#quantified breakup

"It feels like the greatest tragedy to befall mankind"

-- A. to her therapist one day after her boyfriend broke up with her

When you're in it, the pain is raw. Like a tsunami, it overcomes you in giant waves, relentless and violent, eating up all your attention and emotional capacity.

The breakup of a formerly glorious relationship can feel like the greatest tragedy to befall mankind. At least in the universe of those who are experiencing it.

Cupid has not been kind to some of my friends in recent months. They went through anguish, self-doubt and heartache, much of which a cohort of supporters -- my recovered self included -- tried to mollify with ice cream, hugs and alcohol. The stories of their recent breakups haunted them -- during their commute, in bathroom stalls at work, late at night.

But as we collectively and staggeringly grow out of painful breakups and emerge as changed people, the stories of these tragedies become different kinds of stories. They become dark, hilarious comedies that evoke tears from laughter, not grimaced, snot-drenched faces. They become stories worth bragging about, candidates for the worst breakup story in a circle of friends.

"Oh here's a worse story!""Nah-uh, I win this one!""Wait ‘til you hear about this breakup."

If time heals all wounds, then with enough temporal distance, perhaps a good number of these tragedies become nuggets of emotional wisdom that help us keep our own lives -- and those of others -- in perspective. They become stories we share like a bottle of wine, on which we feast with a bitter sweet understanding of the past as it pertains to our future.

With that insight -- gained during moments of blissful solitude, dinner parties with home-cooked meals and walks with friends through all seasons in this godforsaken mammoth of a beautiful city -- I would like to ask you all to share your story with me.

A friend and I made an app that allows you to call in your breakup stories. Call the number below (347-983-1841) and share your stories. You have 45 seconds for each story. Tell me about how someone broke up with you or how you broke up with someone. Tell me about crazy shit you did after a breakup or funny things you did for someone else after a breakup. Tell me funny stories, sad stories, epic stories. I want to hear them all:

There are days when time does not feel linear. When the present tense and long bygone times seem to coexist. When the past is thrust upon your current life and pushes down hard. The past few months have been amazing. My family and friends have been an incredible pillar of support. My professional life is going well. And I’m out and about, being active, meeting old and new friends, making art. But every once in a while the past catches up for an unpleasant “hello, here I am.” During the first few summer months, these moments occurred more frequently. Sometimes that was because of divorce-related paperwork. Sometimes because of trips to places where news of the divorce had not yet traveled. Perhaps also because the anniversary of our breakup was coming up fast. Earlier, I graphed my public display of emotions, by which I mean incidents of public crying. Mind you, public crying is something I try to avoid and occurs mostly when I can’t keep my shit together. It’s now been more than a full year since the breakup. But grief still comes and goes in weird ways:

Triggers People and tasks, gatherings and events — they help propel time forward. My schedules have been packed with them, electronic ink filling the rows and columns of my Google calendar. But there’s only so much busy-ness that your body will allow you. In between appointments, the past can come creeping back, clouding thoughts about your present tense and temporarily corrupting those about the future. These feelings of mourning and somewhat sullen reflection seem to come suddenly and unexpectedly. But often they have been triggered at an earlier point by real-world events and come out when you are left to their own devices. Interacting with him caused anxiety, dealing with divorce-related paperwork did, too. 

But what really wears you down is breaking the news to others. Over and over and over again.

Here’s a brutal metaphor for a breakup: It’s some kind of mutilation. First it feels like someone rips your heart out of your chest. Then as you’re trying to grasp what just happened, still in shock about the loss of that pumping machine in your body, someone else chops off one arm, then another. Then go your legs. In the end you look like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail:

Basically, it’s not just that you feel an emotional void after you ‘uncouple' from someone. But so many parts of your identity — your mutual circle of friends, your common living space, your ex-partner's extended family — are suddenly cut off from you. You look around and half your limbs are missing.

But then over the coming months you start to rebuild yourself. You take the scraps that are left of you and you stitch yourself back together, one piece at a time. It’s a way of establishing a new self with entirely new components as well as old ones you forgot you had.

There’s that part of you that is playing a sport again, something you had neglected in favor of lounging around at home and watching Netflix with your spouse. There’s that part of you that is back drawing stuff or banging on that guitar — I know at least three women who have made a bunch of breakup art in recent months. Then there’s the social you who is out at rooftop parties, barbeques and bar events that you had previously been too tired to attend.

There’s this new and old you, sewn together haphazardly with bibs and bobs you found lying around. But the truly great thing is that…

IT’S ALIVE!

Yes! Like Frankenstein’s monster, you have risen from the dead… or from many formerly dead body parts. You’re still kind of limping, need to tighten a few seams here and there, and might even wanna straighten some of those joints. But you’re back and alive and ready to learn how to walk again.

That’s sort of where I landed as springtime came around and then something even stranger happened:

I had been going on dates every once in a while. Usually, they’d go like so: it starts out with some interesting banter on your phone, then maybe a meeting. The first encounter mostly feels like work, sometimes it gets easier and most often things trickle on and then end in one or both of you losing interest.

But something happened. There was some kind of spark with someone.

(Below is an interactive graphic. To make something happen, click the grey button!)

(To watch this fullscreen go here)

Of course, the number of text message exchanges — in this case 1,146 in the first four weeks alone, an average of 40.9 per day — doesn’t mean much. But perhaps it’s a nice indication of when there are real sparks. Our connections with one another in a busy city, especially one like New York City, can easily fall to pieces. There are always a 8.2 million other people — basically the entire population of New York City — you could be seeing. There are so many things you could be doing. So much work to be done.

But sometimes, when something feels right between two people, they just wanna talk to each other all the time. Like ALL. THE. TIME.

Something might come out of that. Other times something gets in the way and the whole thing implodes. To quote a friend of mine: “All good things end.” It’s a joke. But yeah, she was on to something.

As you can see, things didn’t really work out in the end. We both got a little too excited, then a little scared and then life and a ton of travel got in the way. But that is besides the point. An intense and lovely month with someone can remind you that you can still feel. That you’re not just dead inside. I believe that’s a reason to celebrate. Let summertime come!

Fake Movie Meme

"Margin of Error" (anon request - "...inspired by the tumblr Quantified Breakup...") Jared Leto, Imogen Poots

Initially, he thought it was a mutual breakup. He thought both of them had fallen out of love. He thought that they acted more like roommates than lovers. He thought that this was what they both wanted. He was wrong.

Jason (Leto) has built his life and interests around numbers and statistics. When everything else around him fails, the numbers will not. People don't always make sense, but numbers do. Equations, statistics, probabilities... they make sense.

Jason's girlfriend -ex-girlfriend- Liv (Poots) always seemed to understand him, and his love for numbers. They were together for seven years -seven years full of love and laughter and fun -and of course, numbers.

But sometimes it just doesn't work out. Sometimes people fall out of love, and its no one's fault. No one is to blame. No one is the villain. Sometimes it just happens.

It's the end of the year. It's been one heck of a year. 

While some of the past few months sucked big time, I wanna take this opportunity to also recognize just how lucky I've been to have received all this support from my friends. 

Love received vs. love perceived

During a breakup your feelings play tricks on you. Sometimes shit ain't as bad as it feels at that point in time, but you don't know because your heart tells you everything in the world sucks and there's no hope. 

There's this human tendency to sink into a hole of negative emotions (or sometimes just numbness). Whatever you're feeling at the very beginning is all-consuming, eclipsing some of the sweetest gestures. The intensity of those feelings subsides over time and then you really start seeing how awesome your friends are and have been.

Tiny words on screens

Society likes to condemn texting.

Texting ruins our teens. It makes us into hazards to others. Often it's considered rude

But you know what? Words, whether transmitted electronically, written on paper or told to you in person, are still thoughts that are with you.

Here's how many text messages I exchanged in the past 4 months:

  There are entire text message conversations I had with some friends right after the breakup; during some of the toughest times; and at random points in time. They all helped mend my stupid little heart.

I wanted to point them out, if only statistically (to respect their privacy). Below are the ten folks I exchanged the most text messages with, in order of when they responded to my breakup. 

The real world

There were, of course, also plenty of occasions when my friends would do things for me in the real world. They went on trips with me, made a point of trying new things (like making pie crust for the first time!) and sometimes sent me gifts from far away. In short, folks rallied to show me just how much fun life can be.

And that's super helpful. After a breakup, you just have a lot more time on your hands. Even once you've cried yourself silly, there's still time left for other things. 

Here's a timeline of real-life events from the past few months as documented on instagram:

Yowsers, the internets

Last but not least, I also want to recognize the 4,759 people who started to follow me here and the countless others who have tweeted and written about this tumblr in some very sweet ways.  

I was not quite sure what to expect when I started publishing these charts. There were some really hateful comments on some sites. But there were also a lot of encouraging words that made me feel like my graphical explorations of this painful period weren't as futile as I expected them to be. Thank you guys. 

And have a happy new year!

Note: For this post I used a software that allowed me to recover my iphone data. I got individual spreadsheets for everything from calendar records to call logs. The csv file I received for my text messages was 21,417 rows of messy, unwieldy data. But complete with weird-looking things that used to be emojis!

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. Two can be as bad as one. It's the loneliest number since the number one.

— Aimee Mann

In the process of making these graphics, I wondered whether applying metrics, math and data analysis to an emotional situation was something other people did, too. And they do! If you pay attention you start noticing it around you. 

We celebrate anniversaries. We count the days until we see our loved ones again. We pay attention to the number of times we say “I love you.”

We also seem to have mathematical equations as to how long it takes to get over a breakup: 

According to these formulae, I still seem to have a long way to go (le sigh) or am over the whole ordeal (huzzah). What a load of entertaining and well-meaning bullcrap. 

While enumerating this kind of process seems silly it does help you put an endpoint to something that seems so enduring. It’s a conceptual switch you make from something feeling infinite to finite.

It doesn’t mean that I am not still confused. Or terrified of ever being vulnerable again. Or have the urge to run the the opposite corner of the world (penguins!). And as someone put it to me recently: time is so squishy. A night can stretch to awful eternity. A week can fly by if you fill it with people and activities. Time is just a tad too elastic to be compartmentalized into an equation, especially when emotions are involved. 

But using these formulae gives us a framework to think about feelings. It conveys that there is a beginning, middle and end to something that in reality is probably not all that clean-cut or simple.

And so, if enumeration can mollify a restless soul, why not look for a few more indicators of my re-entry into normalcy?

How bout we start by looking at my re-socialization in the virtual world via social media. Studies seems to tell you conflicting things about social media. Some say that spending time on Facebook makes you unhappy. Other studies say it makes us happier. Perhaps the most illuminating point was that passively reading about the lives others makes us feel increasingly lonely — I wouldn't want to be an NSA spy — while participation in the lives of others in form of likes, posts, comments and tweets supposedly makes us happy. 

Hoping to find out how much 'happier' I have become I looked through my social media data to find activities that indicated how much I started participating in the lives of others (not just read about them passively):

Looks like two months into the breakup, I really tried to be more social. 

Similarly, real-life activities are probably a good indicator for how you're doing. Post-breakup you find yourself with a lot of time on your hands. Here's what I tried to do with my time (again, it seems like a lot happens to me about 2 months in):

Regardless, of what kind of progress these graphics might show, I wonder just how linear the process of 'getting over an ex' really is. There are remnants and ghosts of experiences past that still inform the person we are today. There are physical and virtual reminders alike that can, after weeks of not thinking about your ex, catapult you back into a contemplative, bitter-sweet state.

This makes me wonder: should we look for emotional peace in our daily lives rather than for completely eradicating the memory of someone? 

Who knows. Time will tell. 

Note: The data for the social media graphics came from the respective social media portals. Both Facebook and Twitter allow you to download your own data:

Facebook gives you a barebones site, which does not actually contain all the information they track about you. So I had to manually download parts of my activity log, using these steps and extract the data I wanted (my activity log). 

Twitter on the other hand made things much much easier by not only putting together a lovely little page with all your tweets on it — data visualizations included! — but by also handing you a csv file of all your activities (comma-separated-value file that you can easily process with Excel or other data parsing programs).

"In a place where we are so rarely alone, we find privacy in public."

— from Melissa Febos' New York Times Op-Ed piece titled 'Look at Me, I’m Crying'

Every day we function within parameters. We do our jobs. We do our chores. We chit chat with the person who sells us groceries. We function very admirably.

But when something disruptive happens in our lives — a breakup or maybe even a serious family emergency — we sometimes can't help but let it all out. And I don't just mean at home. Sometimes, you kinda have to stop functioning and ball your eyes out in public. At that point in time you don't even have a choice.  It's like a spontaneous emotional combustion — BAM! And you're in it, head tilted, grimacing, people walking by, for the most part ignoring you, and all the crap streams out of you. You can read a few better descriptions of this activity here.

Commiserations with other people about breakups seemed to reveal that I was not alone in expressing emotions like this! I've had women shrieking with joy as they told me about the therapeutic effects of crying publicly. 

Here's a quick breakdown of public crying I recall from emails, texts and conversations (I started jotting down data for this in mid-October. Data does not include domestic crying):

(I think it took me a good month to really grasp that all this was over... then came the processing and then November. Oh lovely, calm November.).

Triggers

There are a million things we do to keep occupied during the day and early evenings, but sometimes really simple things like taking the subway or seeing photos of a mutual friend's wedding on social media can be bring out some fairly strong emotions. 

To encapsulate the 'horror' that some seemingly simple actions, events and things can incite in a person post-breakup, I made a few faux minimalist horror movie posters (these are inspired by the amazing Saul Bass, designer of many Hitchcock film posters, and graphic designer Albert Exergian who made a number of minimalist TV posters that are pretty rad). 

Subway rides can be really raw. Maybe it's the lack of distractions/the Internet, the confinement in space, or the anonymity (there are plenty of people, just none who really pay attention to you) but subways have been this place of cartharsis for me. My friends assure me I'm not alone in feeling that way!

Weddings are wonderful. A celebration of the love between two human beings. Joy. Food. Music. All good things. But when you're still coming to terms with the exact opposite of a wedding, they can be a tad brutal. Especially as spectated via social media.

"Songs with words" — a term coined by a friend. Song lyrics can be one major bummer when you already feel vulnerable. If you're anything like me and like lend your daily commute a selected soundtrack, then listening to songs can really amplify how you feel. And when you got one profound and sad line sung at you after another, you might find yourself losing it on the F train somewhere between Manhattan and Brooklyn. 

Music

But as much as music can be a trigger for public sadness, it can also sweeten your mood on a good day. For all the moments of utter vulnerability there were also plenty of moments when I felt somewhat sublime, serene, energized and happy. Just to drive home the point, I went through my iTunes both on my computer and on my phone to get an idea of just how sad or happy my playlists were.

Here's the total tally:

Here are the top 20 'sad' songs (tables are sortable!):

Here are the top 20 'happy' songs:

It's good to know that my song selection was happier than I thought it was.

Note: The data for the public crying incidences was a little harder to come by. Again, I went through emails and social media postings in an attempt to remember how I felt on given days. It was somewhat masochistic. But that's better than running away from your emotions, right? I promise there's more uplifting data, too.