The New Business of Breakups

Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era. Around the year 1 C.E., the Roman poet Ovid followed up “The Art of Love,” his dating manual in verse, with an antidote titled “Cures for Love.” Among the recommendations are to pick up a hobby (“cow bulls into submission”), distract yourself with a new partner (“as they split off into many a stream, mighty rivers lose muscle”), and, if possible, take a trip at once: “Don’t fake an excuse, either, for sticking around. Don’t check the calendar. Don’t keep looking over your shoulder back at Rome.”

This past summer, I did the bidding of the ancients and booked a seat on the Berkshire Flyer—Amtrak’s seasonal train from Penn Station to Pittsfield, Massachusetts—to get some distance from my own romantic disappointment. A few weeks earlier, I had been dumped by a man I was seeing—and by text, no less. Even the rake Rodolphe had the decency to add a drop of water to his breakup letter to Emma Bovary, hidden in a basket of apricots, to make it look as though he was inconsolable. Yet does that spare Emma’s feelings? When the basket arrives and her husband invites her to smell the fruit’s sweet aroma, she shouts, “I can’t breathe!” With respect to breakups, the message is the message.

My friends, more schooled in these matters, reminded me that a breakup text was better than being “ghosted,” a practice that, when I learned of it, seemed worth bringing the guillotine back for. One friend asked if I had a “breakup plan.” A what? I found a worksheet on Etsy, seemingly modelled on a birth plan, only instead of “I may want a walking epidural,” the options to numb the pain included “start a side hustle.” Before I knew it, I was lost in a corner of the Internet populated by breakup coaches, heartbreak dietitians looking to replace the classic pint of ice cream with anti-inflammatory popcorn, and get-over-him getaways. The Chablé hotel, at its Yucatán and Maroma locations, offers a program called Healing Heartbreak, in which newly single guests can undergo a full-body exfoliation treatment to symbolize the “scrubbing away of the past.” When Al Green sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the question was rhetorical. Now there’s the Mend app, which leads users through a seventeen-module online course that will “turn your breakup into a breakthrough.” At StrIVeMD, which has locations in Ohio, Illinois, and Texas, Dr. Syed Ali advertises ketamine injections as breakup therapy, claiming that they can provide relief from heartbreak-induced depression and anxiety within hours.

It had been nearly ten years since I’d last been on the dating market, and I felt like I had slept through some kind of revolution. I met my now ex-husband in 2015, at a friend’s birthday party. We sat on opposite sides of a long table at a Burmese restaurant, and I noticed him across the din of gossip and requests to pass the tea-leaf salad. We parted last summer, after many months of what one could call deliberation but was mostly me pleading to be free. My marriage had been everything I thought I could ask for: sturdy. I just didn’t feel particularly tended to. At first, I thought that was O.K. I was a grownup; I didn’t need anyone to take care of me. In time, I just started to feel more on my own than seemed right for someone who wasn’t actually on her own. After it ended, as I was still trying to understand how I had got caught up in a mess of my own making, I met someone really, really hot. He had a face you could not help but project all of your fantasies onto—when I showed his picture to a friend, she said, “Ooh, he looks like he reads.” He made films and lived in Chinatown, near a funeral parlor that hired a marching band to process down the street as part of the service. The last time I saw him before he sent me that text, we were in his kitchen eating pastries when we suddenly heard the brass horns. “It must be someone rich,” he said. “This is lasting a long time.” I did not know then that I was listening to our swan song.

Ovid wrote, “Love is a scam—every time, every case.” Was that true of love cures, too? I decided to investigate, one heartbreak hotel at a time. This is why I was heading to the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I would be taking part in a three-day workshop—Healing from Heartbreak: A Woman’s Path from Devastation to Rebirth. I had also considered a program called Renew Breakup Bootcamp, run by Amy Chan, a former marketing specialist who calls herself the Chief Heart Hacker. Her retreat, which alternates between Mendocino and upstate New York, is staffed by an expert on men’s “emotional physiology,” a movement specialist, and a dominatrix with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. I called Chan. “Why a dominatrix?” I asked. She told me that most of her clients are high-achieving but lose their power in relationships: “So I thought, Well, who understands power? She’s not necessarily teaching you how to handcuff someone. She’s drawing the parallels of ‘How do we have handcuffs on? How are we in bondage?’ ” I was too late to register.

Kripalu was familiar to me from Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel, “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” This was the yoga retreat where, in the TV adaptation, Claire Danes as Rachel Fleishman, recently separated from her husband, becomes addicted to therapeutic-screaming classes, and slowly loses her mind. On the train, I listened to the audiobook of “Handbook for the Heartbroken,” by Sara Avant Stover, the woman who would be leading the workshop. To find it, I had scrolled on Amazon past titles like “Win Your Breakup: How to Be the One That Got Away” and “It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken.” (There was also an adult coloring book called “Have a Nice Life Asshole.”) Stover’s voice, as it came through my headphones, had the slow, intentional cadence of a yoga instructor’s. She compared the “journey of heartbreak” to a tightrope. “One end of the rope is anchored to your old life, the other to your new one,” she said. “And to get from one end to the other, you must take one step at a time over a terrifying, treacherous chasm.”

The lobby of Kripalu was buzzing with fit white women carrying pastel-colored water bottles. A friendly blonde at the front desk handed me my room key, a map of the grounds, and an orange lanyard with a nametag that read “Jennifer. Healing from Heartbreak.” I found Stover, an ethereal forty-seven-year-old who bears a passing resemblance to Marianne Williamson, perched on a green couch in a small seating area that looked out over leafy rolling hills. Above her was a poster with a quote from Maya Angelou: “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”

Stover was inspired to write her book after she went through a series of hardships—financial, professional, interpersonal—beginning with two painful back-to-back breakups, in 2016 and 2017; the first was after her fiancé came home one night and told her that he had been having an affair with a close mutual friend. I asked if it had been hard to record those parts of the book. “You know, it wasn’t,” she said. “I remember seeing an episode of ‘And Just Like That . . . ,’ the ‘Sex and the City’ spinoff, where Carrie Bradshaw was reading from her memoir about her husband’s death, and it was very emotional for her. I wondered if it would be that way for me, but it wasn’t. I had just done so much healing.”

I could see that. Her long brown hair was now full and lustrous. In her book, she describes it falling out amid the stress of her breakups. During that time, she also found out that she was prediabetic, despite having no history of blood-sugar abnormalities. She blamed the “toxic environment” in which she had been living, but did not think that her general practitioner would make the connection. She consulted with an Ayurvedic M.D. instead. “She could hear in my pulse the impact that the heartbreak had on me,” Stover said. The Ayurvedic doctor prescribed a yoga position called supported fish pose. “You take a block and lay your back on it right under your breastbone, to help the grief move more,” Stover explained.

“Meal prep’s done for the week.”

Cartoon by Drew Panckeri

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During the next three days, Stover would be leading twenty-six women—including me—through grief-loosening yoga poses, meditations, and writing exercises. Stover is a certified practitioner of Internal Family Systems (I.F.S.), a school of psychotherapy rooted in the idea that the human mind is composed of various “inner parts”—family members—which act in concert to protect our psyches from old wounds. “Firefighters” douse the pain with quick fixes (like alcohol); “managers” may make things worse when trying to make them better (e.g., people-pleasing). I.F.S. practitioners guide patients in coaxing out “exiles”—past traumas that might destabilize the entire system—while keeping the “whole self” intact. It reminded me of Jenga.

That evening, I found myself on a seat cushion in a room with mustard-yellow walls and large windows. Indian sitar music played as women of all ages filed in and settled in a large circle. “A circle represents wholeness. It is also a boundary,” Stover said. Two spiritual elders from Burkina Faso, she told us, had taught her that “we need to plug into a village nervous system to handle grief.” Just when I thought I had accidentally stepped into a scene out of “Eat, Pray, Love,” Stover asked us if we remembered the part of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir in which the author sobs on her bathroom floor. “Without spaces like these, all that’s left is the bathroom floor,” she said. Stover’s assistant placed a box of Crayola crayons at the center of the room. We were told to draw a “heartbreak time line” dotted with all the heartbreaks we had endured in the past and could imagine in the future. The size of each dot was meant to reflect the “charge” it held. The more unresolved the heartbreak, the bigger the dot.

I drew something that looked like one of those horizontal diagrams of the solar system that decorated my science classrooms in high school. I made my most recent breakup the size of Mars, whereas my divorce was more Pluto-like in dimension. I felt guilty that the latter was not more “charged,” but Chan had told me that this was common among people who attended her boot camp—they often felt more raw after the demise of short-lived “situationships” than after decades-long marriages. (“It’s kind of like going to Disneyland,” she said. “If you were there for twelve hours, until you were exhausted, that’s like the end of a marriage. But imagine you leave after three rides—like, you haven’t even hit Space Mountain. Then you’re leaving on a complete high with all of the possibility that hasn’t been actualized.”)

It was hard to disentangle one heartbreak from the other. A year after the end of my marriage, I had decided to go full steam ahead with dating, even though I wasn’t quite ready. I had been broken up with before, of course, but this instance reminded me of another brief but passionate ride: the time my stepdad took the training wheels off my bike and I raced right into a neighbor’s hedges.

Next, Stover led us into butterfly pose. I forgot to stretch or warm up or whatever it is that physically fit people do, and I pulled a muscle in my hip. Stover gave me some tips on icing it, and also suggested I meet with someone in Kripalu’s Healing Arts Center, on the fourth floor. Holding a napkin full of ice against my crotch, I made my way there. At the front desk, alongside offerings for massages and Reiki, I noticed a treatment called Integrated Energy Therapy. The description read, “Practitioners create a ‘heartlink’ to connect to the angelic realm and channel Integrated Energy to their client. This process helps to release emotions from their client’s cellular memory map.”

A woman with wavy blond hair streaked with gray named Mae Hedges Boyce—her nametag said “Mae B.”—led me into a room and began a “consultation.” I told her about the recent breakup and wondered if it was the sort of thing that she helped guests to process. “Could you erase him from my cellular memory?” I asked. She said no—and, anyway, that wasn’t the goal. “The goal,” Boyce informed me, “is to make sure you feel love again, to let go of all the things in the way.” As I lay down on the table, she told me that she was calling on celestial beings to “have their way with me,” which seemed to entail her pulling invisible needles out of my body. I kept trying to anticipate her movements, raising my back so that she wouldn’t have to lift me up. She stopped me. “Let yourself be taken care of,” she said. She noticed tightness in my hips and advised, “Keep your pelvis wide and open.” After fifty minutes, she stood above me, her hands on my shoulders. “There is so much joy waiting for you,” she said. “Have it.”

I confess: I have always romanticized heartbreak. I get stuck on the pages of “Great Expectations” with Miss Havisham, the jilted bride turned recluse, still wearing her wedding gown, her untouched wedding cake crawling with spiders. Her refusal to move on from the scene of her devastation seemed more passionate to me than most love affairs. In college, I read the Aeneid. Dido, after her lover Aeneas deserts her, kills herself with his sword on a funeral pyre, but not before building an effigy of him to burn alongside her. I was disturbed, but I was also impressed. These women understood that, even if you can’t count on a man for a great love, you can at least depend on yourself for an epic heartbreak. And it was not only women. Heathcliff. Gatsby. These were my people.

But life, as I occasionally need reminding, is not a novel. Heartbreak, it turns out, can land you in the emergency room. I contacted Ilan Wittstein, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, who has researched broken-heart syndrome. In the late nineties, Wittstein noticed a pattern of patients suffering from severe cardiac distress for whom further testing turned up contradictory results. Some of these patients had congestive heart failure and had to be moved to the intensive-care unit. As expected, their EKGs were abnormal. But when Wittstein took his patients to the catheterization lab their arteries looked clear. Then there was the matter of how they recovered. Whereas heart attacks damage the muscle, often permanently, these patients’ ultrasounds showed that their heart muscles had healed, sometimes as soon as three days later. “And that was something we had never seen before,” he told me.

Wittstein looked for any examples in medical journals of this constellation of symptoms. He found scattered references to something called takotsubo disease, named after the vase-shaped trap that Japanese fishermen use to catch octopuses. (On ultrasounds, the left ventricles of patients with this syndrome look like takotsubos.) “There was an article in Japan in 2000 that said, ‘We think this only happened in Japanese people, because no one else in the world has ever described it,’ ” he said. After Wittstein published a paper on the subject in The New England Journal of Medicine, in 2005, the American Medical Association officially recognized broken-heart syndrome, also known as takotsubo cardiomyopathy, as a condition. Doctors now estimate that at least two per cent of all patients thought to be having heart attacks are actually experiencing broken-heart syndrome, which, in rare cases, can be fatal. (Wittstein told me that he and his colleagues settled on that name after they noticed that a lot of their patients had come in shortly after a loved one passed away.) Ninety per cent of diagnosed cases are in women, most of whom are postmenopausal. Wittstein posits that lower levels of estrogen, which improves blood flow in the arteries, are likely the culprit. (Wittstein cautioned that younger people can still develop the condition, and that, on the whole, they have worse outcomes.) Fortunately, fewer than ten per cent of patients have a recurrence. The first cut really is the deepest.

Lovesickness was once regarded as an ailment that could ravage the mind and the body. That idea stemmed from thinkers like Aristotle, who hypothesized that the heart dictated the body’s physiological and emotional systems. Earlier physicians such as Hippocrates had posited that the brain was in charge of the body—what is known as cephalocentrism. Aristotle’s revisionist theory of the heart proved influential—for centuries, people believed that a broken heart meant a broken everything else. In 1558, the French writer Pierre Boaistuau published his record of global miseries, “The Theater of the World.” He wrote about bodies ravaged by the “malady” of love: “Their bowels were shrunken. Their poor heart was all burned. Their liver had been invaded and consumed.” In 1610, the French physician Jacques Ferrand devoted an entire book to the subject, “A Treatise on Lovesickness.” He recommended enemas, the draining of hemorrhoids, and, in some cases, bloodletting almost to the point of heart failure.

Later medical literature sometimes painted lovesickness as an affliction that affected men in particular. (It was believed to inhibit the ability to reason, an ability women were thought not to possess in the first place.) But by the nineteenth century nervous states and conditions of all sorts—“excessive sensibility,” erotomania—were largely the province of women. The “melancholy of disappointed love” was conceived of by Sir Alexander Morison, a Scottish physician. His 1840 book, “The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases,” contains illustrations of his patients, among them young women sexually frustrated over clergymen. (Had Fleabag lived in nineteenth-century Scotland, Morison might have treated her with leeches.) As Victorian doctors turned their attention to hysteria, the figure of the lovesick woman faded from serious medical discussion, even as artists and writers continued to be fascinated by her. In Henry James’s “Watch and Ward” (1878), the wealthy Roger Lawrence can tell that the object of his affections, Nora Lambert, is preoccupied with thoughts of another man: “ ‘Lovesick, lovesick is the word,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve read of it all my days in the poets, but here it is in the flesh.’ ”

For most of my life, it was said that breakups were best treated by Doctor Time. Or there was the more effective but perhaps slightly less advisable prescription for getting over someone—getting under someone else. In “When Harry Met Sally,” a movie that is, in fact, mostly about two people going through breakups, the titular characters, played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, fight over who is doing a better job handling theirs. Harry chides Sally for taking her time getting back out there, to which she responds, “You’re gonna have to move back to New Jersey because you’ve slept with everybody in New York, and I don’t see that turning Helen”—his ex-wife—“into a faint memory for you.”

If the movie were remade now, we might see these characters “processing the trauma” of their breakups differently. These days, as an eclectic mix of terms from psychotherapy has become the lingua franca of the heartbroken, you don’t “dump that jerk”; instead, you “go no contact from a narcissist.” (You can also find convoluted forms of this thinking—“We broke up because he’s an avoidant Scorpio and I’m an anxious Libra”—all over TikTok and Reddit.) This can invite a certain amount of eye-rolling, but a number of counsellors I talked to believe that we are more prone to underestimating the pain of heartbreak than to overtreating it.

I spoke with David Kessler, a leading expert on grief, after e-mailing him at [email protected]. He has a refreshing sense of humor despite, or maybe because of, his line of work. Kessler co-wrote a book in 2014 with Louise Hay, titled “You Can Heal Your Heart: Finding Peace After a Breakup, Divorce, or Death.” When we spoke, I explained that the impetus for this story was the end of a brief romantic relationship. “It’s not a big deal,” I reassured him. “No,” he said. “Stop. Why do we do that? Why do we minimize our feelings?” Kessler told me that he is often asked to rank the various causes of heartbreak. He said, “People ask, ‘Which is the worst grief?’ I always say, ‘Yours.’ ” I still had my doubts that one could speak about death and breakups in the same breath. Then I recalled a colleague telling me about a difficult breakup she went through; the weirdest part, she said, was feeling like her boyfriend had vanished overnight—“vaporized” was the word she used.

Some in the heartbreak space have begun employing methods typically used to treat patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. One treatment that kept coming up in my reporting was eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (E.M.D.R.), whereby the patient experiences bilateral stimulation—visual, auditory, or tactile—while focussing on a traumatic memory. It was developed, in the late nineteen-eighties, by a psychologist named Francine Shapiro. One day, she was recalling a painful episode during a walk in the park, and observed that she felt better whenever she was looking back and forth. (She later argued in a paper that this darting of the eyes dulled the intensity of a triggering memory.) Syed Ali, of StrIVeMD, offers something called the stellate ganglion block as a breakup treatment. The procedure is not F.D.A.-approved, but it is used at a number of clinics for P.T.S.D. “Breakups, particularly where there’s betrayal involved, can create P.T.S.D.-like symptoms,” Ali said. He injects two local anesthetics near the stellate ganglion nerves in a person’s neck. According to Ali, within minutes patients should hopefully feel “rumination” begin to subside—what he called “that infinite loop of ‘What did I do wrong?’ ” It costs a thousand dollars. Insurance doesn’t cover it. (I asked.)

In the German Netflix film “The Heartbreak Agency,” from 2024, a journalist reeling from a breakup decides to write a story about a new business that claims to treat broken hearts. He arrives at a luxury hotel outside Berlin and is greeted at the front desk by a chipper concierge. “We’re going to help you heal,” she says, before hanging a gigantic heart-shaped cookie around his neck. In the film, the journalist ends up falling in love with the owner of the agency, a character based on the German breakup coach Elena-Katharina Sohn. “That is so against my policy,” Sohn, the owner of Die Liebeskümmerer (the Heartbreak Agency), told me as we sat in her office in Berlin.

The movie took other liberties. Unlike in the film, there is no heart-themed décor in Sohn’s office, and no empty fish tank into which clients deposit expired romantic mementos. Sohn is known for something called the Glücksherz-Methode (Happiness Heart Method), which she first proposed in her best-selling book “Goodbye Herzschmerz” (“Goodbye Heartbreak”). As I sat in a white leather chair, Sohn pulled out a tripod easel with a large sheet of paper and handed me a red Magic Marker. More coloring, I thought. I had asked her to show me how to make a Glücksherz. She told me to draw a heart and divide it into sections, each representing a part of my life from which I derive (or hope to derive) happiness. I sectioned off about a third of my heart and wrote “work.” “Wow, that’s a lot,” she exclaimed. “Oh, well, I’m American,” I replied. About twenty per cent was split between friends and family. Then I marked off the remaining half and put the word “love” inside. “Ah,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

Have you ever had a client whose heart was taken up a hundred per cent by love, I asked. Sohn said yes, absolutely. A person like that, if they lose love, they lose everything. “Sometimes people tell me, ‘Well, that’s not romantic, Elena, saying that love and romance should take up, like, twenty per cent of my heart,’ ” she said. “And then I say, ‘No, no, that’s a misunderstanding, because, if you have several sources for your personal happiness, only then can you be a good partner.’ ” She stopped and looked at me intently. “Otherwise, you are—it’s a very bad word, and I don’t know if it is as bad in English as well, but in German it’s really, really bad. You are needy.”

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Nearly every heartbreak specialist I spoke with had the same origin story. Sohn was no exception. She began her career after an earth-shattering breakup. It happened sixteen years ago, when her first live-in boyfriend ended their relationship. She was working at a P.R. agency at the time, and spoke to her boss. “I told him, ‘I cannot work,’ ” she said. “I went to the doctor and got a sick note so that I could get some weeks off.” This, she told me, is an accepted practice in Germany, where health insurers diagnose heartbreak as a “failure to adapt psychologically.” The German-language interpreter I had brought along for the interview spoke up to say that she, too, had got a leave of absence following a breakup. “I think it is the impact of German Romanticism and our poets,” she suggested. No more young Werthers would be left to drown themselves in sorrow, the country had seemingly decided.

During Sohn’s sabbatical, she bought a used convertible and set off on a road trip with her dog. “He was a really big love story as well,” she said wistfully. “Lasse. I put him on the passenger seat, and we started travelling, visiting old friends.” The trip was therapeutic, and Sohn wondered why there weren’t dedicated getaways for people in the same situation. She worked with some therapists to plan a breakup retreat at a luxury hotel outside Berlin: “I got there early, to put uplifting messages on the guests’ pillows.” Sohn no longer organizes breakup retreats. It wasn’t financially viable, she told me: “Somebody would book, and then two weeks before the trip he would say he was back together with his ex and cancel.”

She pivoted to offering one-on-one counselling instead. In 2015, she completed an eighteen-month training program and was certified as an alternative practitioner of psychotherapy by the German health department. Sohn told me that most of her clients are college-educated. (Insurance does not always cover her services, and her fee is a hundred and sixty euros an hour.) They are often, she finds, too much in their heads, trying to rationalize their way out of a heartbreak. As a remedy, she does various exercises employing “body psychotherapy.” If a client says that she wants to get back together with her ex, Sohn has her write that down on a notecard and place it on a chair. The client writes down other scenarios—seeing someone new, remaining single—and places those alternatives on other chairs. Then the client sits on one and waits for a bodily response. “But sometimes they do not need to sit down,” Sohn said. “The choice of chair—if it is cozy or cold—can tell them the answer.”

I was surprised to learn that slightly more than fifty per cent of Sohn’s patients are men; most breakup services are targeted at women. (Stover only accepts applicants to her workshop who identify as women.) Sohn thinks that men and women react differently to breakups. “Women stay in and talk to their friends, their sisters, their colleagues,” she said. “The typical man with heartbreak is the opposite. A lot of our male clients say we’re the first people they’ve told. Instead, they play sports or go out for drinks. Sometimes my female clients say, ‘Look at my ex-partner. He has no heartbreak.’ Then I say, ‘No, no, he’s just dealing in another way.’ ”

I spoke with a woman I’ll call Greta, one of Sohn’s former clients, a baby-faced blond filmmaker in her thirties who lives outside Munich. When she was twenty-eight, her boyfriend of three years abruptly ended things. At the time, she was devastated. “I had lost not only my life but also my future, because I was planning on having a family with this guy,” she told me. “All of my coping mechanisms that I thought would help—dating, eating sugar, meeting with friends—didn’t help at all. I had no tools whatsoever to get me out of this.” When Greta did the Happiness Heart exercise, the love portion of her heart was at nearly ninety per cent. She recalled the time that her boyfriend got a Vespa scooter: “I went to a meeting of Vespa enthusiasts. It was all men. I asked them, ‘What can I do as a girlfriend to support my boyfriend’s hobby?’ ” Greta giggled. “Now I think back on this, and I think, Oh, my God, how needy was that?”

Over Zoom, Greta showed me a recent drawing of her heart, now a more proportional mosaic that included hobbies. What sorts of hobbies? I asked. “Martial arts,” Greta said. After Sohn had her visualize herself as a child, Greta was reminded of how much she had loved Bruce Lee films. Sohn does this often with her clients. She said a lot of women suddenly recall a childhood love of horseback riding. “That is very common,” she said.

At Kripalu, Stover had urged us to see our broken hearts as cracked vases. She described the Japanese art of kintsugi, “where you take a broken piece of pottery and you piece it back together with gold glue. It’s like we’re healing our fracturedness.” Stover spoke genuinely, but the visual was an apt metaphor for a question that had been nagging me throughout my reporting: Was heartbreak just a new gold rush?

It’s hard to quantify exactly how large the divorce industry is, but it’s widely speculated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. With more and more couples opting to cohabitate without marrying, the era of Big Breakup was probably inevitable. In 2014, Gwyneth Paltrow announced, in a blog post on her wellness site, Goop, that she and her then husband, Chris Martin, had decided to “consciously uncouple,” a concept created by the psychotherapist Katherine Woodward Thomas. Thomas told me that she had been on a retreat in Costa Rica when the Goop post went live. She found the only landline available on site to answer questions from journalists around the world. “There was a lot of pushback, with people making fun of Gwyneth,” Thomas said. “People tend to do that because she’s so gorgeous and privileged.” But Thomas believed that our attitude toward relationships needed updating. “Happily ever after is from a time when everyone died before they were forty,” she said. Most people will now have two to three significant relationships in their lifetime. In the past decade, Thomas has seen an uptick in people seeking resources for “amicable” breakups and divorces. “Things have changed so quickly,” she said. “Conscious uncoupling named it enough that it gave a new idea to people, and it was almost like . . . a dam was waiting to break.”

Measuring the quality of the water can prove tricky. Anyone can call themselves a breakup coach, but there are programs that will, for a price, allow you to claim that you are certified as one. In the United Kingdom, Sara Davison, who is a breakup and divorce coach, told me that she has trained more than six hundred and fifty coaches in twenty-seven different countries. Her certification program, which starts at around four thousand dollars, entails forty hours of video training. It also comes with access to Davison’s “black book” of support professionals—stylists, personal trainers, lawyers, financial advisers. “You name it,” she told me. (After we spoke, Davison messaged me on WhatsApp to offer a limited discount on her breakup-coach course for New Yorker readers. I politely declined.) Not every breakup coach has the same goalpost. Some services offer to help you #getyourexback using questionable methods such as manifesting, the law of attraction, and strategic texting. Natalia Juarez, a breakup coach who has appeared on “Good Morning America,” advertises a three-step process called “conscious recoupling” on her Web site. Lee Wilson, who calls himself Coach Lee, runs a popular service called MyExBackCoach.com that charges five hundred and seventy-nine dollars per one-on-one session with him. Many “get your ex back” coaches are men who advertise to heterosexual women, offering them the “male perspective.”

Despite my misgivings about the breakup industry, it still seemed like a good thing that people were paying serious attention to the ends of relationships other than marriages. While I was working on this story, almost everyone I spoke to about it assumed that I would be focussing on my divorce. It struck me that marriage is so hegemonic in American society that even its aftermath, divorce, takes all the oxygen out of conversations around heartbreak. My mom was never married to my father; they hadn’t even been a couple. Whenever I tell people that she was a single parent, they assume that I’m a “child of divorce,” and I have to correct them.

I decided to reach out to John Markowitz, of Columbia University. Markowitz conducts comparative research in the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry, evaluating the benefits of various psychotherapies for patients suffering from P.T.S.D. and depression. He believes that breakups, though distressing, should not qualify as traumatic episodes on their own. Markowitz is skeptical of E.M.D.R. He acknowledged that it was evidence-based (the W.H.O. has endorsed it as an effective treatment for P.T.S.D.), but he believed that it was efficacious because of its similarities to exposure therapy, which can be difficult to endure. He compared the use of bilateral eye movement in E.M.D.R. to a hypnotist’s watch. “You’re distracting the patient with magic,” he told me.

He also had reservations about “body psychotherapy,” another term that kept popping up in my reporting. If clients felt better after the breakup retreats and methods I was coming across, Markowitz said, it was likely because those treatments incorporated elements— such as emotional stimuli, ritual, and structure—behind many successful therapies. I had felt better after Kripalu, but perhaps I had been mesmerized by “structure” (e.g., designated times for Ayurvedic meals and kayaking).

I called Orna Guralnik, a psychoanalyst and the star of Showtime’s “Couples Therapy.” Her job, in part, is to help couples avoid breaking up, but it’s also to help them deal with the detritus of former heartbreaks. “People come scarred and with all sorts of haunting histories that color their expectations,” she said. I asked Guralnik what she thought of various breakup-targeted interventions. “It’s not how I work,” she said. “I’m a psychoanalyst. We address heartbreak like any other thing.” Getting over a breakup is a process, she said: “It’s a matter of coming to terms with reality, which is always a complicated thing, or coming to terms with various realities that remind us of things that happened earlier in our lives that brought us to our knees in one way or another.”

In September, I found myself in an alternate dimension. I was floating in space, and a gigantic, translucent heart was barrelling toward me like an asteroid. I braced for impact, covering my face with my hands, which suddenly looked like tree branches. Words appeared before me: “The person you have lost finds a way back to you.” “Blimey,” a voice behind me said. It belonged to Alice Haddon, a British psychologist whom I had invited to the Gazelli Art House gallery, in London’s Mayfair neighborhood. I took off my virtual-reality goggles and handed them to the gallerist. We had been watching “Heartbreak and Magic,” a V.R. installation by the artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney, who had lost her sister to suicide. It turned out that Haddon had also lost a sibling, a twin brother, who drowned in a swimming accident in Central America at nineteen. “I think people who go into this profession have very sensitive antennae, which makes them good at their job,” she said. “But there was a reason that they had to be sensitive in the first place.”

We stepped outside. Haddon, a forty-nine-year-old blonde who lives in East London, was wearing sporty white sneakers and a long orange wool coat. “I don’t get to this side of town very often,” she said, pointing at a chauffeur polishing a black Mercedes-Benz. Haddon lectures in psychology at City, University of London, and also runs a retreat in England, two to four times a year, called the Heartbreak Hotel. She takes groups of six to ten women to a hotel in either Norfolk or the Peak District for four days of intense heartbreak therapy involving sharing circles, cold swimming, and sessions with on-site psychologists with P.T.S.D. training. She likes those regions of the country, she says, because “a long horizon helps the brain to process things.” She emphasizes the importance of “cocooning” during heartbreak, providing her guests with blankets and hot-water bottles. She didn’t feel comfortable having a journalist attend a retreat, out of concern for her clients’ privacy, but she had agreed to take me through some of the exercises included in the package.

The book she co-wrote, “Finding Your Self at the Heartbreak Hotel,” is also meant to re-create the experience of being at one of her retreats. It contains fictionalized versions of past guests, such as Nadia, a queer woman unable to stop ruminating over her ex-fiancée’s being with a new partner: “I have nightmares about killing them both, then wake up in a cold sweat and my heart breaks all over again when I realize they are both alive and probably in bed together.” Then, Haddon writes, Nadia “laughs through tears, retreats to the back of the sofa, draws up her knees.”

Now Haddon asked how I was responding to the breakup treatments I’d gone through, and I confessed that I felt better but also a bit empty inside. “I miss my wound,” I joked. Haddon laughed. Heartbreaks can be defining, she agreed, adding, “They’re a big part of how we make meaning out of our lives.”

We took a taxi to her home, a small brick row house near London Fields. She had given her husband and teen-age children strict orders not to disturb us. There was nothing she could do about her dog, Bonny, though—a light-brown Lab mix who greeted us excitedly at the door. In the kitchen, she put on a kettle for tea while I looked through the windows. Her small, walled-in back garden was lush with overgrown ferns and an apple tree.

Haddon decided to be a psychologist when she was sixteen, after she read a book called “Dibs in Search of Self,” about a kid who hides under a desk. A therapist comes along and plays a game that draws him out from under it. “I thought, I’m going to do that,” she told me. She studied psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and started working at the Priory, a private psychiatric hospital, in her early twenties. She joined its eating-disorder unit, and then moved to Saudi Arabia, to treat a well-off young woman there. “I think it was a really influential bit of my life, because I’d never seen that kind of wealth before, and that kind of unhappiness,” she said. Haddon’s clients at the Heartbreak Hotel come from various walks of life, but, at around three thousand pounds, a stay there is certainly more expensive than bonbons and a box of tissues.

One of the guests at Haddon’s first retreat was a woman in her forties—I’ll call her Olivia—who lived in London. Her partner had had an affair with a co-worker, and paid for Olivia to attend the retreat after she found out. “Guilt,” Olivia said wryly, when I called her up. By the time she arrived at the Heartbreak Hotel, she had tried everything else. “I was seeing, like, five therapists. . . . I did hypnotherapy,” she said. “I think I read every single blog post since, like, 1992 on betrayal and heartbreak. I listened to every single podcast. I was obsessed.” Olivia was struggling with what she believes was P.T.S.D. “I would cry for days on end, and I’d never really been someone with mental-health problems before that, so it was really scary,” she said. At the Heartbreak Hotel, Olivia found E.M.D.R. therapy especially helpful. “I had a lot of visual triggers really causing a lot of pain for me,” she said. “I’d seen photos of my partner and the other woman. It was just a constant—like, I close my eyes, and they were just always there.” Finally, they began to fade.

In Haddon’s bright kitchen, the tea had finished steeping. “I want to hear about your heartbreak,” Haddon said. By way of diversion, I offered my therapist’s theories for why I’ve struggled in my love life. “I purposefully pick people with whom it won’t work out,” I said, “where there’s some baked-in conflict.”

“If we were at the hotel,” Haddon said, “this is when I’d ask, ‘If you think that somewhere deep down you deserve rejection, how do you try to keep yourself safe?’ ”

I knew where this was going. I told her that I had never, to the disappointment of many a therapist, had big feelings about my father not being in my life. My parents had not been a couple. “He was my mom’s high-school math teacher,” I said. For her, it was four years of thinking nothing would ever happen, and then something happened, and suddenly I was there and he wasn’t. “It’s my mother’s heartbreak, not mine,” I said. Haddon said nothing. “He was twenty-three years older,” I continued. “If anything, I’ve always felt that him leaving me alone—I’ve met him only a couple of times—is his single act of love toward me.”

“Is that how you learned to protect yourself?” she asked. She was sitting close and was very still. Somewhere between asking and answering, I said, “To pick people whose rejection wouldn’t hurt me.”

“So,” Haddon asked, “how is that going for you?”

My jet lag was working like a truth serum. “It’s a life with very little love, very little warmth, just very little,” I told her. “I have this fantasy of coming home and someone cooking me dinner and offering me a glass of wine.” I let out an embarrassed sigh. “It’s the simplest thing, and it’s been the most elusive. And I’m, like, Why? Why haven’t I picked people who would do that for me?”

“Finish this sentence,” Haddon instructed me, beginning a cognitive-behavioral-therapy-inspired exercise that she does at the Heartbreak Hotel. “If I don’t have any needs in a relationship, then . . .”

“Then,” I supplied, “I would be loved more.”

“Where does that idea come from?” she asked.

“My mother was eighteen when she had me,” I said. “She was all alone. And I knew . . .” My voice was getting shaky. “I knew that I was this big imposition on this young woman’s life, and that she was still heartbroken. I tried to be self-sufficient whenever I could be. I felt like if I didn’t need too much, it would be O.K., like it would be O.K. that I was here.” I could hardly speak. “I was the same way in my marriage,” I told her. We both started nodding. She brought me a tissue.

“It can be very relaxing when people are clear about their needs, Jennifer,” she said. I took another sip of tea. “Very relaxing,” I repeated.

“Some might say my prescriptions are hard,” Ovid had warned. “Best to think twice if you’re counting on help from the sorcerous herbals.” There would be no magical shortcuts. The day after I got back home to New York, I stretched and went for a run in the park—an old hobby I had decided to take up again. ♦