Why breaking up became such a hard thing to do
For every broken heart, there are thousands of songs, movies and works of literature ready to offer salve. But if Taylor Swift’s discography isn’t helping you move past the grief, there’s always the burgeoning breakup industry. Vancouver has a boot camp dedicated to healing hearts, and Torontonians can employ the services of a local breakup coach. For those looking to exit a relationship who don’t have the nerve do the deed, there is a Toronto-based service called the Breakup Shop that offers a range of services, costing $5 to $80, to say farewell for you.
But sometimes all the how-to YouTube videos, apps and self-books just aren’t enough. When Kelli María Korducki was 28, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend of nearly a decade. On the surface, everything seemed ideal. Awesome guy, lovely life. Family holidays, financial stability (on his side), mutual friends and all the other trimmings that come with a healthy, supportive relationship. She felt lucky to have found such a mensch — and yet, deep down Korducki desired more from life.
Trying to make sense over why she felt so ashamed for her decision to leave, Korducki read the popular advice columns, scoured Reddit threads and clicked on all the links, but could not relate to much of the experiences being shared. Nowhere did she find insight into how to get over the guilt when you break up with a “Good Man.”
And so, being a journalist, Korducki decided to time-travel back to look at the history of romantic partnerships to see she could excavate any knowledge from those who had come before, and settled for less.
Out of personal turmoil came Korducki’s thought-provoking debut book, Hard to Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up, published by Coach House Books, which examines how western traditions around romantic partnerships are interwoven with our economic, social and legal systems.
“I got thinking about what makes people decide to change their circumstances when it comes to intimate relationships,” says Korducki by phone from New York, her current home city. “The main thing that I tried to look at is, culturally and legally, why was that decision so fraught for me, and why is that decision fraught for so many women? I was looking desperately for any kind of evidence that other women were going through what I was.”
Korducki starts her journey with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She first encountered the classic novel as a 19year-old English-lit major around the same time she started dating her ex. While Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have become cultural shorthand for a certain kind of swooning love, the novel also represents the era’s growing tension between societal expectations for women and their desires for a compatible mate.
“I realized it was important to start at the moment where romance entered marriage. It was when the institution became a lot more complicated,” says Korducki. “Until then there was no pretense of romance having anything to do with marriage. It was purely an political economic alliance. Life was really hard, romance was an indulgence and as a frivolity, had no place in something as serious as marriage.”
Hard to Do covers a broad swath of history, including one startling chapter in which Korducki looks at marriage during the American Antebellum era, and how it was employed as an insidious tool to keep Black slaves in line. Covering centuries of patriarchal marriage acts and divorce laws in North America and the U.K., she shows how they kept women at an economic and legal disadvantage. (Case in point: the province of Nova Scotia recently updated its mar- riage law by removing references to “spinsters.”)
“The mark of a women’s adulthood was her resignation to the role of wife, and her future identity as wife and mother to the detriment of her ability to look after and protect herself,” says Korducki, though she doesn’t totally buy into the narrative that women getting into the workforce has “saved womankind.”
Although the book deals predominantly with the union between a man and a woman — “presumed to be the natural norm” and the bedrock of our society — Korducki touches on how gay marriage, polyamorous relationships and other partnerships have presented new opportunities and freedoms to reimagine our romantic lives in healthier, more democratic ways. Korducki, who refers to herself as a serial monogamist, is now happily involved in another serious relationship. She says the fact that they don’t live together and have no immediate plans for a wedding or kids is a decision that even 10 years ago would have seemed unusual.
“I really think that my generation is at a crossroads, where we’re beginning to question these understandings that we thought were so hard-wired about the nature of gender, the nature of partnership, of employment, and all the things feed into each other,” Korducki says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship that determining the kinds of family structures that we create for ourselves and in turn the society we want.”