| Jennifer Wilson
Staff writer Earlier this summer, I had to report to my friends that the new guy I’d just been telling them about over dinner, so starry-eyed I barely touched my food, had texted me to say he just wanted to be friends. I had anticipated that the usual platitudes would roll in: “you’re too good for him,” “his loss,” “does he have a car we can key?” But one friend surprised me by asking whether I had a “breakup plan.” You mean, other than to wallow and eat carbs? No, I did not. I searched the phrase online, and found something on Etsy that looked like it was modelled on a birthing plan—except, instead of “I may want a walking epidural,” among the options to numb the pain was “start a side hustle.” The breakup plan also advised against “stalking” your ex’s “socials,” so I stopped doing that, and I started to look deeper into this new-to-me world of breaking up better. It was populated by coaches and doulas for the recently dumped, and its landscape was dotted with heartbreak-themed spa vacations (one offered an exfoliating treatment meant to symbolize the “scrubbing away of the past”). I had fallen down a rabbit hole, or should I say a k-hole: I discovered a clinic with locations in the Midwest advertising ketamine-assisted breakup therapy and some other unnerving—literally—interventions to curtail the hurt. I was a bit freaked out. When you’re heartbroken, it feels like you’ll do anything, pay anything, to make it go away or, however improbably, to bring the person back. And now here was this burgeoning industry of pricey get-over-him getaways and move-on medicines. I wanted to find out whether there were any actual remedies in this heartbreak boomtown or if it was all just fool’s gold. For a piece in this week’s issue, I attended a three-day “Healing from Heartbreak” workshop at Kripalu, in the Berkshires. I spent time in London with a psychologist who runs retreats at a “Heartbreak Hotel,” staffed by experts in treating P.T.S.D. I even flew to Berlin for a one-on-one session with the owner of Die Liebeskümmerer, the Heartbreak Agency, an institution that inspired a recent film of the same name featuring a freshly dumped journalist who skeptically attends a heartbreak retreat and comes out a romantic. Would life imitate art? | 
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