coping with a breakup: why some breakups hurt…and others don’t
We’ve made it to the third installment in my four-part series in the month of February, all about different kinds of love. We started out with my treatise about being worthy of love with the film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, then last week I wrote about what it takes for a long-term relationship to go the distance in my commentary about The Lovebirds. Next week I’ll be sharing my thoughts about Life Partners and the ways that friendships change over time as we go through life’s many chapters.
breakups, heartbreak, & one unforgettable day
Today I’m talking about the film Someone Great directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, all about friendship, heartbreak, and coping with a breakup. It’s a day-in-the-life / one-day escapade film centering around three friends: Jenny, Blair, and Erin. They’re on a hunt for tickets to the sold-out music festival, Neon Classic, and must overcome many an obstacle to make it happen.
The friends have been thrown into their day of adventure because Jenny has just been dumped by her long-time boyfriend, Nate, and is kind of losing her shit, so Blair and Erin come to her rescue. In the tradition of the very best day-in-the-life films, each of the three is on her own journey for the day. Jenny is a heartbroken mess. Blair juggles ambivalence about the perfect life she envisioned for herself that she’s not enjoying as much as she’d like. And Erin spends the day trying to convince herself she’s not in love with the woman she’s been dating for the past couple of months. Spoilers up ahead!
why some breakups hurt more than others
What I love about this movie is that it’s a bit of a breakup primer. There are actually two significant relationship endings: Jenny and Nate and Blair and Will. Both are long-term, “serious” (whatever that means) relationships. But the impact of these two endings could not be more different.
jenny’s broken heart
Erin, Jenny, & Blair: three friends, two breakups
Jenny is pretty well wrecked by Nate breaking things off. She’s drunk and stoned literally the entire day, walking down the street in Manhattan chugging a bottle of tequila. She’s wearing an outfit that’s…weird. I mean I’d wear it (well, not the “Latina AF” shirt since I’m white AF), but not because I was like, doing well. At one point Jenny runs into Nate’s cousin, Hannah, who works at Vogue. Hannah delivers a pretty great back-handed compliment about the ensemble describing it as “so 90s” and wants to feature it in a piece about “people who don’t care what they look like.”
Every song Jenny hears, familiar landmarks she walks past, the “holy grail of joints” she’s gifted from her dealer: it’s all fodder for a trip down memory lane and a montage of scenes taking us through the story of her and Nate’s relationship. We see their ups and downs, their first I-love-yous, their fights leading to their breakup, the whole dang narrative. She’s haunted by it. It’s one of those very relatable days where the awareness of what she lost is a mere breath away at any given moment. Coping with a breakup can be a beast.
blair’s sense of relief
Will & Blair, the loving exes
Blair, on the other hand, has the chillest breakup in the history of time. In an early scene, it’s clear she’s over her boyfriend Will and finds him irritating to the point of disgust. But she’s still trying to put on the performance of a lifetime to convince herself she’s still into it. Blair’s one of those people who has a five and ten year plan for her life. She put the time into this relationship, so she wants to stick with it because that’s the plan. Will seems blissfully unaware of his girlfriend’s growing distance, but Blair hits a breaking point when she comes home to find him cleaning her apartment in the middle of the day (they don’t live together). “I don’t know if I’m happy anymore,” she tells him. Come to find out, Blair isn’t the only person performing. Will responds “Oh my God! Wow, that is so good to hear….I haven’t been happy for such a long time….Honestly I almost cheated on you last week.”
They are so completely over by the time this conversation happens that Blair is kind of delighted to hear about him almost sleeping with someone else. She actually responds “Great!” She herself hooked up with a friend from college just a couple of hours before this conversation. And she’ll pursue the same hookup later in the evening, this time feeling guilt-free and like a weight has been lifted. “We were just together for so long, I thought this was going to be a bigger deal,” Blair says, and Will agrees.
the emotional impact of a breakup
One breakup is devastating, to both parties. (We catch a glimpse of Nate later in the film, and he’s not doing so hot either.) One is a sigh of relief, to both parties. And interestingly enough, in both couples, both people still love each other. Will’s parting words to Blair were that he loves her and probably always will. I love that there are no bad actors (as in humans) in this film. Everyone’s intentions are good, everyone is an ordinary person doing the best they can. Even Blair’s hookup, Matt, initially seems like a tool, but in the end, he’s just an ordinary man who might even be kinda nice.
These two breakups are also an interesting study in that they both needed to happen and we get to see up-close why some breakups hurt more than others. We’re pretty clear on the fact that Blair and Will’s story has played out. But for most of the movie, we’re looking at Jenny’s relationship through rejected, mournful eyes, so it takes some time to see that it, too, had run its course. Jenny was recently offered her dream job at Rolling Stone, which is prompting her to leave NYC in just a short couple of weeks, and in her memories we can see that she and Nate’s arguing escalated with this news. But we also see that they had been growing apart for some time. It just took the move to prompt one of them to take action.
Breakups can really suck, and the grief after a breakup can be rough. It’s one of the biggest reasons that people seek therapy, and for some reason people feel ashamed of needing help in their aftermath. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had who sit with embarrassment and shame in admitting how hard a split was on them. “Everyone experiences breakups, so why am I making such a big deal about it?” That’s the sentiment.
coping with the aftermath of a breakup
You’re making a big deal about it because it’s a big deal. Even Blair and Will’s ending is a big deal. It’s the end of a significant chapter for the two of them, and even good things can be incredibly stressful and difficult.
“You’re making a big deal about it because it’s a big deal.”
In my heart of hearts I always want the couples I see to work things out. I’m very pro-relationship. But my job is to follow the couple where they believe is right, and sometimes breaking up is the path they decide they need to take. It’s hard to watch, and I grieve it with them. But just like Someone Great shows us, they are survivable even when we’re completely heartbroken.
I wonder if the survivability of breakups would feel more believable if our grief felt reasonable, instead of like we’re being dramatic. When we’re in the aftermath – good or bad – it can feel like we will never feel differently. Your breakup matters. I hate that you’re going through this, and I wish I could take away whatever pain or discomfort you’re sitting with. But I’m here to support you through it if that’s something you want.
when a relationship ends
Jenny’s closing insight into her relationship is a bittersweet step toward accepting a breakup, which happened lightning fast. It may accurately portray the day after a relationship ends, but it’s still a movie, after all, so it had to wrap things up nicely. For many of us, it can take a good bit of time to find that place of acceptance, years even. And for others — like Blair — the end has been coming for so long that by the time it’s over, acceptance is immediate, and they’re all set to be open to whatever comes next. Neither option is wrong.
That’s all for today. I hope you’ll join me next week for my fourth and final post about the movie Life Partners. See ya soon.
Thank you for reading! I’m Trina, and I’m a therapist in Texas. I wrote this post myself using my own words and ideas. I used AI to help me optimize titles, headings, keywords, and meta descriptions for SEO purposes. AI also gave me some tips on how to share this post on social media. I will always let you know if/when/how I use AI in my blog posts.
If you’re in Texas and looking for a therapist, give me a shout. I’d love to learn more about you and your story.
