A PhD can be a time of immense emotional as well as intellectual change. Following last week’s post about falling in love, resident blogger Ebba writes this week about being heartbroken as a PhD student.

Heartbreak is its own kind of pain, and it needs its own kind of management. It’s unlike grief because it usually passes, but it resembles grief because one has to leave a part of oneself behind and grow into something new as a result of it. Falling in love is to become nearly as invested in another person as in life itself, and in that person’s absence, we are forced to reckon with the loss of a part of our reality that we learnt to think of as vital.

‘[O]nce an attachment bond is formed, either mutually or not, any rupture or threat of a rupture causes an intense grief reaction that runs through the gamut of the mourning process, which cannot be rushed.’¹

When I was heartbroken several years ago, I tried to read A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I was desperate for some theoretical perspective on what I was going through. As usual during that time, I wasn’t able to focus on what I was doing. I read the same sentence over and over, wondering how to translate the signs I saw on the page into words in my head. The research I did at that time showed signs of the same problem: I tried to piece sentences together with words I knew that I knew, but I was unable to draw strong enough parallels between these words to make them come together. I stopped trusting the coherence of language, just as I had ceased trusting the connection between what people said and what they did; I connected anything I wrote with semicolons; I relied on this punctuation to suggest connection between random ideas.

The heartbreak process is one that must move at its own speed. This can be hard to accept, because romantic heartbreak (understandably) doesn’t have the self-evident importance of bereavement, and so it’s difficult to know what to say to oneself and others about one’s state of mind. In many ways, it’s a time of intense and painful growth that leaves many of us with a better understanding of consequences, fortified personal boundaries, and increased self-awareness – especially if it’s one’s first heartbreak. This growth process can get intense when spending hours alone in front of the computer, and perhaps it is only years later that one can begin to understand what the heartache meant and why it was necessary. Just as it sometimes takes time to understand complex ideas and how they relate to our research, we need to give ourselves time to understand the implications of the things that happen to us in our private lives.

I’m writing this because in my experience, researchers sometimes struggle to let natural emotional processes into their lives. Everything is about reason, evidence, logic. Heartache, however, has no logic. It can’t be evidenced, defended, or refuted. It can hardly even be managed, just accepted, and if we don’t understand the need to feel our full range of emotions, we may never reach the state of maturity and integrity that, in my experience, often follows heartbreak. Some grow out of a relationship that was beautiful and worthwhile. Others manage to break free from a situation in which they were never fully at home. Yet others are left behind without a word of warning. Regardless, the ache of disconnect desires to be felt, and if it’s allowed to exist as a part of us, it will fade eventually. If it’s resisted or ignored, it can end up dominating us and the PhD projects that we’ve also given our hearts and minds to – projects that will still be there for us when we come out on the other side.

We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.²

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1. Kalpana Khatwani, ‘Theories of love and loss: A new conception of mourning’ (The Wright Institute, PhD thesis, 2003), ii ↩︎
2. Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). ↩︎