Mallory Wallace’s mom meant well.
Her mom was trying to help her work through a rough breakup and wanted her to eat anything she could stomach. Two years later, the pain of the breakup is still raw for Mallory — and it’s connected to the one food her mom continually made for her. When you’re heartbroken, even life’s simplest pleasures become too much to bear.
“I can’t eat cinnamon raisin toast anymore,” Mallory says.
Her breakup with her hometown boyfriend was one of the hardest things she had to endure during the whirlwind that is college. A happy, healthy young woman, Mallory was attending UW-Madison and studying communicative sciences and disorders. She thought her life was picture-perfect. But then her unexpected breakup rocked her world. Looking back, Mallory chalks up her heartbreak as a valuable learning experience that helped shape the self-assured woman she is today.
When your heart breaks, whether it’s caused by a significant other, a tragic death or something in between, it feels like you’re drowning in pain. Your chest physically hurts, and it seems like the tears will never cease to flow from your eyes. But while it may not seem like it at first, the pain will stop and your heart will heal. Heartbreak is an inevitable part of life; it’s how we recover from this experience that defines who we are.
Falling in Love
This is the easy part. It seemed like fate when Mallory and her preschool classmate Will took their lifelong friendship to the next level after graduating from high school. Despite going to different colleges for much of their relationship, Mallory and Will remained best friends and deeply in love. Ilene Kastel, a licensed clinical professional counselor based out of Chicago, pointed to Dr. Helen Fisher’s research on brain imaging and MRIs.
“Love is registered in the same area of the brain that addiction is. Falling in and out of love functions just like an addiction,” Kastel says.
It’s no wonder falling in love can feel all-consuming.
Dick Goldberg, a Wisconsin-based radio broadcaster and veteran relationship therapist, says relationships evolve through three major stages. The first stage is the head-over-heels, giddy, can’t-sleep-because-you’re-so-obsessed phase. He describes this process as each person wearing a mask, putting their best foot forward to be the most compatible version of themselves for their partner.
The UW-Madison Couples Lab, based in the School of Human Ecology, puts couples of all ages under the microscope to learn more about relationship dynamics. Lauren Papp, associate professor and director of the lab, says some common threads in healthy relationships include communication, being able to work through differences and, believe it or not, a lack of jealousy.
“It’s really important [in] college-age relationships for people to know that jealousy is actually not a healthy sign. [It’s] not a healthy behavior in a relationship because it tends to reflect more that jealous person’s insecurities rather than positive feelings about the relationship,” Papp says.
There are plenty of healthy ways to express interest and commitment to your relationship, and jealousy isn’t one of them, Papp says.
Staying in Love
During the second stage of a relationship, Goldberg says, couples can face conflict for the first time. How do you and your partner react to your first disagreement? Whether fighting about something your partner posted on another person’s Facebook wall or disagreeing about which Italian restaurant you should pick to celebrate your three-month anniversary, it’s important that you and your partner communicate effectively and often.
For Mallory and Will, it seemed like they had this phase of their relationship mastered. Long-distance dating is no easy feat, especially during college when the opportunities to feel insecure are seemingly endless. Despite the odds stacked against them, Mallory and Will found themselves able to successfully communicate and, in return, build a loving and stable relationship.
Goldberg explains the third and final stage of a relationship as companionate love. During this phase, you see your partner’s imperfections, and you fight on occasion, yet you love each other anyway. This type of love is softer and more enduring. It is this unconditional love that gets couples to their fifth, 15th, even 50th anniversaries and beyond.
Despite the passionate and all-consuming love you may feel while in a relationship, the importance of maintaining your own identity cannot be overstated. As Papp suggests, this is the ultimate goal: for people of all ages to be able to grow as individuals while simultaneously nurturing the relationship.
“People have lots of opportunities to re-evaluate and make plans to stick with it or end the relationship as other things in their life change,” Papp says.
Mallory wanted to stick with it. Will didn’t.
The Heartbreak
If you haven’t experienced this feeling yet, consider yourself lucky. If you have experienced it, you understand that it is one of the worst pains — physical, emotional, psychological — that you can experience during your lifetime. It feels like the walls are caving in, like someone punched you in the gut with an iron fist. If it hurts badly enough, you can literally feel your heart break right down the middle.
According to the American Heart Association, broken heart syndrome, also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy, occurs when part of your heart enlarges temporarily, causing it to pump less sufficiently. Symptoms include chest pain and shortness of breath.
“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching,” says Gabriel García Márquez in his book “Collected Stories.”
Mallory felt the heartbreak, and she felt it hard. It doesn’t matter what led to it; the only thing that mattered was that is happened. She cried for days, weeks. Even the smallest reminder of Will, such as seeing his photo pop onto her Facebook newsfeed, set her into a tear-soaked breakdown. All Mallory wanted to do was talk to Will, the one person who made her feel like this.
It turns out that dwelling on your breakup might be a good thing as long as you don’t dwell too long. According to a study by graduate student Grace Larson at Northwestern University, initially rehashing breakup details can help with your recovery, helping you better process and understand what went wrong.
Anyone who knows heartbreak understands that it transcends emotional boundaries and affects you physically as well. Mallory’s appetite immediately plummeted, causing her to lose 10 pounds in a matter of weeks. Enter Mallory’s mom, instantly making her cinnamon raisin toast to try to get some energy and calories into her system.
Despite what it may initially feel like, not everything about a breakup is bad, and the pain doesn’t last forever. The semester Mallory and Will broke up, she shifted her focus to the one thing she could control: her schoolwork. She ended up getting a 4.0 GPA and had the most academically successful semester of her college career. Six months after she and Will ended their relationship, Mallory finally felt like herself again.
Now What?
Not everyone reacts to heartbreak the same way Mallory did; everyone grieves in different ways. The term “grieve” may seem dramatic, but it isn’t. Goldberg says that breakups can sometimes feel more painful than mourning a death.
“The end of a relationship is in some ways worse than death, because if you were left, there’s a feeling of inadequacy that can come up … It can really affect your sense of self and self-esteem,” Goldberg says.
It’s during these difficult transitions in life that it’s easy to fall victim to unhealthy habits, so it’s important to make a conscious effort to take care of yourself, Papp says. If you want to cry and feel miserable, then do it. Just don’t unpack and settle there. Papp suggests turning to healthy behaviors such as eating right, working out and spending time with friends and family to help give you the strength to get through this rough period. Get back into a routine one day at a time and realize the fact that you lost someone doesn’t make you any less whole.
Experts agree on a common post-breakup theme: cutting off contact completely is crucial to healing your wound. If you remain in contact, it’s easier to hold out hope that the relationship could pick back up again, Goldberg says. Even if you’re trying to maintain a friendship, there is often one partner more romantically attached than the other. This could lead to months, even years, of frustration and depression. Kastel also brings up a similar point about secondary breakups.
“When partners stay in touch, there is a secondary breakup that happens later, which is just as painful, when one sees their ex reaching out less frequently or with less empathy or warmth,” Kastel says.
This communication cutoff includes social media. Papp says even though it may be tempting to check in on your previous partner, it’s important to disengage. If that means deleting or blocking an account or getting rid of a phone number, so be it. Social media often acts as a highlight reel of our lives, not the entire picture. It’s most likely not reflective of your ex’s life as a whole. The self-inflicted gut punch and irrational anger that comes with checking your ex’s social media is never worth it. Ever.
Instead of checking your ex’s most recent Instagram post, try to stay busy. Mallory found the downtime to be the hardest. Change your environment. Get outside. Hang out with your friends. Call your sibling.
Heartbreak is part of life. It’s like getting your wisdom teeth removed or paying taxes. No one wants to deal with it, but it happens whether you want it to or not. And guess what? You come out of heartbreak a better version of yourself. Along the way, you learn, you grow and you find love again. Enjoy and trust the process.
“There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness,” Jonathan Franzen writes in his book “Freedom.”
You are heartbroken, but you are not broken. The moment it happens, your world seems to fall apart. You breathe. In, out. In, out. People say it gets better, but you don’t believe them. But then, somehow one minute of being OK turns into one day, and one day turns into one month. Kastel says the first month without contact is the hardest, but it gets easier from there. According to a 2008 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, people bounce back from breakups about twice as fast as they originally expected. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.
As for Mallory, now there’s a new toast in her life: banana and peanut butter on rye.
Brenna Koeneke
With roots in Milwaukee, Brenna is a true Sconnie at heart but is itching to explore the West Coast post-graduation. Brenna loves words. Her passion for grammar and writing has been stitched into her soul ever since she can remember. She always takes the scenic route and loves all things dogs, fashion and indie-rock. But above all, Brenna strives to be a professional storyteller for a major publication.