“You’ll get over it.” “You’ll find someone else.” “Plenty more fish in the sea.”
This is advice frequently given to someone going through a crushing heartbreak. Though well meant, there is something singularly unhelpful—if not outright offensive—about it. Why, exactly, is that? What is it that strikes precisely the wrong chord in this seemingly reasonable invitation to move on—especially since one may well have done that before?
Here is the beginning of an answer. At least for some people, some of the time, loving someone means altering the shape of one’s identity to include the beloved. That is, the beloved becomes part of one’s identity. Among the many ways one thinks of oneself—as someone with a certain profession, a certain taste in music, or in art—there’s also seeing oneself as someone’s partner. (A good question which I will not address here is to what extent this is influenced by gender, culture or religion. Does it happen to women more frequently than to men? Is it more common in certain kinds of culture? I am grateful to Ema Sullivan-Bissett and Ali-Reza Bhojani for helping me identify these questions.)
The identity bond can manifest in a number of ways: not only in thinking of oneself as someone’s partner, but also in new aspects of oneself that have been developed in relation to the beloved. This is put exquisitely eloquently by Laurie Paul: “I had not realized just how many of the properties that I would have used to describe myself—that I would have thought of as essential to me—were, in fact, the result of my relationship”. Once the bond between one’s identity and that of the beloved has been forged, being asked to move on from loving someone is not at all unlike being asked to move home (I am grateful to Giuseppe Iannone for helping me develop this thought)—or, more specifically, from a house where one feels at home. No wonder, then, that, as Lopez-Cantero and Archer have pointed out, heartbreak can be disorienting—and, therefore, frightening.
So, a first reason why the invitation to move on strikes an especially unhappy chord is because this essentially amounts to, all of a sudden, becoming a different person.
But there is more. The link between loving someone and developing a certain identity highlights what I think is a previously underexplored aspect of transformative experiences. These are experiences that change both what we know, in the sense that they teach us something that we couldn’t learn other than by undergoing them, and also the kind of person we think we are. Laurie Paul’s seminal work on this topic has taken off from a paradigm transformative experience: having a first child. The reason why this is paradigmatic is that it is such a novel kind of experience that no amount of testimony (so Paul argues) will enable us to imagine what it’s going to be like, until and unless we undergo it. Also, it will likely reshape our values and priorities in such a way that we will, effectively, be a different kind of person altogether—one whose priorities and values we might currently be unable to relate to.
A large part of the debate on transformative experiences, therefore, has revolved around the challenge arising from new kinds of experiences (say, taking drugs, or getting married, for the first time), and whether or not we can know enough about what they are like other than by having them (through certain exercises of imagination, for example, as Edna Ullman-Margalit and Amy Kind have argued, or through encounters with art), or whether we can make decisions about them while bypassing the need for this knowledge (for instance, by focusing on the kind of person we want to be). But this focus has obscured another side of transformative experiences, which is that of the personal transformation that they involve, and how the latter can impose limits on our knowledge and imagination regardless of whether the transformative experience in question is novel or not. For many people in their adult life, heartbreak won’t be a novel experience. It will have happened at least once, and, crucially, however difficult, it will often have resulted in moving on. So why can it still be so damn difficult to move on again?
As previously suggested, part of the answer has to do with the idea that, when trying to imagine oneself out of love with a person that one is currently deeply in love with, what one is trying to imagine is a different self. Having fallen out of love previously won’t help with this specific imaginative exercise. Another part of the answer, I want to suggest, lies in the effect that personal transformation can have on our knowledge—specifically, on the future possibilities that we can see or imagine.
The problem can take one of the following shapes. On the one hand, one might try to picture oneself having got over the beloved, but might find it difficult to recognize oneself in that person. That is, a version of oneself that has moved on might strike one as theoretically possible, but inauthentic. On the other hand, and worse, having become the sort of person who is now in love with someone, life possibilities that involve being without that person might be invisible.
This has far-reaching implications. Think of people who are stuck in an abusive relationship. This, of course, can be for many reasons, including financial ones. But think of a destructive relationship where one is financially and ethically free to leave, and still can’t bring themselves to do it. I am offering the conjecture that they can’t truly imagine themselves without their partner because their identity has been bound up with them, and this personal transformation imposes limits on their knowledge, making it impossible for them to truly see other options.
I have struck a rather sombre note in suggesting that there are important cases where experience isn’t really a teacher (Randell provides other reasons to think so). The bright side is that we can expect much more transformation in life even from experiences that aren’t, strictly speaking, novel. Just as heartbreak can present challenges no matter how much we may have experienced it before, by the same token falling in love can still be new and exciting even though it might have happened before: it still presents us with the mysterious possibility to become someone new.
Chiara Brozzo
Chiara Brozzo is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. She does research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, empirically-informed philosophy of action, and aesthetics. She is interested in beliefs that are very central to our self-conception, and is exploring how these are acquired and modified through transformative experiences.
