Valentine’s Day is a divisive occasion. Single folks feel particularly single; couples feel compelled to double down on their coupliness. In an effort to heal this painful schism, we focused our latest mini-essay collection on a common experience: romantic misadventure. Not everyone has the fortune of good love, but everyone knows its opposite. This kind of romantic tragedy has a way of tarnishing completely innocent objects. Songs become trigger anthems; movies or books that once seemed profound now seem corrupt; even a food you once loved can hold that bitter aftertaste.

With all that in mind, on this Hallmark holiday, we asked some of our favorite writers and artists: What has love ruined for you?

Elvia Wilk - Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther

I used to tell people that I broke up with my first college boyfriend because of Goethe, but of course the truth is that he broke up with me, and it wasn’t really because of Goethe. In any case, I still blame The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang’s emo 1774 teen drama, which—spoiler—ends with the suicide of proto-incel Albert because his coveted femme, the adorably manipulative domestic goddess Charlotte, marries someone else. I read the novel in first-year seminar, after which I told my boyfriend in the throes of passion (depression) that I, like Werther, would die for love. He gave me a withering, pitying look that still causes me to shudder with humiliation. I later learned that the book’s publication was followed by a suicide epidemic in Europe where men would dress up in Werther-like little blue tailcoats and jump from cliffs or whatnot. In retrospect I found it curious that I got the gender roles reversed in my own relationship, with me being the one offering to jump off a cliff. But then last month I read Elective Affinities, a more “mature” work by Goethe from 1809, and found it to be a meisterwerk of gay literature, leading me to reassess my earlier Sturm und Drang genderplay as a sophisticated queering of the canon. That said: no one, and I mean no one, should read Werther until they are too old for it to work on them.

Minh Nguyen - Lord of the Rings

When I was 19 I met a man who was the romantic personification of death. I was consumed by his extremes. He towered at six foot five yet moved with a glide so weightless that if he were walking on snow, you’d expect no footprints behind him. His voice was soft and melodic, even when his words were depraved and menacing. No one witnessed our relationship. None of my friends saw him (and over the course of two years, they would not see me either). To this day, there is no trace of him on the internet. Every few years, usually in a bout of sleeplessness, I trawl the search engines to verify that he existed. I can’t.

Together we embraced a kind of nihilism—to be young and dying—that I then thought was valorous and now find disgusting. I had read the line from DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, “talent is more erotic when it’s wasted,” and internalized it humorlessly. We squandered our days in his apartment, sinking into the mattress. He owned three DVDs, which we assigned to our three sole activities. The other two titles are too dark to mention, but one of them was Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which we put on for taking recreational meds.

I remember how the movie begins, must have heard Elrond (or Galadriel?) say “history became legend, legend became myth…” dozens of times. I would doze off around Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party, the sounds of cheering and fireworks seeping into my sleep. My dreams would fill in the scenes, with spectral characters clinking their glasses, kissing, dancing into the sky. I would wake up from the party, in darkness, the TV aglow with the scrolling credits. Eventually, I would really wake up, and leave the purgatory apartment, and after many relapses, never come back. I have no idea what the movie’s about. How does it end? Don’t tell me.

Zito Madu - Midtown Detroit

I owed him one. After all, he suffered in the fallout from my last relationship gone wrong, which had exiled us from our favorite restaurant. But my good friend’s breakup would have much wider application. To avoid his ex, he demanded that we avoid the whole of midtown Detroit.

This was troublesome since it was the main place we hung out. There were practical reasons for his demand—she worked in midtown, frequented the same places we did, and their friend groups were solidly intertwined. Suddenly we had nowhere to go.

As they say, limitations foster creativity. With midtown off-limits, we started venturing out to Ann Arbor, Lansing, Birmingham, and then further out to Chicago and Toronto. We built ourselves new communities in those places, and he rebuilt his confidence, so much so that six months in we could finally return to midtown Detroit—Ground Zero of his suffering.

A few minutes into our return, someone called his name. It was her. Immediately all the progress we’d made was nullified. Of course, afterwards they had to go through the natural rhythm of things: hovering around each other awkwardly, never quite getting back together—a process much more annoying than our exile ever was.

Vijay Khurana - Correspondences

In the early weeks and months, we would write furiously, desperately. Like other lovers, what we wrote was “you have made me aware of the passage of time,” and “here are some reasons why I might deserve you.” Now, we have an electric kettle that glows blue as the water boils. And of course we still discuss things, like light and dust and Buddenbrooks and Amit Chaudhuri and Jeanne Dielman. But we tend to do this in person. Our writing amounts to “do we have cilantro?” and “here is a video of a seal who is up to no good.”

This may seem self-defeating, as though all I’m saying is that having ruins wanting. But doesn’t it? Yesterday, in the shower, I was listening to a podcast about the unhappy correspondence of Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch. Ingeborg writes, “for the first time, I can see how different your situation is from mine, because I have no situation.” My partner was in the bedroom, listening to something else, and her thing bled into mine, unintelligibly and not unpleasantly. I am pretty sure that shower steam is bad for my phone and will shorten its life—but then a phone is not forever, not like a letter.

Molly Young - Stupid Eyes

My (now-ex) boyfriend worked in comedy and was a canny diagnostician of his field. He could explain why certain jokes worked and others didn't; he was quick to locate the word or pause that distinguished an ingenious bit from one that was merely clever.

For this reason I was excited to present him with an observation of my own, which we can refer to as Molly’s Unifying Theory of Her Favorite Comedy Performances (MUTHFCP).

“[Redacted!], I figured it out!” I told him one day. “The thing that makes me laugh hardest is when performers can make their eyes look stupid on command.”

This move I was describing, it was a physical event: the gaze became unfocused and the wattage of the iris dimmed. It was the act of perception rendered as processing error.

“That’s not a thing,” the boyfriend said.

Reader, we broke up. (For other reasons.) It took years before I could encounter Stupid Eyes with the old sense of joy—years in which I had not yet learned, as we all must, that you should never trust a person who tells you that a thing is not a thing!

Lina Mounzer - Holding Hands

At first it was sweet. Wherever we went, he wanted to hold my hand.

He was chivalrous: he would run ahead to open doors for me. He would lift my bike up the stairs at the first sign of struggle.

“You’re so lucky,” my friends would tell me. “My boyfriend won’t do anything for me unless I ask.”

But then, he always wanted to hold my hand. Even when it was so hot out my palms were running with sweat. Even when the sidewalk was too narrow to walk side by side.

He would run ahead and open doors for me even if it meant tripping in the process. He would squeeze himself into corners and angles and sometimes annoy other diners to pull out my chair if we were in a crowded place. He insisted on carrying all my groceries and got exasperated when I protested that, as an adult, I was perfectly capable of carrying them myself.

This wasn’t chivalry; this was its ugly twin, control. I eventually managed to leave him, but the association never left me: to this day, I get claustrophobic if someone insists on holding my hand.

Sasha Frere-Jones - The West Village

Before Deborah Holmes died on January 4, 2021, we had two sons and lived together in four homes, three of which are apartments in Manhattan. When I’m near our first spot, on Sullivan above Houston, I think of Twin Peaks, which started airing while we lived there. We had two distinct friend groups, as you might expect from a dropout lawyer and a dropout dropout. This location never cues a ghost. Our second apartment, at the corner of Grove and Hudson, is kryptonite. We were in love there, two twenty-somethings in a tiny West Village one bedroom. We laid vinyl tiles in a kitchen that always smelled of gas. I got fired from the Dustdevils while sitting in the living room, talking on a landline to the guitarist who had left and was returning to claim her old spot by doing her boyfriend’s wet work. (He was too scared to fire me.) I bought cut-out CDs at a discount shop on West 4th that’s gone, though the Chase Bank next door isn’t. (Deborah loved Cypress Hill and Mad Kap and she put up with my Brutal Truth CDs.) Biking through the West Village, I think of the meals we could barely afford at restaurants that are gone. We inherited a puppy from her family and decided Grove Street was too small. In the summer of 1993, we found a fixture fee loft on Broadway and Walker. Deacon was almost a full-sized poodle when we moved in. The kids live there now, at least sometimes. There are too many facts and failures and resentments in the air to find the space threatening: its reality is vivid. Grove Street was where the promise and youth and unresolved passion found a perch. It represents love and nothing else.

Jasmine Araujo - Painting

I began painting while dating him. I painted for myself at first until friends encouraged me to sell my pieces, and they sold fast. I thought he was the essential portal: an actor endowed with the ability to dance, write, play any instrument, and look into my closet, piecing together outfits for himself I’d never considered. And hadn’t every Woody Allen film taught us to be enchanted by actors who could control the room with their gaze alone, like Nola Rice in Matchpoint? He affirmed something about being Black and avant garde in a world where our imaginations are held hostage by terror and profit.

My painter’s block didn’t come on suddenly after he cheated on me. It unfurled slowly: a disinterest in selling my art, opting for scrolling instead of scavenging for supplies, deleting my Instagram art account. One day, staring into a bloated succulent at my 9-to-5, I realized I hadn't painted in a year. Then two went by, then five. No one told me love has the power to summon gifts and disappear them; I would have opted out.

Don't ask me how I returned to painting after all that time. Certainly it has nothing to do with romance, and everything to do with the price of eggs and credit scores—unless exploring the fecundity of your imagination counts as romance.

Rob Franklin - Polite Conversation

In the aftermath of real love, “get to know you” talk, of the first date variety, is ruined. Actually, polite conversation in general becomes tedious. It has always struck me as a particular cruelty to return—after knowing someone, really knowing them: their mother’s name and the pitch of her voice when angry, how it always turned them into a child; their worst words and the citric tang of their sweat—to the subject of one’s favorite color. But I suppose every great thing begins with hello.

Whitney Mallett - Nick Cave

I have an ex who regretted showing me Nick Cave (the Australian baritone, not the American sculptor). When we were breaking up—a slow untangling—the man I’d been living with confessed, as petty as it sounded, he hated that Cave’s songs had burrowed so deep into me. We couldn’t go back; they were mine now, just as much. I think he hated the idea that I might impress someone like him, late at night under dim lighting, telling them how much I loved the first line of the first song on Cave’s tenth studio album with the Bad Seeds, The Boatman’s Call: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.” It’s allegedly Cave’s PJ Harvey break-up album, and threaded through its baroque grief is a plain-spoken admission of unconditional love. I think it’s an angst you never grow out of, the yearning for testimony that devotion outlasts our fleeting arrangements. This was all a long time ago and still I know that feeling. The song is not ruined for me so much as it ruins me, every time.

Christina Catherine Martinez - My Feet

I’m enrolled in a modern dance class that’s far too advanced for me. I have to dance because I am so horny for this man. I don’t know where he is. Our affair had a clear time frame that we both agreed to observe with stoic dignity. But now he is back in… New York? Brussels? Johannesburg? I don’t know. It is my lot in life to fall in with denizens of the peripatetic creative class. I accept the consequences of this, if not with grace, then with 90 weekly minutes of leaps, contractions and step-ball-changes that alchemize my excess sexual energy into sweat mustaches and various motion injuries.

Sometimes the instructor will single me out among the dozens of hot people who move good in order to point out that my body is in the wrong shape, or that I’m thinking too fast, or more pointedly that “you’re not with us.” I do not cry. I nod my head and twist with more abandon. These ritual humiliations avec chassés, which I prefer to perform barefoot, have recently worn the skin off of my right big toe. It’s better than a sex injury. I’m going back next week for more.

Mina Tavakoli - Balsamic Vinegar

We sat on the dirt together. I could see his face getting piggy in the heat as I rubbed the small of his back. He stared into the distance with that baffled look a baby gets before it cries. There, kneading him, in a neutral, reasoned, cards-on-the-table sort of way, I had felt at peace with the size and depth of my lovelessness. Still, I wasn’t above giving the situation a gravity it didn’t deserve. “I love you,” I announced. He turned to me and lowered his head as I moved to his nape.

“Can you get my shoulder?”

The car was throwing a long skein of cloud into the sky from somewhere deep in its hood. Arizona was already looking like something I’d want to forget, but the soil and the sand were flattering the bit of cherry light visible behind a ridge, swarming the whole thing with the mystic color of sick. We sat there long enough to watch it die to dusk.

The only things we’d had on us were dirty dishes, clothes that reeked, and a jug of vinegar—ancient totems in staggered states of rot. Insultingly symbolic, I remember thinking. I fished the jug from the mess and presented it to him gravely, like some sort of biblical mistress. He shook his head. I brought it near the gulch and took a sip, then offered him one. “No,” went his voice, bodiless beyond the car door. Whether glossing a salad or on a fish or reduced to glaze, gravy, molasses, whatever, I refuse vinegar now with the same faraway flatness. No. Back out there, I retched, instantly and musically, returning it the same way it went in—red, warm, needless—and in league with everything surrounding.

Shiv Kotecha - My Armor

Love ruined my ability to protect myself; all the arguments I once wore like armor, mutilated by love’s process:

— that friendship is more rewarding than love;
— because more enduring, less demanding;
— and less “blind,” therefore more arbitrary and fun;
— and that writing, though incomparably less rewarding than either love or friendship, is a more reliable way to sublimate existence;
— which tells you how much I once prized solitude;
— stewing away alone as a way to be;
— believing contemporary life to be bogus;
— as bogus as traditions are;
— especially the ones associated with romantic love;
— flirting being circuitous, selfish activity;
— once, an ex of mine succeeded at seducing the old-me by calling me a Lacanian, having figured out what I needed to hear, and giving me the first of many reasons I needed to leave him;
— communication being so impossible;
— that I felt contentment;
— better left alone because unlovable, though friendship ruined that argument for me long ago.

“Ruin is Formal… consecutive and slow,” wrote Dickinson. These crumbs mark the beginning of the end of a bad personality. Nothing to see here: happy, horny, and suddenly, totally afraid to die. ♦