies in the eye of the beholder.
I am a 70-year-old woman from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. I visited Zagreb back in 1967 and the city is very close to my heart. When I found out from a local newspaper that there exists the Museum of Broken Relationships, I was sad and happy at the same time. This is a postcard that was inserted through the slit of my door a long time ago by our neighbours’ son. He had been in love with me for three years. Following the old Armenian tradition, his parents came to our home to ask for my hand. My parents refused saying that their son did not deserve me. They left angry and very disappointed. The same evening their son drove his car off a cliff...
We all want to love and be loved. It’s a basic human need, but it’s one that few of us have any idea how to meet successfully. And so, most of us stumble through relationships until we find one that “sticks.” But, unfortunately, even that type of relationship might eventually end up broken, partly because we are all broken to greater or lesser degrees, and carry that damage with us into each relationship.
No relationship can fix what’s broken when the damage has been done to an individual who has yet to do the work to repair what has been cracked and corroded.
Perhaps someday I’ll make it back to Zagreb. I’d love to spend a day going through the Museum of Broken Relationships. I can think of little more unique and yet uniformly human than the trail of broken relationships we all leave behind. I’m sure the stories are fascinating, the sort of thing that would keep me enraptured until someone (probably Erin) would pull me out kicking and screaming.
If you live, you love. If you love, you lose. Not always, of course, but few of us leave this world with a winning record when it comes to romantic relationships. Loving and losing are part of how we learn and grow. It’s how we get to know ourselves and learn about what we want in and need from a relationship and life. It’s how we form the criteria we use for evaluating the “worthiness” of those we enter into a relationship with.
I can look at my own life and understand that I am where I am because of the decisions AND mistakes I’ve made along the way. I’ve lived and loved, hurt and been hurt…which makes me like every other human being. Broken relationships? Yeah, there have been a few…dozen. But I’ve taken something away from each one that has brought me to where I am today when you look at them in combination. Some of the experiences I wouldn’t repeat if you held a loaded gun to my head. Some were truly amazing, if short-lived. And some were of the “WTF was I thinking??” variety.
Sometimes thinking with the wrong head will lead you into some pretty amazing stories. Sometimes it can get you into some regrettable scenarios. And sometimes, you never know what cards you’ve drawn until you’re in the middle of it all.
I may be going to Hell, but at least I’ll have some of the best stories to tell.
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