THE break-up club
A look inside an annual gathering of freshly broken hearts—and how they start to heal.
Vikki Stark, a Montreal psychotherapist, was about 15 seconds into her opening remarks when two of the people at my table reached for a tissue. Everyone in the room (other than me) had the same terrible thing in common, and the collective trauma was palpable. Stark guided the group of almost 30 women, ranging in age from 27 to 68, through meditation: “Imagine breathing in clean arctic air that’s nourishing every cell in your body, then blowing out all of the toxicity.”
That toxicity can be summed up like this: These women had husbands who told them one day out of the blue that they were leaving, unilaterally announcing that the marriage was over, often shortly after one of them was away for some reason. “He loved me so much, and now I’m kicked to the curb,” says Jessica* from Minnesota, whose husband left one month after their 20-year anniversary.
Divorce is rarely pleasant, but these ladies were struggling with something unique—what Stark has coined “wife abandonment syndrome,” where the decision to end the marriage is sudden and one-sided. Women are left reeling not only because they face an uncertain future but also because they never saw it coming. And how do you move on from such a fundamental challenge to your sense of reality?
Every September, Stark hosts a weekend retreat on the topic in downtown Montreal. Over the course of two days, the participants share their stories and focus on building up their sense of selfworth. “We’re all at different stages of struggling,” Stark said in her opening remarks at the 2018 conference. But there was one clear message: You can flourish even after the ground has swallowed you whole.
On the first morning, the ladies settled in at round tables in a small conference room at Hotel Omni Mont-royal, coffee cups in hand. Many were still wearing wedding rings. Some looked a little shell-shocked, but they were eager to introduce themselves and soon found remarkable similarities in their stories.
When their husbands left, for example, many used the same clichéd phrases: “It’s over,” “I’m done,” “I can’t do this anymore,” “I love you, but
I’m not in love with you.” These pronouncements were typically made at inopportune times—like when one woman was stuffing the turkey for Thanksgiving or when another was getting dressed for work.
There was often cruelty, a sudden coldness and allegations of being a bad or uncaring wife—someone standing between him and his deserved happiness. And the men came up with absurd excuses to explain their sudden detachment: One husband told his wife he couldn’t stand that she rode horses; one guy said it was because she once took her own salsa to a restaurant.
There was almost always adultery involved, though it sometimes took a while for that to come out. One wife hired a private investigator and found that her partner had fathered six children with multiple women while they were married; another noted that a few months after her husband left, his new girlfriend posted something on Facebook about their one-year anniversary.
Tamara* from Virginia asked her husband of 25 years for a final hug as he was walking out the door and he refused. “I realized he felt like he was cheating on his girlfriend,” she says.
Stark’s interest isn’t purely academic. She stumbled across this phenomenon in 2006, when, three days before her first book, My Sister, My Self, was to launch, her own husband announced he was leaving. Stark had believed her marriage was secure and had no inkling he was having an affair. “Some men hit a certain point when they look around and ask if this is all there is,” says Stark. “‘I’ve been a good husband and father, but when do I get to be James Bond?’ ” (I can confirm that one of the guys being discussed that weekend has an Instagram account that shows a sudden and dramatic increase in forearm tattoos, topless selfies in the mirror and hashtags like “#fitover50.”)
Stark has been hosting the Montreal retreat—called the “Jump Up!”—for four years. After the women introduced themselves, the group was broken into two sessions—one for more acute, or recent, trauma and one for those struggling with the longer-term implications of being left. Over the next two days, there was a touch of art therapy, the screening of an inspirational short film and concrete tips under the banners of “Seven steps for moving forward” and “Getting closure conversation.”
The group bonded quickly, crying less and laughing more as the weekend went on. They traded coping mechanisms, from taking magnesium pills to induce calm to reading bestselling self-help author Brené Brown to using a keratin product to combat stressinduced hair loss. But the same heartbreaking question came up over and over: “What did I do wrong to make my husband stop loving me?” (“I know I made mistakes, but not enough to make a man leave his whole family,” said Shauna* from Washington.) Stark urged the women to get past the idea of being discarded: “Believing that it was 50 percent your fault gives you back some of your power, but the way he left isn’t your responsibility.”
That understanding was a steep hill to climb for some. During one exercise, where Stark provided a handout titled “33 Erroneous Beliefs” and asked
the participants to circle statements they believed about themselves, the lady sitting to my left circled “I can’t keep a man happy” and the woman to my right circled “It’s embarrassing to be alone at my age.”
But one person told the group that she started writing down all of the nasty things her husband had said, and then, in a separate column, she wrote down what she knows to be true. “Seeing that difference really helps me,” she explained.
One of the last activities was a “finishline ceremony” for those ready to move on—which involved being pushed across a literal line on the floor. Carolyn*, a woman in her 30s from Ottawa whose husband went to Las Vegas and returned seeking a divorce, appeared to be in a particularly good headspace, moving swiftly to draw boundaries rather than living in a prolonged period of emotional limbo. “Once he told me he was leaving, I just put my projectmanagement hat on, like I would at work, and went through each step of healing,” she said.
Acceptance of a new normal appears to be the key—acceptance that he isn’t coming back, that one person can’t save a marriage and that you might never get the closure or apology you want. The women were also grappling with the realization of a kind of false promise. They had given everything to family life, sometimes suppressing their own needs while working full time, taking care of kids and navigating aging parents, in service to a union that was supposed to last.
But, as Stark emphasized, there simply are no guarantees. You don’t know what life will bring you and there’s no marriage so good that it’s invulnerable to disintegration. “You can’t choose someone who will never leave you because, sometimes, guys are in it until they’re not,” she says. “But that’s no reason not to love.”
As the weekend was winding down, Stark urged the participants to view this change as a new beginning brimming with potential. “I believe that it’s possible to have a happy relationship with a man, even though there are no guarantees. But that’s true no matter who you love.”