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It’s a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy. Corners of the brain that cause and respond to addiction can be activated by images or reminders of ex partners Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied people who had been dumped and found the parts of the brain activated were those associated with addiction. A person rejected feels the same kinds of pain and craving they might with drugs and alcohol – they go through withdrawal and they can relapse, too, many months later, a midnight phone call, a stone at a window. “All of this helped me realise what I was feeling was justified. That I was going through something clinically awful.”
This stunning exploration of love and heartbreak from cult journalist and Vogue columnist Annie Lord, is so much more than a book about one singular break-up. It is an unflinchingly honest account of the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone who has ever nursed a broken heart. Heartbreak is one of the most painful life experiences we have and we need to take it seriously for our mental and physical health’: science journalist Florence Williams. Photograph: Casie Zalud Annie Lord: It’s weird actually, a couple of times I’ve spoken to male friends for the column and quoted them [about why men might behave a certain way in dating]. And when they say stuff, I’m never satisfied with what they’re saying. Sometimes I feel I’m like, ‘no, I get you more than you get you,’ or ‘yeah, that’s not it.’ It just feels like the explanation a lot of men use for stuff feels very simple. Maybe they are simple but it feels like it can’t be that. But sometimes you are making yourself feel better via a very complex explanation for [men’s] actions that make out that you’re still hot and desirable, and they still want to have sex with you, and go out with you. It's just these external factors [preventing it].Reeling from a broken heart, Annie Lord revisits the past – from the moment she first fell in love, the shared in-jokes and intertwining of a long-term relationship, to the months that saw the slow erosion of a bond five years in the making. There have been hundreds of studies into the beginnings of love, but why has it taken so long for scientists to investigate its end, this “clinically awful” state? “Science has become more sophisticated at looking at transcription factors in our genome,” says writer Florence Williams. “We are used to relegating heartbreak to cultural melodrama, like popular songs and romantic poetry. But heartbreak isn’t just melodrama. It’s one of the most painful life experiences we have and we need to take it seriously for our mental and physical health.” When Williams’s husband left her after 25 years, she felt “imperilled”. 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. At 50, she’d never experienced anything like it, this “disorienting sorrow, shame and peril”. Not only did she want to figure out what heartbreak was doing to her body, she wanted to work out how to get better. Would she be among the 15% of people who don’t recover after a major breakup? She set to work.
Annie Lord: There is a weird thing that happens where something bad [in dating] happens and you’re already thinking about how you might write about them and your life feels like a story. It feels like not being in your life but seeing it as a spectator and recording it. I don’t feel embarrassed when I’m writing about myself because I’m a massive oversharer even in person, but it does affect how other people see me which is crap. I don’t want people to think I’m writing about them all the time. If men read the column they know what I think about so many things. It’s not very sexy because I can’t be mysterious. If you’re seeing a guy you want him to think you have loads of options, but that doesn’t work if he can read that you don’t. I think in the future I would still like to write about myself because I enjoy it but maybe it might be less dating-focused. That said, I’m obsessed with relationships and love. I think if I met the right person and they weren’t comfortable being written about I would give up the column, though that would be difficult because they’d probably say they were uncomfortable on about date three and I still wouldn’t know if I was going to fall for them enough to give it up? In your teens and early twenties, it feels like the career is the thing you should never give up on and nothing comes before that. Now I’m more established I think I could make something else happen if I didn’t have the column. Men are the disappearing, impossible thing now rather than work. Some white blood cells monitor our moods, via our nervous system, and can listen out for heartbreak and loneliness, which in turn increases inflammationverifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ I think we don’t take the grief of heartbreak particularly seriously as a society, relative to how devastating it actually is. I noticed a lot of the literary references you cite in the book to express your feelings were originally written about grief as we traditionally understand it – linked to bereavement. Perhaps some will think that’s overdramatic. Do you think grief is the right framing for how a breakup feels? The idea for the book and the Vogue column both came from a viral essay you wrote about your breakup in the immediate aftermath. Why did you decide to write that at the time? But it was reading about the science of heartbreak that had the biggest impact. “Saying, ‘I’m going through a breakup’ didn’t do what I was feeling justice. It felt too small, too ordinary.” So Lord sought out studies, learning things like, “The way your breathing adjusts to another person’s when you’re together for a long time, how in grief some people’s hearts really do break, or the fact that your brain craves that person the same way you would cocaine.” Heartbreak and rejection can trigger activity in the same area of the brain where physical pain is activated (the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex)
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