‘After the end of my decade-long relationship, I now think closure is a myth’
When it comes to finding love in Berlin, some advice I've heard rings true. Berlin being the emotionally unavailable, non-committal, avoidant situationship capital of Europe, you’re more likely to find ketamine on the bathroom floor. So when I found a partner with whom I lived through 10 years of life’s ecstasies and agonies, the dissolution of that bond was an ineffable loss.
What range of emotion can you experience in a decade of living with someone? My first New York Times’ byline. My first invitation to write for a major international art museum. Introducing my partner Christian* to open non-monogamy. His ascent on movie sets from driver to production manager. Hiking at the end of the world in Patagonia. A terrifying health scare. Floating on The River Nile. Finishing my visa-hack Master’s. The death of my former partner.
When my former partner died unexpectedly, everyone understood that as loss. With my separation from Christian, people often didn’t.
When I told a neighbour, who’s lived closely with his partner for over 20 years, that I was struggling, he told me, ‘There’s really nothing to be upset about.’ They knew I’d be alone at Christmas, yet I wasn’t invited.
Alone and misunderstood
Bewildered and dead-lonely on a freelance writer income, there was plenty to be upset about. Being the favourite of someone you admire for a quarter of your time lived on earth, and then, suddenly, not, is crushingly destabilising. A source of solace in the world moving out of your home requires dramatic life changes – practical (like the substantial gendered wealth loss women incur in countries without legal protection for cohabitation separation) and more complex.
Because it was an open partnership, my grief was taken even less seriously. An older friend couldn't understand how I felt betrayed, perceiving betrayal only in terms of sexual fidelity – not what the writer Audre Lorde referred to as ‘looking the other way to intimacy.’
My friend saw our discarded decade-long commitment to care for each other after we, in the future, lived in separate homes (he wanted children and I didn’t, so this was planned from the start) as absurd. But it’s not uncommon to remain close in queer and non-monogamous relationships, where family structures can lie outside the nuclear ideal.
I wasn’t exactly naïve either. I used to joke that he’d throw me under the tracks after meeting a ‘nice, conventional girl’ who would not be so enthralled by our orgy history or intense, nonsexual connection. (We lived companionately in the latter years.) ‘Never!’ he’d say.
After the end, we tried meeting every week for lunch. But in the end, there were too many lines crossed, and the disappointment meant this ritual became too painful for me to maintain.
A younger friend didn’t see our plans as ridiculous. He just didn’t understand my grief, period. At 24, he’d never experienced loss and didn’t know how to be there for me.
Why isn’t relationship loss seen as grief?
One thing was clear. These people from different parts of the world, spanning three decades of wildly different lives and social milieus, all felt similarly. They wanted me to get over it and move on. The palpable loneliness of loss felt much lonelier without a sense of validation. When stories of heartbreak compose so much of our culture – with longing a muse for art, music, literature, film, and opera – why isn’t relationship loss legitimised as grief?
‘We really struggle, not just with relationship loss, but with all kinds of loss, and how to talk about it,’ Cody Delistraty, author of The Grief Cure, a new book on mourning, told me by phone from New York. ‘There’s an epidemic of minimisation and individualisation, and there's this feeling, that to face someone's grief in a real way, you're admitting: these things can happen to me.’
Talking about grief is like talking about rape pre-MeToo – something society expects you to discuss behind closed doors. Not talking about it enough, our vocabulary for grief is poor. What to call this? Separation grief? I’ve been calling it ‘my divorce.’
But divorce still doesn’t cut it. In the first months that I lived alone, my grief was so disorienting that when I woke in the night, I didn’t know where I was. Was I at the home of Christian’s parents outside the city, I asked myself, eyes adjusting to the dark. No, we weren’t together anymore.
Nightmares. Chest pain. A mental fog that felt like COVID. The exhaustion of separation has been associated with depression and significant threats to physical, mental, social, and financial well-being.
When someone you love is gone, ‘the stored map of this relationship in your brain becomes inconsistent with reality,’ neuroscientist Dr Nas Fatih previously told Women’s Health. ‘Suddenly, the communication and intimacy are halted. All the plans you discussed together will no longer go ahead.’ Years of living together create a collection of expectations from our partner, and our brain must readjust.
Alone and unmoored, I found a simple pleasure in abandoning myself to not being my best. To letting go of keeping it together. Erik Satie and a devastating Karen Dalton song blared on repeat. I stopped writing and leaving the flat, ordering so much takeaway that my bank put a fraud alert on my card.
Crying felt good. But an imminent economic crisis and the creeping idea that I’d never be loved again made me sick. For weeks I lay on the sofa, worrying I’d never get up and work again.
What even is grief?
In Daybreak, a lesser-known text of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher wrote: ‘We have to learn to think differently – in order at last… to feel differently.’ How can we think differently about grief so that we might later feel differently? What even is grief?
Mine wasn’t sexual bereavement – the grief experienced when we can’t have sex with our partners. In the latter years, Christian and I had sex about once a year, coming down together after New Year’s. Even then, it was more about affection, a way to communicate by doing this thing that our bodies knew how to do without having to speak.
My grief wasn’t about regret either. I was the one who saw ‘the divorce’ through, and haven't forgotten the peace I now have – the way we’d cough while scream-fighting, our bodies unable to handle the hurt. Instead, my grief was tactile and verbal; not being held when sad or euphoric, not being told I’m beautiful, which he did until the end, even when I looked awful.
Grief was aural – the oceanic quiet of my old rotary phone not ringing took on an oppressive physicality. When Christian was away on a film set for months, he called it mornings and evenings, whenever I forgot to turn my mobile ringer on. Those calls were the warmth of someone checking on me. Of someone knowing if I didn’t come home. Of soothing advice when I got anxious. ‘Biggie (his endearment for me after I complained that I was not ‘Little’), eat something and make yourself comfortable'. Christian was the only one with the number.
The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ Is the acute shock of separation grief the bestowing and withdrawing of attention from someone we adore?
In 1913, when Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung split with his mentor, Freud, he had a prolonged nervous breakdown. His grieving was traumatic. Yet it was also a period of discovery. Jung’s ‘creative illness’ led to psychological transformation. When he resurfaced, he became one of the world’s leading psychotherapists.
Like Jung, my time of grieving became a highly inventive period. A miracle happened: I was selected to be artist-in-residence at an art space in the US that I’d haphazardly applied to. This meant my own studio and apartment away from Berlin for a month. I had to care for myself again and start working my arse off.
Desire was key to the pain subsiding
Contrary to the common wisdom about grief killing desire, desire was key to my pain subsiding. The project I submitted was a portrait photo series of pretty, young men. Seeing that men are still the only people allowed by society to be sexual, I wanted to make a body of work that was purely about turning myself on. Desiring and feeling desired again woke me up, recalling something that had gotten lost in my despair: my confidence and self-belief.
Desiring, you’re in a heightened state of being – alive and infused with energy. Energy you can use to make changes in your life (like how some people start to take better care of themselves when they’re in love). Desire opened the door to feeling like myself again, and the reminder that there are many special – and hot – people out there.
The project also allayed another concern. Feeling fearful about the realisation that my thirties were suddenly over, at 41, I discovered a whole new cohort of people interested in women over 35: young men.
This was not a peaceful time. Sleeping about five hours a night in Savannah, a city in the southern state of Georgia – only possible with the aid of sleeping pills – my anxiety was off the charts. Starting something new and meeting so many people at such a chaotic life moment was overwhelming. Who was I? Who did I want to be? I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a period of remaking myself by doing something terrifying and risky: expressing my sexual desire publicly in the puritanical American south – and calling it art!
It wasn’t until just before my exhibition that I finally felt good; that I knew I was going to be okay. I made a body of work I was proud of that I hadn’t been sure I could make. I met people at various stages of life who excited me, who found me exciting. I wondered if the vulnerability inherent in letting myself feel my grief made this possible; if we need breakdowns in order to put ourselves together in a new way. New connections offered another feeling I’d forgotten about: hope.
We need breakdowns so we can put ourselves together in a new way
Can the breakdown of the life we knew give space for renewal? Delistrary thinks so. ‘Grief can be a fundamental turning point. It disrupts the linearity that is in every aspect of life,’ he said. ‘Our culture pushes against that and says, “No, just keep moving.” This is actually a time of huge potential growth, of rebuilding, remaking, re-seeing, re-being. To skip over that in pursuit of a myth like closure would be another great loss.’ Perhaps we need breakdowns so we can put ourselves together in a new way.
After months of feeling better, lately, some minor detail crushes me. Watching a Greek movie, hearing ‘paragalo,’ remembering how Christian used to bring a sheet of phrases on every holiday. Going to the hardware shop and thinking of his twee mistranslation from his native German, ‘the tool market.’ I’ve never believed in the concept of closure. I don’t even refer to former partners as ‘exes’ – what an odd social imperative to cut out a part of us, as if it didn’t exist. I’m not sure, then, why I was surprised when my grief returned.
The truth is, loss is not linear; grief is like all emotions – it ebbs and it flows. ‘Grief is treated as something that can be processed and managed,’ Delistraty, who spent a decade trying to ‘cure’ the loss of his mother’s death, only to discover that there is no cure, said. ‘There's an expansive feeling about grief and loss, that bristles so much against closure, of the infinite nature of it – that it's always there and will always be there. To me, that’s more freeing than this idea that you can put it in a rear view mirror and drive away from it.’
Closure is seductive for those not experiencing the loss who see it as a problem to solve. ‘The idea of grief as a burden is really a 20th century construct.’ Delistraty said. ‘As soon as you say, “It's not a burden. This is a normal part of life,”’ people are keen to talk about their grief.’
Indeed, existentialist philosophers saw value in anguish. ‘There is no love of life without despair of life,’ the French writer Albert Camus said. And Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw despair as a necessary step toward self-realisation. Like my Jungian creative awakening?
Grief is a deeply human experience that connects us to art and other people. When you read a poem that someone wrote a long time ago, or when you encounter a person with a vastly different life than you who understands your longing, you feel a sense of being less alone in the world. ‘This is something that we all, as humans, deal with,’ Delistraty agreed.
Trying again
Recently, I met someone for the first time since our split. This person and I have more peculiar things in common than anyone with whom I’ve ever lived. But each time we got closer, he became withdrawn. Not wanting to wait, I was honest, telling him: ‘I think I’m falling in love.’ His response? ‘I’ll never have the energy to entertain you.’ He was not emotionally available.
I used to joke that the only thing Christian and I had in common was liking me. We were different. But we cared about things other people didn’t: good lighting, fancy salt, jokes too sick or too stupid, weird dancing. Meeting someone open to letting you see their weaknesses – someone who accepts yours and loves you the way you are – is an intimacy that many people just aren’t willing to experience. Cynicism is easier than trying.
That decade of trying that Christian shared with me was rare. Hearing Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer,’ while writing this, I was transported to the cigar lounge of a Belle Époque hotel during lockdown, a spa town in south Germany where Dostoevsky used to hang out. On a night of too many bottles of wine and Christian’s location manager playing ‘Rocket Man’ on the piano, the three of us singing, ‘It’s lonely out in space… And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.’
It’s right to grieve that, whether people understand or not. And while we may not get the living-apart love we’d hoped for, I cherish the good times – Christian checking us into a four-star hotel on the same street as our flat on the way home from a club, extending a magic night a little longer. My ritual of buying a German Playboy, trashy drinks, and junk food at the gas station, my feet out the window as he drove to our secret lake – and to try to learn from the bad times.
Since my grief-remaking, I’ve been part of five exhibitions and will soon have my first solo show. The next time we think about telling someone that they’re grieving well by repressing their emotions, we might consider what encouraging the opposite could bring. Instead of pushing for closure and ‘moving on’ – an idea which serves everyone but the griever – letting ourselves feel everything as the loss becomes a new part of us. We may even become a richer version of ourself. (Just don’t say, ‘Please hurry with your transformation.’)
Fortunately, I’m an eternal romantic optimist who grew up on epic eighties love songs. I have dark days, believing I’ll never find love again, like everyone else. (I’m a poet, not a maniac.) Yet my default setting is a belief that new magic, endless nights will turn to weeks and months and years.
And while no longer being the favourite person of someone I love is a loss I may grieve for a long, long time, there are other rare people to become the favourite of.
*Name has been changed for privacy
Mary Katharine Tramontana writes about sexual politics, art, and culture. You can find her on Twitter at @MKTramontana, or Instagram at @marykatharinetramontana. She lives in Berlin.
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