I got angry yesterday, which is unlike me, a lady of peace and careful breaths. I felt like that guy who kicked in his telly when the Sex Pistols swore and I may have done similar had this not been a work laptop and had I not been a little bit sleepy after lunch. The thing that got me, the thing that threatened to push me over the edge, was an article about the rise of “get your ex back” coaches.
This is the “breakup rehabilitation industry”, where people charge brokenhearted followers, typically clients who have found them on YouTube after Googling “how to get my ex back”, hundreds of dollars for a single coaching session. In addition to these sessions, for an extra $499 the client can send two further inquiries (at no more than 500 words each), with one coach reporting that business is booming – he’s currently making “multiple six figures”. “My schedule is packed back-to-back all week,” a man called Benny Lichtenwalner told Slate. “Think of the worst breakup you’ve had. Would you try to solve it for the price of a PlayStation? I think if their ex said, ‘Hey, give me a PlayStation and we’ll be back together,’ they’d do it. I can sleep at night just fine. Because I love that I’m helping people.”
It was as I started to morbidly scroll through their videos – videos set typically in these sort of grey voids, transient non-places reminiscent of loneliness itself, or of models designed by architects who went missing mysteriously before the project began – it was as I started to scroll that my anger really kicked in. “Five psychology steps to reattract an ex,” “Seven ways to make your ex think about you 24/7,” the numbers soon made me lightly dissociate and I was back, briefly, in a much younger body vomiting with heartbreak. Like grief, part of us should feel grateful to feel heartbreak so violently, because it is proof of love, but also like grief, perhaps, it’s still surrounded by acres of taboos around what it is acceptable to say or feel and our cruel inability to comprehend an ending.
I flashed to a moment, the end of the 1990s, crying on a low wall, humiliated. I can feel the physical agony of that heartbreak, I can remember the pleading conversations of night-times in the early 2000s, when calls were free after 9pm, and I can remember also one afternoon, terribly hungover with my best friend, watching Gosford Park while we quietly wept. Would I have been drawn in by these videos when I was wading through those horrible months, when I was weak and dehydrated from crying and feeling unloved and ugly? Undoubtedly. Would they have led to my ex and I now being happily married and naming sourdough starters in a bungalow in Watford? Who can say?
Some of the advice sounds all right. Like, OK, after you’ve been dumped, the coaches agree you should cut off all contact with the ex, concentrate on improving your self-esteem and, then, because you haven’t been hassling them for months on text, when the ex is ready to talk, it’s easier for them to return. That’s good advice, it promotes a kind of cool, clear dignity and encourages you to centre your mental health, but what it doesn’t do, crucially, is get your ex back. I would suggest (I say, tempering my anger in a kind and adult fashion) that the way to cure heartbreak is rarely to try to turn back time, but instead, move forward.
These coaches are, of course, an offshoot of the self-help industry, where a huge amount of money is made by people who diagnose and promise to remedy all manner of human inadequacies, from poverty to low sex drive – it’s an industry that is both a feature and a tool of a relentless economy. But its coaches and products meet their customers at their lowest points, when they are desperate for change. And while these business people can perhaps offer rudimentary tools to help us look at a problem from a different angle, when faced with somebody in serious distress, the only responsible advice they could really give would be for their client to talk to a qualified professional. Much like the children who end up blaming themselves for not working hard enough after being brought up on the fiction that they can be whatever they want to be, so do the adults who return to self help. They’re trying to apply an easy fix to a complicated and unique problem, one most likely caused by an inequitable and brutal little world.
The truth is, you can’t force somebody to love you again. And even if it was possible, even if you could learn how to manipulate your ex in such a way that they returned to a broken relationship, that relationship would be built on sand, not to mention upon the memories of gesticulating YouTube mentors still gurning at you from beside your next cookery video. My anger comes from the knowledge of how vulnerable a person is when the heartbreak is fresh, when you would do anything, pay anything to feel safe and loved again, but I understand the self-help impulse here, the desire to feel as though you’re in control. One of the hardest parts of a breakup, in my experience, is coming to terms with the chaos and horrors and unpredictability of love, and then, choosing to start right from the beginning, again and again and again.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
