I got angry yesterday, who is unlike me, a lady of peace and careful breathing. I felt like that guy who kicked his TV in when the Sex Pistols were swearing and I might have done something similar if it wasn’t a work laptop and if I wasn’t a little sleepy after lunch. The thing that got me, the thing that threatened to push me over the edge, was an article on the rise of “get your ex back” coaches.
This is the “breakup rehab industry,” where people charge broken-hearted followers, typically clients they found on YouTube after Googling “how to get my ex back,” hundreds of dollars for a single coaching session. In addition to these sessions, for an extra $499, the client can send two further inquiries (at a maximum of 500 words each), with one trainer reporting that business is booming – he’s currently making “multiple six figures”. “My schedule is packed back to back all week,” a man named Benny Lichtenwalner told Slate. “Think about the worst breakup you’ve ever had. Would you try to solve it for the price of a PlayStation? I think if their ex said, ‘Hey, give me a PlayStation and we’ll get back together,’ they would do it. I can sleep well at night. Because I like that I help people.”
That’s when I started morbidly scrolling through their videos – videos that typically take place in these kinds of gray voids, transient non-places reminiscent of solitude itself, or of models designed by architects who mysteriously went missing before the project began – it was as I started to scroll that my anger really kicked in. “Five Psychological Steps to Get an Ex Back,” “Seven Ways to Make Your Ex Think About You 24/7,” the numbers soon dissociated me and I was back, briefly, in a much younger body that vomiting with sadness. Like grief, a part of us should feel grateful to feel grief so violently, because it is a proof of love, but also like grief, perhaps, it is still surrounded by acres of taboos around what is acceptable to say or feel and our cruel inability to comprehend an end.
After a moment, the end of the 1990s, I cried on a low wall, humiliated. I can feel the physical pain of that heartbreak, I can remember the pleading conversations of late nights in the early 2000s when calls were free after 9pm, and I can also remember being terribly hungover with my best friend one afternoon looked at Gosford Park while we cried silently. Would I have been drawn in by these videos when I waded through those terrible months, when I was weak and dehydrated from crying and feeling unloved and ugly? Undoubtedly. Would they have resulted in my ex and I now being happily married and calling sourdough starters in a bungalow in Watford? Who can say?
Some of the advice sounds right. Like, OK, after you get dumped, the coaches agree that you should cut off all contact with the ex, focus on improving your self-esteem and then, because you haven’t texted them in months, when the ex is ready is to speak, it is easier for them to return. It’s good advice, it promotes a kind of cool, clear dignity and encourages you to center your mental health, but what it doesn’t do, crucially, is get your ex back. I would suggest (I say, tempering my anger in a kind and mature way) that the way to heal grief is rarely to try to turn back time, but rather to move forward.
These coaches are, of course, an outgrowth of the self-help industry, where huge sums of money are made by people diagnosing and promising to fix all manner of human inadequacies, from poverty to low sex drive – an industry that is both a feature and an instrument of a ruthless economy. But his coaches and products meet their clients at their lowest points, when they are desperate for change. And while these business people may offer rudimentary tools to help us look at a problem from a different angle, when faced with someone in dire need, the only responsible advice they can really give is that their client with a qualified professional should speak. Much like the children who end up blaming themselves for not working hard enough after being raised with the fiction that they can be whatever they want to be, so do the adults who revert to self-help. They are trying to apply an easy solution to a complicated and unique problem, one most likely caused by an unfair and brutal world.
The truth is, you can’t force someone to love you back. And even if it were possible, even if you could learn how to manipulate your ex into returning to a broken relationship, that relationship would be built on sand, not to mention the memories of gestural YouTube mentors who are still looking at the lightning. you next to your next cooking video. My anger comes from knowing how vulnerable one is when the grief is fresh, when you will do anything, pay anything to feel safe and loved again, but I understand the self-help impulse here, the desire to to feel like you are in control. One of the hardest parts of a breakup, in my experience, is coming to terms with the chaos and horrors and unpredictability of love, and then choosing to start right from the beginning, again and again and again.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
