Heartbreak: A Journalist Studies the Science of Divorce

by Florence Williams. Florence is a science journalist, but when her husband of twenty five years ended their marriage, she became her own subject. Florence set out to understand what was happening to her emotions and her body after the divorce. She turned to scientists who study social pain, loneliness, and the biology of romantic attachment, and she also turned to her friends and loved ones to try and piece her

life back together. Florence recorded her journey that includes conversations with her friends hence to date new men, and her trips around the country to interview scientists. Her book is filled with moments of joy and sadness, and it sheds light on the complexity of emotions that can follow Heartbreak. Okay, here comes the preview. You can order the Heartbreak audio books so that it's sent directly to your podcast app by going to Pushkin dot fm, slash Heartbreak, or at Audible.

When I set out to try and understand the experience of heartbreak, both my own and more generally, I recorded a lot of my journey as it was unfolding, in real time recordings, Oh you are Oh my god, you're really going to do this? I don't know. Writing this book has been a deeply personal exploration for me, and I'm grateful you're choosing to listen. It may sound a little different from the audio books you're used to hearing.

I'll be reading the text, but you'll also hear passages from my audio journal, entries and sounds from trips took in the wilderness. You'll hear conversations with friends. The only advice I have for you is that we are here for you, so don't do it alone. And scientists and experts who study heartbreak, just because you've been dumped doesn't

mean you don't just can stop attaching. In fact, the brain region that becomes active when you've been dumped linked with pain also becomes active when you have tooth pain. Why does that seem sort of appropriate? So's it's a very painful experience and it can last a long time. You'll even hear me in therapy. Yeah, just the whole universe of dating is much more dramatic than being in a twenty year marriage. I figured this is an audiobook, you might as well really hear it. The highs, the lows,

the sometimes crooked path to a heart, more whole. Here we go. I hope you enjoy it. My biggest problem at the moment was the portable toilet. It was just too heavy. It was weighing down the bow of my canoe, which was already loaded with eighty pounds of water and a double walled cooler filled with fairly ridiculous items like coconut milk, ribi steaks and cage free liquid, whole eggs, three blocks of ice, ten days or the water. I have so much food, like why did I grad onions?

And that's me night one alone on the river making an audio diary are really more of an audio rant. Heavy food, huge cooler takes up three quarters of the boat. I'd also brought a fetching beach parasol. It was just too much stuff. But the toilet seemed a particular rebuke. Why does something you shit in in the desert have to be made of ammunition grade twenty millimeter steel? It doesn't. And the canoe was small. It just feels really heavy,

like I can move it in a straight line. But if I had to make a move, if there are a rock coming, I mean I cannot move it. The ill conceived toilet was just one of the many small and giant mistakes that led me to this moment cursing alone in the wilderness. There were the mistakes in my marriage, the cosmic mistake to my mind of the divorce, the wrong men I'd fallen for in the year since my separation, the friendships I'd overburdened. All of these were yes, weighing

me down. If I thought about the heavy ship metaphors too long, my head hurt. Most recently, there was the poor decision made because I was possibly having a hot flash, to launch this leg of my journey a day early, at seven pm, in fading light, just above a small rapid, in a canoe that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Then again, it was August and it was ninety seven degrees in Green River, Utah, even a teenage boy would be having a hot flash. Camping at the shadeless Town

Park was an unbearable option. Running a desert river for a month in the height of summer was probably another bad decision. But here I was. An outfitter named Craig had rented me the fifteen foot canoe with a broken thwart, splintering gunnals, and the tanker toilet. The boat was the color of lipstick you wear when you're trying too hard. It did, however, match the parasol. Craig dropped me off at the ramp. He laughed and said, just remember, if

you don't know, knots make lots. He then snapped a picture of me surrounded by all my gear and drove off in his air conditioned pickup. To be clear, I do know how to tie knots, and I generally know what I'm doing in the wilderness. But my own canoe lay upside down in Washington, DC, where it petulantly awaited better days, and where until recently I also petulantly lay often right side down. After my husband decided to leave our twenty five year marriage because among other things. He

said he needed to go find his soulmate. Still nothing in my prior canoeing experience had fully prepared me for the reality that I could barely alter the trajectory of this boat. Once I got it into the river, only a few small inches of freeboard lay between the water and the top of my gunnals. I stared at the approaching shoals. I glared at the toilet, glinting like a smug brigadier in the twilight. When the river split into two channels, I chose the one on the right, but

the current grew fast, shallow bumpy. The canoe scraped over some rocks, thence more, and started to list sideways. I pushed my feet back into my river shoes and hopped out into the shin deep water, figuring I'd have an easier time keeping the boat upright and off the rocks if I were outside it. My heart was beating fast. I cursed myself for not tying down my gear better. The boat bumped along upright, and I jumped back in.

I knew I needed to pull over in camp. Soon before I got any darker, I grounded the boat under the first available scruffy gravel bar for my first night ever spent alone in the wilderness. I'd be camping within sight of the Inner State. I can hear I seventy. I haven't even gone under I seventy yet. I'm between I seventy and the airport. I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? I guess this really a good idea.

By this point, I'd already been addling the Green River for two weeks with friends and family, had run Split Mountain and Desolation Canyon, among other stretches. Everything was so aptly named. The first white men to run these canyons one hundred and fifty years ago hated most of it. Country Worthless, scrawled one in his journal. Now it was

just me and the sound of air brakes. I spent the night awake, be raiding myself for existing in the first place, and then be raiding my husband, and then scheming about how to jettison the toilet because there was no way I was going to haul that thing for the next two weeks. I was here because I needed

to jettison so many things. A year's worth of fear, dismay, and loneliness, some bad habits acquired to stave off those feelings, a peevish and lingering sense of abandonment, my stubborn attachment to a man who clearly was no longer in my boat. A year and a half earlier, i'd a life that seemed worth keeping afloat. I was a science journalist with two trusting and kind hearted teenagers and a husband who

ran a venerable and useful nonprofit. We had moved a few years before from Colorado, and I missed our former life out west, but we had a comfortable house near the Potomac River and a goofy mutt to walk the towpath with. I thought our long marriage was fundamentally sound

and totally salvageable. We'd seen each other through academic degrees and professional milestones, We'd had decades of fun living in beautiful places, and we'd produced these amazing little people who depended on us for love and hope and stability in a world that seemed to be growing only more confusing and unjust. Our friends marriages weren't perfect, either, but they worked things out. As far as I could tell, nobody here was miserable or violent, or crazy or impossibly annoying.

Having never been heartbroken before, I tended to dismiss portrayals of it in popular culture or literature, or even by my friends. I'm sorry to say as overwrought, but one of the first stages of heartbreak, I soon learned, is feeling stunned, even if you shouldn't have been. I'd been used to feeling in control, but you can't game heartbreak. It overtakes you. When my husband decided to live on his own after three decades of togetherness, the cliches of

heartbreak felt not like melodrama at all. I felt like I'd been axed in the heart, like I was missing a limb set adrift in an ocean, loosed in a terrifying wood. I felt imperiled. Our dad had dissolved into vapor, and I couldn't grasp what remained. I plodded through my days, cooking for our son and daughter, walking the dog, and making most but not all, of my deadlines. I would have moments of collapse, and then I'd get back up,

feeling vague and dance at the same time. We spent another six months, still living together and drafting, painfully drafting a detailed parenting plan. By the time he took his small blue suitcase and rolled it out of the kitchen door forever. I'd already lost twenty pounds I didn't want to lose. I couldn't imagine a life without him, or ever trusting men again, or being able to love or be loved. Having just turned fifty, it all seemed even

more impossible. I was completely existentially freaked. This is heartbreak. Now I would be facing an uncertain future without the partner i'd had since I was eighteen years old. I'd have to figure out somehow who I was without him. There was no blueprint. None of my close friends was divorced. I felt, in so many ways alone. This also is hard break. Physically, I felt like my body had been

plugged into a faulty electrical socket. In addition to the weight loss, I'd stopped sleeping, I was getting sick, my pancreas wasn't working right. It was hard to think straight. This too is heartbreak, and it's what finally propelled me to seek some answers. Not only did I want to figure out what was happening to my body, I needed

to roll myself upright and get better. I tried to find refuge everywhere I could, and that meant sometimes in the rational arms of fields like neurogenomics and the psychology of social rejection that sounds like middle school snubs but actually describes a vast ocean of pain stretches from the playground to broken marriages like my own. You know, we are a not only a pair bonding animal, but we are a group animal. I mean, for millions of years,

you know, alone individual was a dead individual. What I learned talking to scientists, reading their papers, visiting their labs was fascinating but unnerving. Despite having lost my mother to cancer when I was in my twenties, I'd never experienced the disorienting, sorrow, shame, and peril of losing my life partner. Romantic heartbreak can cause complex emotional trauma, as with lass

associated with the death of a partner. It can dismantle your identity, But the grief of this type of heartbreak is compounded by rejection, which I came to learn we humans feel as a deeply evolved threat to our survival. Breakups are common, and heartbreak is nearly universal, and yet

it wallops us. About thirty nine percent of all first marriages in the US, end and divorce psychologists rank this event or what one eighteen fifty two medical text book called the slow tortures of connubial disturbance as one of the top stressful and sequential life experiences we have, just

below the death of a loved one. For as long as there has been literature, writers have rendered heartbreak, connubial or otherwise, as akin to physical pain, and specifically to a kind of pain bound to the expectation of more pain. Could tell Us used the word excrucior the particular and agonizing feeling of being nailed up by your palms exposed. Susan Sontag dumped by feckless Jasper John's when he left a New Year's Eve party with another woman, was similarly graphic.

It hurts to love, she wrote, It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin. And here's poet Anne Carson, whose lover of five years told her he no longer felt what he called spin woman caught in a cage of thorns, unable to stand upright. There was plenty of heartbreak art, so much art, But I wanted science. If this was such a common and devastating experience. Why wasn't there a validated protocol for recovery

beyond weep dancing while belting out Gloria Gainer. Where was the research and what did it say? You'd think after a million years of hominin sighing at the moon over lost love, we would have figured this out by now. Why did nature design us to be so deeply, even operatically sad? Why was heartbreak so hard to get over? If I learned the answers, maybe I could speed it up and feel better. Much has been written about the science of falling in love, but very little about what

happens on the other side. Only in recent years has science begun to excavate some of the literal biological pathways of this brand of pain. If you place someone who has recently suffered heartbreak in a scanner, parts of the brain light up that are very closely related to the parts that fire after receiving a burn or an electrical show. And if some study subjects are unfortunate enough to receive

an electrical shock after heartbreak, the pain will hurt more. If, however, you shock someone who remains in a loving relationship and they hold their loved one's hand or gaze at a picture of their devoted squeeze, the pain will hurt much less. Even more remarkable is the understanding that heartbreak reaches far beyond emotional anguish to influence physical health. People who have suffered lost love face an elevated risk of serious medical woes.

It's not just their metaphorically sundered hearts, although cardiac risk is part of it. Their cells look different, their immune systems falter, even their language skills drop off. Why would evolution equip us with an operating system so easily weakened by an event as common as the denial of love? One genomics researcher when so far as to say heartbreak

is one of the hidden landmines of human existence. The language heartbreak may sometimes sound mundane, but the havoc and inflicts on our brains and bodies is trenchant, profound, and until recently understudied. Among the documented downstream effects of rejection, grief, and loneliness are fragmented sleep and fatigue, increased anxiety, poor impulse control, depression, cognitive decline, altered gene expression, and early death. Why should your immune system care if you've been dumped?

What skin does a white blood cell have in the game of love plenty. It turns out some of our cells listen for loneliness. They adjust their work accordingly, sometimes with devastating consequences for the rest of your potentially feeble, truncated life. I was eager to reverse course. Since my cells unfortunately appeared to be listening. New advances in genomics experimental psychology promised to show me exactly how they were

responding and what I might do about it. I set out to experiment on myself to see if I could understand the way heartbreak changes our neurons, our bodies, and our sense of ourselves. I would have my nervous system monitored while viewing pictures of my x at different points after Splitsville. I would measure my threat mediated biomarkers of inflammation. By better understanding the ailment, I would perhaps find some remedy.

This book traces the general trajectory of heartbreak, from the moment of shock to feelings of rejection, to grief and loneliness, and finally toward a measure of repair. All paths through heartbreak are different. Mine was messy and strange, and often unexpected. I came to dismiss some of the conventional approaches to recovering from rupture, especially the ideas that you shouldn't form other attachments too quickly and that the key to healing

is the commonly traded bromide of loving yourself first. Both of these sortations fell short for me. I had to improvise a different course. Ultimately, I would orient toward the far shore of heartbreak through bombs, much less obvious, but supported by evidence, beauty, agency, and purpose. I would try a regiment of solutions and substances, mostly legal, but not entirely.

I would travel across the US and to England and Croatia to meet the researchers, practitioners, and ordinary people who were ahead of me and learning how to move on. Some of them were dealing with loss and serious emotional trauma. I'm not equating my pain with theirs, but I believe we can learn from people in extremists about the systems governing our emotions and our health, and the lessons and

potential treatments that apply to all of us. What I found was extraordinary, surprising, and immensely helpful, and would change the way I think about the world, our health, our relationships, and what it means to be human. I would hike my heart back to life whenever I got a chance. I would try trauma cures, nature cures, psychedelics, and a makeshift clinic. Companionship of many flavors. If you don't know,

knots make lots. Before long, I'd end up here. Okay, night one river mile one nineteen, silt working its way under every fingernail. I knew what wreckage lay upstream. Everything else was a question mark. It was clear there would be no fast heartbreak ac Also, I hated scorpions, but at least I knew what I needed for now. It was to lighten my load. Thanks for listening. If you want to hear more, you can order the Heartbreak audiobook directly at Pushkin dot fm, slash Heartbreak, or at audible