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Film
The best method for getting through a breakup is watching Marc Webb’s movie (500) Days of Summer, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets dumped by the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl Zooey Deschanel. For all its faults, this film has a killer rejection scene; it’s so painful, especially for a man, that it should lance the boil of emotional pain all by itself. Gordon-Levitt stars as Tom, who shows up for a party to which he has been diplomatically invited by his now ex-girlfriend Summer. The poor dope is somehow hoping against hope that the old magic will be rekindled. The party is cleverly split on the screen between “Expectations” and “Reality”: on the left we see his fantasy that they will start canoodling, on the right, the horrible reality of her distant, if polite interactions with him. Pure agony. Peter Bradshaw
Music
Once you have graduated from the initial cathartic weeps, you need a song that captures the right degree of unattractive, vaguely childish, just-been-dumped bitterness, without any of the emotional baggage of shared romantic memory. Settled next to Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Huddy, Nessa Barrett’s self-confessed “petty” ode i hope ur miserable until ur dead marks her out as one of 2021’s most exciting new gen Z exports in the pop-punk reboot explosion, revelling in the extreme highs and lows of her teenage perspective. It’s not quite Lemonade levels of sophistication, but it’s an excellent soundtrack to the “throws darts at personalised dartboard” phase of post-breakup grief. Jenessa Williams
Books
George Eliot wouldn’t want you to wallow. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch, a “Study of Provincial Life” tracing the web of connections between the inhabitants of a town in the English Midlands, shows us mistakes in love: idealistic Dorothea and the ambitious doctor Lydgate marrying the wrong people (a dried-up old pedant and a shallow flirt). The novel is wise, witty and fascinated by every element of Victorian society. Eliot has no truck with romantic illusions, championing instead “passions of the mind”: the intellectual and moral curiosity that eventually leads to a deeper understanding of oneself and others. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grownup people”; you could equally say that reading it can help you grow up. Justine Jordan
Quick Guide
Saturday magazine
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This article comes from Saturday, the new print magazine from the Guardian which combines the best features, culture, lifestyle and travel writing in one beautiful package. Available now in the UK and ROI.
Games
Video games are the perfect thing for those unbearable post-breakup weeks, because you are likely to prefer the idea of being a space wizard or grizzled monster-slayer for hundreds of hours to the idea of actually inhabiting your own life. But if you want to play something that will help you feel your feelings rather than distract you from them, go for Firewatch, a game about a heartbroken man who, after his wife develops early onset dementia, retreats to Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming to gaze out at the gorgeous scenery from a fire lookout. It is soothing, sad and gently mysterious. Keza MacDonald
Art
Crying helps, they say, and no artist captured the agony and ecstasy of tears better than Bas Jan Ader. In a great gush recorded in photographs and a film titled I’m Too Sad to Tell You, the conceptual artist is lost in tears, letting them stream out in a voluptuous orgy of pain. We don’t know what has made him cry. It could be a bad breakup. Maybe he peeled an onion. He never said why he was sad – he was too sad to tell us – but melancholy itself is reclaimed by this work of art that finds beauty, truth and reassurance in the universality of sorrow. Go on. Cry. Jonathan Jones
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