April 19, 2024. A Cosmopolitan UK Editor alerted me to Taylor Swift’s new album and one of the songs about heartbreak, So Long London. A line in the song is,
"I stopped CPR, after all it's no use
The spirit was gone, we would never come to.”
Indeed, the end of the relationship was like someone dying; it radically changed her life; like doing CPR, she had worked hard and desperately and every minute to save it, as nature has programmed us to do; we need to work at relationships; but as the brain imaging studies showed, while grieving during heartbreak, cognitive areas are also weighing the usefulness of the relationship vs. the problems, the pros and cons. Taylor shows us how to recover from heartbreak in this song by looking at the pros and cons.
Why do we love heartbreak songs? They tell us we are not alone. Someone else is feeling the pain with us. When it is someone as well-known as Taylor Swift, it is especially comforting. It is a reminder that heartbreak is part of the human condition. The songs, strangely, help us to recover from heartbreak.
Losing a relationship with a person changes us
When we have a relationship with someone, it is self-expanding at first. There is a new "us." And, we incorporate the other person into our sense of self. Thus, we lose a part of ourselves when we lose a romantic partner.
Seeing the relationship as a separate entity helps recovery
I think the fact that Taylor Swift sees the relationship as something separate from herself is important to her recovery. She is not losing herself, but the relationship. She has some perspective. The relationship is a third entity, separate from herself and himself. Although she talks about two graves—yes, in a sense they have both lost a bit of themselves-- she realizes that they will both find someone else. She ultimately is able to see the relationship as something separate.
She’s angry, too. That helps.
***She sees what was wrong with the relationship as well as what was good about it
Importantly, the pros and cons are on her mind. She goes back and forth from what was good and bad about the relationship “…I loved this place….A moment of warm sun….[But, then]… You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for the proof…My spine split from carrying us up the hill.”
In the song, she goes back and forth from sadness to hope: “stitches undone, two graves, one gun…I”ll find someone…you’ll find someone.”
In our brain imaging studies we found evidence of this weighing of pros and cons in people who were outwardly and consciously only grieving. It’s good to know that at non-verbal levels the brain may be working at recovery rather than just grief, and it is a good thing to know this and give those brain areas a little help. Be angry; think about the bad times as well as the good times. Think about the faults of the former partner as well as the good points.
Want to read more about heartbreak? Try this.
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