When My Breakup Felt Worse than Death, I Turned to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I n the weeks leading up to my breakup, I slept a meagre three hours a night. There was a thickness in the air that knew the planes of my life were about to shift, and it was keeping me awake. The night it happened, I slept next to my mother. She awoke to my frustrated sobs around four in the morning and placed a warm hand on my cheek. We lay there in silence for about an hour, until I finally fell asleep. The emotions came crashing back when I opened my eyes a couple hours later. I took the day off work, dragged myself home, and turned on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I fell in love five years ago. Having never been in love before, I readily threw myself into this relationship. He and I tumbled head first into things—spendings days at a time at each other’s apartments; sending long, saccharine Facebook messages when one of us left the city for a couple days; and opening up in the wee hours of the morning about our family lives, past relationships, and undisclosed desires. This came to an abrupt halt when we were forced to enter a ten-month period of long distance, just three short months into our romance. It was during this time that I watched Eternal Sunshine on repeat. Michel Gondry’s enigmatic sci-fi romance about a couple, Joel and Clementine, who attempt to erase each other from memory, was so powerful and tender that you could feel their yearning through the screen. For me, it was the filmic embodiment of love. Our love was trapped within FaceTime calls and iMessages, and the tenuous fracture of a three-hour time difference was threatening to run it off course. So my ritual viewings of Eternal Sunshine allowed me to replicate that elusive, exhilarating feeling while I waited for him to move back home. Somehow, five years later and in the throes of a breakup from that same relationship, I was watching it again. It’s very strange that a film could fulfill two opposing needs. I needed Eternal Sunshine to remind me of what love felt like—that feeling that you are two atoms floating in space, compulsively drifting toward one another despite what lies between you. I also needed Eternal Sunshine to allow me to sit in my own unfathomable sadness. Already, taking the day off work felt melodramatic, as did blubbering to my friends. But my emotions were there. I needed the film to tell me that what I was experiencing was real loss. That a facet of my soul had been severed, and that, like any other loss, I would need to grieve it. I would need to grieve him, even though we were texting every day. My friends were seeing him out on the street or at concerts, looking glum and uncomfortable. I could call him at any time and ask him to come over. By all accounts, he was still there, but I needed to grieve. And in order to do that, I needed to forget him.

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E ternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004. It was directed by Gondry and written by Charlie Kaufman, a duo of eccentrics whose whimsical works are often tinged by darkness. It stars Jim Carrey as Joel and Kate Winslet as Clementine—doing an opposites act. Carrey was believed to be too goofy for the role, Winslet too serious. It also features a remarkable cast of supporting actors: Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Tom Wilkinson. The film takes place in a heightened version of our own world—the streets are grey, the cars are dirty, and the living rooms are cluttered. But it’s a world where Joel and Clementine, unable to deal with the pain of their breakup, can actually undergo a memory-removal process in the drab office of a firm called Lacuna Inc. There is a psychological core to romantic grief which stems from the fact that people are unable to forget each other. “I’ve always been interested in how memories can make us feel good or really hurt us,” says Gondry, “even though they don’t really exist.” He discovered that there was truth in the idea that, given the opportunity, a person really would opt to be rid of their painful memories, even if that means forgetting about someone important to them. Memories can be torture. In breakups especially, we obsess over them, lying awake at night inching through every cumulative infraction. Understanding romantic loss as a form of grief comes with an acceptance that this experience can be traumatic and painful. Cataloguing details, obsessing over warnings, and parsing through fraught memories make the process of a breakup an infernal burden on the mind. If I had the opportunity to forget him, would I take it? Experts have long acknowledged psychological parallels in the wake of both death and romantic failure. In the event of a breakup, sufferers have been shown to have trouble remembering things, to experience a loss of purpose, and to find it difficult to focus on daily tasks. They may also feel anger, panic, sadness, emotional numbness, and fear, as well as experience frequent anxiety attacks or loss of appetite and even a loss of immune function. Craig Eric Morris and Chris Reiber call this psychological phenomenon “post-relationship grief.” Which, for the purposes of simplicity, I will be referring to as “romantic grief.” In a study of about 1,700 people ages eighteen to fifty-two, Morris and Reiber found that 96 percent of respondents experienced some degree of emotional trauma during a breakup. A similar study from 2019 found evidence of depression in people who had recently suffered heartbreak—with many displaying a “lack of positive affect” in the days following the event. The authors concluded that “[t]his is consistent with literature regarding grief.” Yet with all this research, romantic loss is not often culturally accepted as a form of grief. By contrast, there are many structures in place—both clinical and social—to accommodate people who have experienced the death of someone close to them. I say “social” because I assume most of us are aware of the many etiquettes involved in supporting a bereaved person. We are expected to reach out frequently, engage in delicate language, and abide by a set of courtesies in order to cushion the blow of the loss. While not everyone will adhere to these norms, it is considered socially unacceptable to transgress them. But in the event of a breakup, the rules are far less rigid and much less followed. This is why the pain experienced during my breakup was understood as a form of “disenfranchised grief,” which is defined as a “grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned.” Traditional grief indeed has severe psychological implications, but the implications associated with disenfranchised grief have an added social element. This means that the person experiencing it may suffer alternative, interpersonal pains. It is important that we understand that “grief can arise in relation to any loss, and any loss can be the result of significant change, whether or not death is involved.” Belief in an omniscience on the part of the deceased is common among those who grieve them. The same happened in the weeks following my grandmother’s death. My aunt told us that on Christmas Day, when she went to the hospital for the last time, my grandmother pulled her caretaker close to her. Rather than saying “Merry Christmas,” as was expected, she whispered, “Send me flowers.” This was a moment of great interest in my family. My grandmother had dementia, which makes this instance easy to dismiss as incoherent. But I believe it provided my aunt some spiritual comfort. We get much clearer warnings with romantic failure. In the weeks leading up to my breakup, I could not wrap my head around the way things had escalated. A month before, we had been in British Columbia, and I was meeting his extended family. We were laughing a lot and cooking meals with his parents. Did I know that, only a few weeks later, we would be crying in his apartment? At what time did I want it to end? Was it at my birthday party three weeks before? Was it when I suggested we open up our relationship, two weeks before? When I got coffee with my friend and she recounted to me the days leading up to her own, very similar, breakup, a week before? Or was it a year earlier, when we decided not to live together anymore? We are given so many warnings, and yet the loss still comes as a shock. In bereavement, we produce hard facts to make sense of the senseless. This is not so different from a breakup. Memories of those final days are as clear as they are disorienting. Given the opportunity, a person would opt to be rid of their painful memories, even if that means forgetting someone important to them. G ondry’s early days in New York were bittersweet. He had moved there from France with his girlfriend, BK, to shoot Eternal Sunshine, shortly after his father had passed away. For Gondry, those days were marked by loss but also hope: “While I was finding various ways to see Joel Barrish’s memories of Clementine evaporate, fade, decay, I was building my own with BK.” Gondry and BK spent a year in New York together. She decorated his apartment with her eclectic sensibilities, and the two carved out a life for themselves, forging moments that would later become too painful for Gondry to recall: “Like this time we went to visit Ellen, the Director of Photography, in the snowy upstate, or when we had this dinner in this sushi place and BK overheard this customer commenting on my accoutrement ‘this guy sure is ready for a storm.’ She couldn’t stop laughing for a while after that.” In Gondry’s mind, both the movie and his relationship with BK were running along smoothly, but this sentiment was held by him alone. As the film entered its editing stages, BK told Gondry she wanted out. She was moving to LA. The breakup was devastating for Gondry. “I am ashamed to say that the pain was greater than the one I had felt for my father,” he remembers. “Sometimes I was crying so hard in the street I had to stop walking because I couldn’t see the pavement anymore.” Here, Gondry is poking at the rather taboo idea that the pain of a breakup can sometimes feel more acute than the pain of losing a loved one. I lost my grandmother on January 3, 2023. Her death, while anticipated for years as her health deteriorated steadily, nevertheless sent shockwaves through my family. Three weeks after that, I was abruptly dumped by someone I had been dating for only a month, and, like Gondry, I am ashamed to say that that pain felt more acute. Of course, my reaction was likely compounded by the death of my grandmother. But when she died, I only cried. When I was dumped, I threw things. I punched the floor. I told my roommate I didn’t know if I could make it through the night. I think that the shock of the dumping had superseded the dull, blunted pain of losing a woman whom I had known and loved my entire life. Grieving my grandmother took preparation; grieving a one-month relationship meant shovelling dirt into an empty grave of unfulfilled experiences. But my grandmother will linger in my head every day for the rest of my life, whereas I recovered from being dumped within a month. Looking back, the pain of losing my five-year relationship is more akin to losing my grandmother, blunt and ongoing—but unlike her death, I expect it will be less impactful over time. After he and BK split up, Gondry ran through a series of futile questions: “Did I neglect her? I don’t know. I think I grew older. I mean physically. BK became more pretty while I grew uglier, or something really pathetic. I was pathetic. I am pathetic.” After my own relationship ended, we circled these same questions. On Boxing Day, we walked around the city, stopping frequently to sit and cry. Sometimes we cried while we were walking, unabashed at confused strangers passing by. That day, he recounted what hindsight had told him—that he never tried to properly understand me. That he took me for granted. That he thought I needed him when, in fact, it was really he who needed me. These were all things I already knew. I was providing a soft, invisible support that kept him running for five years. This is not to say he did not return that support, but that he never felt my half of the weight until it was gone. His acute emotional suffering occurred right at the moment I rubbed his back and said we should no longer be together. Mine began about six months before that. It has been over a year since my breakup, and still, I am crying into my pillow at night. I go through long periods of numbness, but the gloom hangs overhead. I harbour resentment toward friends who opt to spend more time with him than me. I feel suffocated by the city I grew up in, one that he is foreign to. I drink heavily at parties, watching him place his new girlfriend on his lap. In these moments, the numbness fades and in its place comes sorrow, sometimes rage. The disenfranchisement of my grief is such that I can no longer tell anecdotes about him in casual conversation. The grace period for anger has run up, and I can no longer rant about him to my friends or parents. My friends are choosing to spend time with him and to foster their own separate friendships. They are inviting him and his new girlfriend to cottages and showing up to parties together. The window of grief, if there ever was one, has closed, and I am expected to move on, to have found someone else or to be comfortable enough with myself to just not care. My anger and sadness no longer have a place. They have to go. When my grandmother died, I called him to tell him of her passing. We cried into the phone, and the moment was sweet. I half-heartedly invited him to the funeral, but when the day came, I hoped to see him. When it was over, I scanned the crowd and felt a surge of disappointment. He had not come. But was it disappointment? I had just said goodbye to my grandmother for the last time, and simultaneously, I was also saying goodbye to him. There was no real obligation for him to show up to the funeral. Most likely, he felt like he was overstepping. And that was something I had to accept. That day, I experienced a fleeting feeling that, like Joel and Clementine, we would find our way back to each other. If not romantically—I was not ready for that—then spiritually. Like Joel and Clementine, there could be something pulling us together, and the many, many times we had caused each other harm in the past year did not matter. I am now moving to New York, in part because I want to embrace new experiences. Also because I need a fresh start, away from the memories, regrets, and the suffocating, all-consuming agony of my romantic grief. The pain of realizing this may not be us, that the aspirational way in which I viewed Joel and Clementine in the early days of our romance was false, is too much to handle. Perhaps, if it was possible, a spotless mind would be the best answer. Excerpted from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Love, Loss and the Fade to White by Maia Wyman, 2025, published by Ig Publishing.The post When My Breakup Felt Worse than Death, I Turned to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind first appeared on The Walrus.