Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, Slight Changers. I'm excited to share that we're
Speaker 1: going to launch new episodes of A Slight Change of
Speaker 1: Plans on February twenty eighth. I cannot wait for you
Speaker 1: to hear them. In the meantime, I wanted to share
Speaker 1: something special with you. It's a new audiobook from Pushkin Industries,
Speaker 1: the same place I partner with on A Slight Change
Speaker 1: of Plans. It's called Heartbreak, and it's written and read
Speaker 1: by Florence Williams. Florence is a science journalist, but when
Speaker 1: her husband of twenty five years ended their marriage, she
Speaker 1: became her own subject. Florence set out to understand what
Speaker 1: was happening to her emotions and her body after the divorce.
Speaker 1: She turned to scientists who study social pain, loneliness, and
Speaker 1: the biology of romantic attachment, and she also turned to
Speaker 1: her friends and loved ones to try and piece her
Speaker 1: life back together. Florence recorded her journey that includes conversations
Speaker 1: with her friends hence to date new men, and her
Speaker 1: trips around the country to interview scientists. Her book is
Speaker 1: filled with moments of joy and sadness, and it sheds
Speaker 1: light on the complexity of emotions that can follow Heartbreak. Okay,
Speaker 1: here comes the preview. You can order the Heartbreak audio
Speaker 1: books so that it's sent directly to your podcast app
Speaker 1: by going to Pushkin dot fm, slash Heartbreak, or at Audible.
Speaker 1: When I set out to try and understand the experience
Speaker 1: of heartbreak, both my own and more generally, I recorded
Speaker 1: a lot of my journey as it was unfolding, in
Speaker 1: real time recordings, Oh you are Oh my god, you're
Speaker 1: really going to do this? I don't know. Writing this
Speaker 1: book has been a deeply personal exploration for me, and
Speaker 1: I'm grateful you're choosing to listen. It may sound a
Speaker 1: little different from the audio books you're used to hearing.
Speaker 1: I'll be reading the text, but you'll also hear passages
Speaker 1: from my audio journal, entries and sounds from trips took
Speaker 1: in the wilderness. You'll hear conversations with friends. The only
Speaker 1: advice I have for you is that we are here
Speaker 1: for you, so don't do it alone. And scientists and
Speaker 1: experts who study heartbreak, just because you've been dumped doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you don't just can stop attaching. In fact, the
Speaker 1: brain region that becomes active when you've been dumped linked
Speaker 1: with pain also becomes active when you have tooth pain.
Speaker 1: Why does that seem sort of appropriate? So's it's a
Speaker 1: very painful experience and it can last a long time.
Speaker 1: You'll even hear me in therapy. Yeah, just the whole
Speaker 1: universe of dating is much more dramatic than being in
Speaker 1: a twenty year marriage. I figured this is an audiobook,
Speaker 1: you might as well really hear it. The highs, the lows,
Speaker 1: the sometimes crooked path to a heart, more whole. Here
Speaker 1: we go. I hope you enjoy it. My biggest problem
Speaker 1: at the moment was the portable toilet. It was just
Speaker 1: too heavy. It was weighing down the bow of my canoe,
Speaker 1: which was already loaded with eighty pounds of water and
Speaker 1: a double walled cooler filled with fairly ridiculous items like
Speaker 1: coconut milk, ribi steaks and cage free liquid, whole eggs,
Speaker 1: three blocks of ice, ten days or the water. I
Speaker 1: have so much food, like why did I grad onions?
Speaker 1: And that's me night one alone on the river making
Speaker 1: an audio diary are really more of an audio rant.
Speaker 1: Heavy food, huge cooler takes up three quarters of the boat.
Speaker 1: I'd also brought a fetching beach parasol. It was just
Speaker 1: too much stuff. But the toilet seemed a particular rebuke.
Speaker 1: Why does something you shit in in the desert have
Speaker 1: to be made of ammunition grade twenty millimeter steel? It doesn't.
Speaker 1: And the canoe was small. It just feels really heavy,
Speaker 1: like I can move it in a straight line. But
Speaker 1: if I had to make a move, if there are
Speaker 1: a rock coming, I mean I cannot move it. The
Speaker 1: ill conceived toilet was just one of the many small
Speaker 1: and giant mistakes that led me to this moment cursing
Speaker 1: alone in the wilderness. There were the mistakes in my marriage,
Speaker 1: the cosmic mistake to my mind of the divorce, the
Speaker 1: wrong men I'd fallen for in the year since my separation,
Speaker 1: the friendships I'd overburdened. All of these were yes, weighing
Speaker 1: me down. If I thought about the heavy ship metaphors
Speaker 1: too long, my head hurt. Most recently, there was the
Speaker 1: poor decision made because I was possibly having a hot flash,
Speaker 1: to launch this leg of my journey a day early,
Speaker 1: at seven pm, in fading light, just above a small rapid,
Speaker 1: in a canoe that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: Then again, it was August and it was ninety seven
Speaker 1: degrees in Green River, Utah, even a teenage boy would
Speaker 1: be having a hot flash. Camping at the shadeless Town
Speaker 1: Park was an unbearable option. Running a desert river for
Speaker 1: a month in the height of summer was probably another
Speaker 1: bad decision. But here I was. An outfitter named Craig
Speaker 1: had rented me the fifteen foot canoe with a broken thwart,
Speaker 1: splintering gunnals, and the tanker toilet. The boat was the
Speaker 1: color of lipstick you wear when you're trying too hard.
Speaker 1: It did, however, match the parasol. Craig dropped me off
Speaker 1: at the ramp. He laughed and said, just remember, if
Speaker 1: you don't know, knots make lots. He then snapped a
Speaker 1: picture of me surrounded by all my gear and drove
Speaker 1: off in his air conditioned pickup. To be clear, I
Speaker 1: do know how to tie knots, and I generally know
Speaker 1: what I'm doing in the wilderness. But my own canoe
Speaker 1: lay upside down in Washington, DC, where it petulantly awaited
Speaker 1: better days, and where until recently I also petulantly lay
Speaker 1: often right side down. After my husband decided to leave
Speaker 1: our twenty five year marriage because among other things. He
Speaker 1: said he needed to go find his soulmate. Still nothing
Speaker 1: in my prior canoeing experience had fully prepared me for
Speaker 1: the reality that I could barely alter the trajectory of
Speaker 1: this boat. Once I got it into the river, only
Speaker 1: a few small inches of freeboard lay between the water
Speaker 1: and the top of my gunnals. I stared at the
Speaker 1: approaching shoals. I glared at the toilet, glinting like a
Speaker 1: smug brigadier in the twilight. When the river split into
Speaker 1: two channels, I chose the one on the right, but
Speaker 1: the current grew fast, shallow bumpy. The canoe scraped over
Speaker 1: some rocks, thence more, and started to list sideways. I
Speaker 1: pushed my feet back into my river shoes and hopped
Speaker 1: out into the shin deep water, figuring I'd have an
Speaker 1: easier time keeping the boat upright and off the rocks
Speaker 1: if I were outside it. My heart was beating fast.
Speaker 1: I cursed myself for not tying down my gear better.
Speaker 1: The boat bumped along upright, and I jumped back in.
Speaker 1: I knew I needed to pull over in camp. Soon
Speaker 1: before I got any darker, I grounded the boat under
Speaker 1: the first available scruffy gravel bar for my first night
Speaker 1: ever spent alone in the wilderness. I'd be camping within
Speaker 1: sight of the Inner State. I can hear I seventy.
Speaker 1: I haven't even gone under I seventy yet. I'm between
Speaker 1: I seventy and the airport. I'm like, what the fuck
Speaker 1: am I doing? I guess this really a good idea.
Speaker 1: By this point, I'd already been addling the Green River
Speaker 1: for two weeks with friends and family, had run Split
Speaker 1: Mountain and Desolation Canyon, among other stretches. Everything was so
Speaker 1: aptly named. The first white men to run these canyons
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty years ago hated most of it.
Speaker 1: Country Worthless, scrawled one in his journal. Now it was
Speaker 1: just me and the sound of air brakes. I spent
Speaker 1: the night awake, be raiding myself for existing in the
Speaker 1: first place, and then be raiding my husband, and then
Speaker 1: scheming about how to jettison the toilet because there was
Speaker 1: no way I was going to haul that thing for
Speaker 1: the next two weeks. I was here because I needed
Speaker 1: to jettison so many things. A year's worth of fear, dismay,
Speaker 1: and loneliness, some bad habits acquired to stave off those feelings,
Speaker 1: a peevish and lingering sense of abandonment, my stubborn attachment
Speaker 1: to a man who clearly was no longer in my boat.
Speaker 1: A year and a half earlier, i'd a life that
Speaker 1: seemed worth keeping afloat. I was a science journalist with
Speaker 1: two trusting and kind hearted teenagers and a husband who
Speaker 1: ran a venerable and useful nonprofit. We had moved a
Speaker 1: few years before from Colorado, and I missed our former
Speaker 1: life out west, but we had a comfortable house near
Speaker 1: the Potomac River and a goofy mutt to walk the
Speaker 1: towpath with. I thought our long marriage was fundamentally sound
Speaker 1: and totally salvageable. We'd seen each other through academic degrees
Speaker 1: and professional milestones, We'd had decades of fun living in
Speaker 1: beautiful places, and we'd produced these amazing little people who
Speaker 1: depended on us for love and hope and stability in
Speaker 1: a world that seemed to be growing only more confusing
Speaker 1: and unjust. Our friends marriages weren't perfect, either, but they
Speaker 1: worked things out. As far as I could tell, nobody
Speaker 1: here was miserable or violent, or crazy or impossibly annoying.
Speaker 1: Having never been heartbroken before, I tended to dismiss portrayals
Speaker 1: of it in popular culture or literature, or even by
Speaker 1: my friends. I'm sorry to say as overwrought, but one
Speaker 1: of the first stages of heartbreak, I soon learned, is
Speaker 1: feeling stunned, even if you shouldn't have been. I'd been
Speaker 1: used to feeling in control, but you can't game heartbreak.
Speaker 1: It overtakes you. When my husband decided to live on
Speaker 1: his own after three decades of togetherness, the cliches of
Speaker 1: heartbreak felt not like melodrama at all. I felt like
Speaker 1: I'd been axed in the heart, like I was missing
Speaker 1: a limb set adrift in an ocean, loosed in a
Speaker 1: terrifying wood. I felt imperiled. Our dad had dissolved into vapor,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't grasp what remained. I plodded through my days,
Speaker 1: cooking for our son and daughter, walking the dog, and
Speaker 1: making most but not all, of my deadlines. I would
Speaker 1: have moments of collapse, and then I'd get back up,
Speaker 1: feeling vague and dance at the same time. We spent
Speaker 1: another six months, still living together and drafting, painfully drafting
Speaker 1: a detailed parenting plan. By the time he took his
Speaker 1: small blue suitcase and rolled it out of the kitchen
Speaker 1: door forever. I'd already lost twenty pounds I didn't want
Speaker 1: to lose. I couldn't imagine a life without him, or
Speaker 1: ever trusting men again, or being able to love or
Speaker 1: be loved. Having just turned fifty, it all seemed even
Speaker 1: more impossible. I was completely existentially freaked. This is heartbreak.
Speaker 1: Now I would be facing an uncertain future without the
Speaker 1: partner i'd had since I was eighteen years old. I'd
Speaker 1: have to figure out somehow who I was without him.
Speaker 1: There was no blueprint. None of my close friends was divorced.
Speaker 1: I felt, in so many ways alone. This also is
Speaker 1: hard break. Physically, I felt like my body had been
Speaker 1: plugged into a faulty electrical socket. In addition to the
Speaker 1: weight loss, I'd stopped sleeping, I was getting sick, my
Speaker 1: pancreas wasn't working right. It was hard to think straight.
Speaker 1: This too is heartbreak, and it's what finally propelled me
Speaker 1: to seek some answers. Not only did I want to
Speaker 1: figure out what was happening to my body, I needed
Speaker 1: to roll myself upright and get better. I tried to
Speaker 1: find refuge everywhere I could, and that meant sometimes in
Speaker 1: the rational arms of fields like neurogenomics and the psychology
Speaker 1: of social rejection that sounds like middle school snubs but
Speaker 1: actually describes a vast ocean of pain stretches from the
Speaker 1: playground to broken marriages like my own. You know, we
Speaker 1: are a not only a pair bonding animal, but we
Speaker 1: are a group animal. I mean, for millions of years,
Speaker 1: you know, alone individual was a dead individual. What I
Speaker 1: learned talking to scientists, reading their papers, visiting their labs
Speaker 1: was fascinating but unnerving. Despite having lost my mother to
Speaker 1: cancer when I was in my twenties, I'd never experienced
Speaker 1: the disorienting, sorrow, shame, and peril of losing my life partner.
Speaker 1: Romantic heartbreak can cause complex emotional trauma, as with lass
Speaker 1: associated with the death of a partner. It can dismantle
Speaker 1: your identity, But the grief of this type of heartbreak
Speaker 1: is compounded by rejection, which I came to learn we
Speaker 1: humans feel as a deeply evolved threat to our survival.
Speaker 1: Breakups are common, and heartbreak is nearly universal, and yet
Speaker 1: it wallops us. About thirty nine percent of all first
Speaker 1: marriages in the US, end and divorce psychologists rank this
Speaker 1: event or what one eighteen fifty two medical text book
Speaker 1: called the slow tortures of connubial disturbance as one of
Speaker 1: the top stressful and sequential life experiences we have, just
Speaker 1: below the death of a loved one. For as long
Speaker 1: as there has been literature, writers have rendered heartbreak, connubial
Speaker 1: or otherwise, as akin to physical pain, and specifically to
Speaker 1: a kind of pain bound to the expectation of more pain.
Speaker 1: Could tell Us used the word excrucior the particular and
Speaker 1: agonizing feeling of being nailed up by your palms exposed.
Speaker 1: Susan Sontag dumped by feckless Jasper John's when he left
Speaker 1: a New Year's Eve party with another woman, was similarly graphic.
Speaker 1: It hurts to love, she wrote, It's like giving yourself
Speaker 1: to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the
Speaker 1: other person may just walk off with your skin. And
Speaker 1: here's poet Anne Carson, whose lover of five years told
Speaker 1: her he no longer felt what he called spin woman
Speaker 1: caught in a cage of thorns, unable to stand upright.
Speaker 1: There was plenty of heartbreak art, so much art, But
Speaker 1: I wanted science. If this was such a common and
Speaker 1: devastating experience. Why wasn't there a validated protocol for recovery
Speaker 1: beyond weep dancing while belting out Gloria Gainer. Where was
Speaker 1: the research and what did it say? You'd think after
Speaker 1: a million years of hominin sighing at the moon over
Speaker 1: lost love, we would have figured this out by now.
Speaker 1: Why did nature design us to be so deeply, even
Speaker 1: operatically sad? Why was heartbreak so hard to get over?
Speaker 1: If I learned the answers, maybe I could speed it
Speaker 1: up and feel better. Much has been written about the
Speaker 1: science of falling in love, but very little about what
Speaker 1: happens on the other side. Only in recent years has
Speaker 1: science begun to excavate some of the literal biological pathways
Speaker 1: of this brand of pain. If you place someone who
Speaker 1: has recently suffered heartbreak in a scanner, parts of the
Speaker 1: brain light up that are very closely related to the
Speaker 1: parts that fire after receiving a burn or an electrical show.
Speaker 1: And if some study subjects are unfortunate enough to receive
Speaker 1: an electrical shock after heartbreak, the pain will hurt more. If, however,
Speaker 1: you shock someone who remains in a loving relationship and
Speaker 1: they hold their loved one's hand or gaze at a
Speaker 1: picture of their devoted squeeze, the pain will hurt much less.
Speaker 1: Even more remarkable is the understanding that heartbreak reaches far
Speaker 1: beyond emotional anguish to influence physical health. People who have
Speaker 1: suffered lost love face an elevated risk of serious medical woes.
Speaker 1: It's not just their metaphorically sundered hearts, although cardiac risk
Speaker 1: is part of it. Their cells look different, their immune
Speaker 1: systems falter, even their language skills drop off. Why would
Speaker 1: evolution equip us with an operating system so easily weakened
Speaker 1: by an event as common as the denial of love?
Speaker 1: One genomics researcher when so far as to say heartbreak
Speaker 1: is one of the hidden landmines of human existence. The
Speaker 1: language heartbreak may sometimes sound mundane, but the havoc and
Speaker 1: inflicts on our brains and bodies is trenchant, profound, and
Speaker 1: until recently understudied. Among the documented downstream effects of rejection, grief,
Speaker 1: and loneliness are fragmented sleep and fatigue, increased anxiety, poor
Speaker 1: impulse control, depression, cognitive decline, altered gene expression, and early death.
Speaker 1: Why should your immune system care if you've been dumped?
Speaker 1: What skin does a white blood cell have in the
Speaker 1: game of love plenty. It turns out some of our
Speaker 1: cells listen for loneliness. They adjust their work accordingly, sometimes
Speaker 1: with devastating consequences for the rest of your potentially feeble,
Speaker 1: truncated life. I was eager to reverse course. Since my
Speaker 1: cells unfortunately appeared to be listening. New advances in genomics
Speaker 1: experimental psychology promised to show me exactly how they were
Speaker 1: responding and what I might do about it. I set
Speaker 1: out to experiment on myself to see if I could
Speaker 1: understand the way heartbreak changes our neurons, our bodies, and
Speaker 1: our sense of ourselves. I would have my nervous system
Speaker 1: monitored while viewing pictures of my x at different points
Speaker 1: after Splitsville. I would measure my threat mediated biomarkers of inflammation.
Speaker 1: By better understanding the ailment, I would perhaps find some remedy.
Speaker 1: This book traces the general trajectory of heartbreak, from the
Speaker 1: moment of shock to feelings of rejection, to grief and loneliness,
Speaker 1: and finally toward a measure of repair. All paths through
Speaker 1: heartbreak are different. Mine was messy and strange, and often unexpected.
Speaker 1: I came to dismiss some of the conventional approaches to
Speaker 1: recovering from rupture, especially the ideas that you shouldn't form
Speaker 1: other attachments too quickly and that the key to healing
Speaker 1: is the commonly traded bromide of loving yourself first. Both
Speaker 1: of these sortations fell short for me. I had to
Speaker 1: improvise a different course. Ultimately, I would orient toward the
Speaker 1: far shore of heartbreak through bombs, much less obvious, but
Speaker 1: supported by evidence, beauty, agency, and purpose. I would try
Speaker 1: a regiment of solutions and substances, mostly legal, but not entirely.
Speaker 1: I would travel across the US and to England and
Speaker 1: Croatia to meet the researchers, practitioners, and ordinary people who
Speaker 1: were ahead of me and learning how to move on.
Speaker 1: Some of them were dealing with loss and serious emotional trauma.
Speaker 1: I'm not equating my pain with theirs, but I believe
Speaker 1: we can learn from people in extremists about the systems
Speaker 1: governing our emotions and our health, and the lessons and
Speaker 1: potential treatments that apply to all of us. What I
Speaker 1: found was extraordinary, surprising, and immensely helpful, and would change
Speaker 1: the way I think about the world, our health, our relationships,
Speaker 1: and what it means to be human. I would hike
Speaker 1: my heart back to life whenever I got a chance.
Speaker 1: I would try trauma cures, nature cures, psychedelics, and a
Speaker 1: makeshift clinic. Companionship of many flavors. If you don't know,
Speaker 1: knots make lots. Before long, I'd end up here. Okay,
Speaker 1: night one river mile one nineteen, silt working its way
Speaker 1: under every fingernail. I knew what wreckage lay upstream. Everything
Speaker 1: else was a question mark. It was clear there would
Speaker 1: be no fast heartbreak ac Also, I hated scorpions, but
Speaker 1: at least I knew what I needed for now. It
Speaker 1: was to lighten my load. Thanks for listening. If you
Speaker 1: want to hear more, you can order the Heartbreak audiobook
Speaker 1: directly at Pushkin dot fm, slash Heartbreak, or at audible