It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History

by Jennifer Wright

Evolutionary biologists found that people experiencing heartbreak have brain scans that mirror those of cocaine addicts in withdrawal.

The Lion in Winter (1968) where a group of men are waiting to be killed. One says that he is determined to die nobly, and a second replies, “You chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.” The first responds, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

History isn’t the present, but it’s not that different and certainly not any better. The disappointments surrounding love today were experienced just as much, and often with more terrifying consequences, by humans in the past. In any era, love and heartbreak preoccupy everyone who is not a saint or a psychopath. Love and its aftereffects are the main preoccupation of good people, bad people, most all people.

Heartbreak is almost never the defining moment of one’s life. Almost no one is remembered simply for their outlandish breakup behavior

As great as happiness is, knowing loss often helps us connect with and comfort others.

There are times when we feel we are trapped in a relationship with someone who is clearly terrible for us. But we can leave! We are all blessed with the ability to walk out of bad relationships. We are not Sporus. Thank God, we’re not Sporus. And no matter how badly you might have behaved, you’re certainly not Nero.

It would be nice if Eleanor of Aquitaine had a fantastic, happy life, instead of a fairy-tale-gone-wrong existence, because she was spectacular.

She completely was.

But Louis was nice. He was a really good guy.

He was the second son and wanted to join the church until his brother died and he had to take the throne.

Sometimes, when people write about the past they are in actuality projecting their personal experiences and views of the world to those times. We are doing that here, obviously. A lot. Perhaps so did Thomas Hearne and other Victorians who assumed Rosamund must have been a girlish, wilting flower of a woman, since those were virtues that men seemed to cherish during their own time. This notion that Rosamund was sweet and timid and Eleanor was domineering and unlovable comes up a lot in Victorian English writings. But look, that’s not necessarily the way it was. First of all, the assumption that being strong and passionate and accomplished will make you an unlovable woman simply isn’t true. Most men are not sitting around saying, “My main turn-on is definitely incompetence.” Eleanor was loved, and downright worshipped, by a lot of men.

by the late 1160s she was staying in Poitiers away from Henry and his love bower most of the time. There, at her “court of love,” she engaged in theoretical debates. One focused on whether love could flourish within a marriage. It was decided that it could not.

It was said though, that Eleanor did love King Henry very much until this affair. She tolerated the others because he returned to her until Rosamunde.

In her rebellion, Henry saw exactly who Eleanor was—not just a wife who could offer him territory and politically savvy counsel and good child care, but a formidable adversary against a man who was one of the greatest leaders of the century. It was as though, after many years of trying to be a good wife, Eleanor finally reverted to being her true self. He must have thought that was pretty cool. Sometimes, we allow our partners to see us clearly only after we’re no longer with them. Given the constraints of a relationship—the desire to appear nice or sexy or cool or organized or intellectual or whatever we think the other party views a good partner as—we don’t show them how bold and fearless and powerful and strange we can be.

Every account of the English king Henry VIII’s life should start with the same basic question. How hot was Henry VIII?

because every single picture of women from this period looks the same. Seemingly every woman had a tiny mouth, no eyelashes, and a receding hairline. (That hairline wasn’t necessarily due to hair loss, because women plucked back their hairlines and eyelashes. Beauty rituals of the sixteenth century are another story for another excellent book.) To visualize the people in this story properly, you could try playing a game where you imagine them as the actors in The Tudors, but that’s not a good plan because on The Tudors even the allegedly deformed people look the way you or I would appear on the best day of our lives with a team of hair and makeup professionals standing by. So it’s best if you cast everyone in the story of Henry VIII as someone you know. Just make Catherine someone unattractive whom you don’t like very much. That is exactly what Catherine of Aragon looked like. You are very good at imagining historical characters.

😂😂😂

Perhaps Anne was just politely rejecting Henry’s advances because she was genuinely uninterested. Some scholars have argued that Anne was really a victim of Henry’s sexual harassment, and that she truly wasn’t into him.

This is a really interesting idea. We have always acceptied one version of history, the Tudor version.

The couple hoped more children would follow. They did not. Instead, there were three miscarriages.

One of which was the son she carried, and lost when she found him with Jane Seymour, I seem to remember.

While Catherine’s motto had been HUMBLE AND LOYAL, Anne’s was THE MOST HAPPY.

she adopted the motto NO OTHER WISH BUT HIS.

Catherine was incapable of hiding any emotion she ever had. Anne of Cleves once noted that “she was too much a child to deny herself any sweet thing she wanted.” Which is fine, but do not put anything in writing. The fact that she was composing love letters at all, while married to a man who had famously killed her cousin for being an adulterous witch, strikes me as a kind of stupidity akin to women in horror movies walking into abandoned factories all by themselves.

Concerns were fundamentally different than they are today. No one said their main life goal was “to be happy” or find “work-life balance.” Instead, simply surviving was a very real, daily concern for many people. Then there were the questions of how to live honorably and how to get into heaven when you died. Anne died in a way that was absolutely in keeping with the values of her time. Her concern on the scaffold was not sharing her feelings; it was being remembered in an honorable light and preserving the monarchy in the country. And I admire those values. Even today we can understand that avoiding talking terribly about a not-so-great ex is taking a higher road than shouting insults about how you wish you’d never met that person. And when an ex was obviously terrible, as everyone knew Henry was, it just makes you look really composed and forgiving and great. But we may relate more to Catherine. We live in a time that admires being truthful and sharing your feelings. There’s a premium placed on emotional honesty—think about all the people you have heard derided for being “fake.” The premium we place on being “real” may be a youthful luxury that we indulge in before we start thinking about our legacies. The fact that Catherine possibly went to her death ranting reminds us of her youth.

Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian States,

Pacts with the devil have been made many times. There is no other way to explain the popularity of the book Fifty Shades of Grey.)

The book details Timothy’s life in his own somewhat incoherent way. It was written entirely without punctuation. When it was pointed out that the greatest philosopher in the Western world would probably use at least some punctuation (since it was, thank God, no longer the sixteenth century), in the second edition (there were ultimately eight printings) Dexter added a page of punctuation at the end, so readers could insert the marks wherever they liked or, as he claimed, “I put in A Nuf here and they may pepper and salt it as they plese.”

OMG. Why do I want to read this?

caning her in public and declaring her a ghost. And yet—and this is something many of us feel during breakups—even though Timothy had told everyone that Elizabeth had literally ceased to exist, he still wanted her love and approval when she was at his fake funeral. Even though she knew it was fake! He wanted her to be in tears at even the thought of him being dead. No matter what, he expected her to go on loving him. Or at least loving him enough to outweep anyone else at that fake funeral.

Soon after Caroline decided Byron was her fate, they began an affair. He wrote, “I have always thought you the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” No, you didn’t, you thought she was too thin, but that’s a good line.

Oscar Wilde writes in The Picture of Dorian Gray that “the tears of those we no longer love always seem faintly ridiculous,” and maybe they do. But if painful breakups are good for anything, it is because they remind us to try to be decent and extremely sensitive when we’re on the other side of things.

I’m not saying that people who’ve never had their hearts broken tend to be shittier people on the whole, but I’m implying it, strongly.

The writer Henry Miller would claim, one hundred years after these events, that “the best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature.”

Euphemia Gray (thank goodness she shortened her name to Effie, which we shall choose to use; I already misspelled Euphemia twice in typing it here)

I rather like the name.

here is my favorite Oscar Wilde quote: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

He had one of those droopy, bored faces that make Englishmen look as if they’re having a stroke or are a member of the monarchy.

I am the love that dare not speak its name.”

He has also ruined my life, so I can’t help loving him—it is the only thing to do.

Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, not only was a genuine literary genius but had the added distinction of not being a whiny brat. He was a brave champion against humorlessness, bullies, ugliness, and bad wallpaper. All the important stuff. But then, Wilde had a remarkable ability to see the world as he wanted it to be, filled with beautiful, imaginative, funny, loving people. I think that is the way everyone reading this book would like to see the world. And I am sorry that he was disappointed.

“To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.”

That saying “Keeping up with the Joneses”? That referred to Wharton’s family.

The length of time two people are together isn’t the way to gauge the pain of the ending. Feelings don’t work that way.

Edith moved on in the way many of us do, writing him: What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the inmost & uttermost that a woman—a woman like me—can give, for an hour, now and then, when it suits you; & when the hour is over, to leave me out of your mind & out of your life as a man leaves the companion who has afforded him a transient distraction. I think I am worth more than that, or worth, perhaps I had better say, something quite different. Yes, Edith. You did deserve more. Yes to all of this.

But I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”

So even if the average person can’t sympathize with Edith Wharton’s rarefied world, her novels endure because she was able to sympathize with us.

clearly did not live in Vienna in 1915. Turn-of-the century Viennese were the most dramatic generation.

Alma had, by all accounts, an absolutely spectacular time. She was truly the bride of the wind, and I don’t think she ever really wanted to marry anyone, and likely wouldn’t have if the convention hadn’t demanded it. If you feel sympathy for Oskar, it’s easy to write off Alma as a heartbreaker, but she was self-assured and honest about the fact that she didn’t want to be married to him. Not everyone needs to get married. Some people just sleep with tons of cool people and have interesting lives.

Certainly, there was always a corner of Oskar’s heart that belonged to Alma and remembered that great wild passion. But that’s not the kind of relationship that typically has staying power. Oskar needed someone to go to the movies with, and grow old with, and to make him chocolate desserts.

In actuality it was probably a sign that he thought he was a magical person who did not have to abide by any of the laws of human society. He’s like an Ayn Rand character come to life.

People have read that passage and have thought that on some level Norman Mailer was perhaps joking, in the same way that they might believe Allen Ginsberg joined NAMBLA because he felt every organization needed a voice. It seems more likely, however, that when someone sincerely tells you they believe in something, they actually mean it. We just excuse some people or think they’re making some sort of a grander point because we don’t want to believe them. We want to like them so we don’t have to stop enjoying the works they produce. Which is, incidentally, unnecessary. Someone can be a terrible person and still produce great works of art that can be enjoyed by many people. Norman Mailer was the worst person, but that doesn’t mean many of his books aren’t wonderfully written.

I have struggled with this, personally.

“Nearly everyone in the know, women included, immediately focused on Norman’s fate rather than Adele’s. He was One of Us—an intellectual, not a criminal—and after all, he was three sheets to the wind.”

The critic Irving Howe wrote, “Among uptown intellectuals there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Some people do not have a clear understanding of the definition of a victim. However, Norman did admit, “If any of us does something like that, people just don’t look at them in quite the same way. I think ten years went by before people forgot about it.” Ten whole years. Gosh.

Male writers, especially male writers during the 1960s, somehow tricked people into thinking that they were demigods because they had an understanding of language. Because they had a grasp on words, which (and I am stealing this from playwright Alan Bennett) they always pronounced in a way that sounded peculiarly Welsh. Language and words are important, and so are syllables and even punctuation (as we learned from Timothy Dexter). But being a very good writer is not going to cure Alzheimer’s. If someone were going to cure Alzheimer’s, maybe I could excuse them stabbing someone in the heart, but I just can’t do it for the sake of some well-written stories.

This is a bad breakup because society decided it was, more or less, essentially cool with something that was not at all acceptable. We are supposed to be better than this. We do not live in the sixteenth century. We should not accept violent behavior toward women from people even if they seem charismatic and interesting.

Here is the point of this story: being unapologetic is not necessarily a good thing. Remember “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”? Being a decent person means when you mess up, you say you are sorry and mean it. I think—and this is a sense I get from personal interactions—that women ought to apologize for their behavior in relationships a lot less and men should apologize a lot more.

This is not just a breakup between Norman and Adele. It is a breakup between anyone who has respect for a standard of decency (you and me, for instance) and the great men and women of letters who condone Norman Mailer and his behavior. I’m resentful. Adele was bitter, too, claiming, “The poorer I get, and he prospers, it just sharpens my anger. The contrast is enormously painful.” Which is how Norman dismissed Adele later, when she told her side of the story, as though she were a completely unreasonable harridan, who just wouldn’t be happy for him. Well, she and all of us can be bitter together.