By Ariel Tozman
Content Warning – This story contains personal experiences of intimate partner violence, harassment, depression and paranoia.
August 2023 is Matigan Crozier’s summer of first dates. After three years of singledom, the third-year biomedical sciences student is ready to leave hook-up culture behind.
Following days of half-involved texting with a cookie-cutter hockey boy from the United States (U.S.) who had slid into her direct messages (DMs), she agrees to a first date at Toronto’s Broadview Hotel.
Seated across from Finn* on the airy, glass-walled rooftop patio, the hot sun dances through Crozier’s fair curls as it sets on Queen Street East. She is so anxious she can’t stomach her food.
After dinner, the pair head to the Queen Street Viaduct—a quirky green bridge overlooking the Don Valley Parkway. As they walk back, the harsh yellow streetlights framing their silhouettes and the sound of cars turning off the highway, he begins to skip. He tells her how nervous he was to meet her and how interesting she seemed online.
That was the moment Crozier became attracted to him—or in hindsight, to his obsession with her.
“Growing up, or when I was a teenager, I definitely had more of an anxious attachment style. To see somebody who was so openly obsessive, it felt like I had met somebody I could have this mutual obsession with,” she says.
“It’s like wearing off the love drug”
What do we remember about our past relationships and what do we choose to forget? A 2018 study from the journal Romantic Dissolution in Early Adulthood refers to “the problem of what to do” with the memories of our previous romantic entanglements as “grave-dressing.” The study explains that people “dress” the graves marked with the names of their exes in a self-affirming narrative, rewriting the “characters, motivations, and events” to move on.
Arela Agako, a Toronto-based psychologist specializing in dialectical behavioural therapy, emotional regulation, trauma therapy and couples therapy, says our attachment styles can determine how we remember our past relationships. The less stable our sense of identity is, the emptier we feel after a relationship ends. To compensate, those with anxious attachment styles are more likely to idealize their exes.
“We can’t tolerate feeling empty. This feels like our whole world is crashing down upon us,” she notes.
We tell the story of our past relationship based on how we feel at the moment of recall—and breakups can be miserable, she explains. Our hearts ache for lost love, and sooner or later, for the ex-lover.
The Journal Of Social Psychology refers to a psychological phenomenon known as fading affect bias (FAB), wherein memories associated with negative emotions are forgotten more quickly than positive ones. The study found that we instinctively push the bad moments out of our minds, making it harder to move on.
Something about John* catches Sarina Hu’s attention when he walks into her Grade 11 functions class. Whether it’s the fact he was new or some sweet, secret melody in the pitter-patter of his footsteps down the halls of her St. Thomas, Ont. high school—a town of 40-odd thousand—she sees “something different” in him.
In this so-called “honeymoon phase,” everything feels fine—more than fine. This blossomed into the now-second-year business technology management student’s first relationship.
The then-16-year-old tells herself everything is perfect, however, over the next two-and-half-years, fighting begins and progressively intensifies.
The following summer after Grade 12, John starts working at a waterfront restaurant in Port Stanley, Ont., a 15-minute drive from St. Thomas. Warm weather brings local teenagers like Hu and her friends to the beach in droves, with many kids from her high school working part-time gigs there.
Incidentally, John begins hanging out with one of his female co-workers. When he tells Hu her name, she recognizes the coworker as a St. Thomas local, one “with a history of home-wrecking.”
In October 2022, Hu stays the night at John’s house. She gets up to use the bathroom when she notices his phone light up with an Instagram notification, illuminating her uneasy face. Her gut tells her to open the message, so she does—it’s a DM from his co-worker. The text itself is “something casual,” but has no context as he’s deleted their previous exchange.
Hu suggests they take a break. This happens “sporadically”—a couple of times a month, for over a year. Each time they meet to discuss pausing or ending things but then make up.
The end of a romantic relationship “is one of the most distressing events an adult can experience,” according to a thesis published by Iowa State University. The Journal of Psychology says the effect of heartbreak on our memory is similar to the effect of watching a violent movie—with both scenarios inducing acute stress. Confronted by distress, the human mind intentionally suppresses its capacity to remember.
It’s now March 2023. Hu loans John the money to buy a new computer monitor. Weeks go by as he makes up excuses as to why he can’t pay her back—while simultaneously going for dinners with friends and buying new, expensive clothing.
Hu grows increasingly frustrated. They argue over text and she tells him she feels as though he is taking advantage of her kindness. He responds by insulting her, calling her a “bitch.”
She turns off her phone, and for the first time in years, she begins to see what her life would be like without him. “Very peaceful,” she now reflects.
They break up over text, and for a whole month after, he love-bombs her incessantly. When she meets him in person to give back his belongings, he behaves “like a jerk.” She recalls his demeanour as cold, unforgiving and apathetic.
After the breakup, he ignores her desire for no contact. He emails her, texts her from different numbers and enlists his friends to message her on his behalf.
Data from the World Health Organization suggests that one in three women will become a victim of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in her lifetime. IPV ranges from ‘mild’ abuse, such as insulting, swearing or yelling at a partner, to ‘severe’ abuse, constituted by extreme acts of bodily harm. A dissertation published by Walden University finds that adult female victims will make, on average, seven attempts to leave their abusive partner before they succeed. The study suggests victims will return to their abusers because they have not learned that they are valuable, and no matter what they do or say, their partner won’t change.
James*, a third-year English and history major, met Lori on Tinder in June of 2021. It was “totally just meant to be a one-time hook-up” but they ended up liking each other “more than [they] expected to,” he says.
The two fell into dating, never having spoken about exclusivity or what they were to each other, as they continued to spend time together.
It’s deep into the winter of 2022 and James bartends at Club 44, a slick, neon nightclub on King Street West. For five days a week, he lives without seeing the sun. He wakes to darkness and falls asleep to the first rays of dawn.
“I had basically zero autonomy. I was taking two classes at the time because I didn’t have the energy to take more,” he says.
At the time, he would often walk home late at night, feeling as if he was being followed. He recalls experiencing a sense of paranoia, where shadows and lights seemed to distort reality. “There were points where I was convinced I was being stalked.”
He says, “That period of my life just doesn’t really exist in my head all that much.”
James believes he is battling depression.
A study published in Occupational Medicine found that higher levels of burnout and depression “coexisted” with higher levels of paranoia.
One Sunday afternoon, James is watching a Buffalo Bills game. The Bills are in overtime, and he is on the edge of his seat, eyes glued to the television. Suddenly, his phone begins to ring. Lori’s name flashes on the screen. He picks up her call with immense difficulty and no small amount of irritation.
Over the next 15 minutes, Lori ends things with him. She cites many reasons for leaving. They see each other infrequently, and when they do, it is brief. She lives in Oshawa Ont., and James works most weekends. He gets home at 5 a.m. and wakes up at noon, giving them about six or seven hours together from the time she gets to the start of his shift. Plus, he’s struggling to communicate his dark, tangled feelings.
Lori hangs up and James returns to the TV. The game is over. The Bills have lost. He is more upset about the game than he is about the breakup.
The Journal of Social Psychology article demonstrates how attachment styles produce distinct patterns of “experiencing and encoding relational memories.”
Avoidant individuals downplay the significance of relationship-specific memories, making them more likely to fade. In the article, otherwise-healthy ‘victims of heartbreak’ also exhibited working memory alteration and depression-like symptoms.
A study in Trends in Neurosciences corroborates the adverse impact of depression on cognitive functioning, finding that depressed individuals showed impaired recollection and poor memory of positive events.
According to Agako, anger causes us to remember all the times our partner hurt us. When anger gets activated, negative recollections come easily. We subsist on rage, impairing our capacity to empathize with the other person.
“I do think some level of anger can be really healthy in sort of healing from a breakup because anger is the emotion that gets us to set boundaries,” she notes.
However, when memories associated with this emotion are triggered, others can follow suit. “So all of a sudden, we’re not just thinking about all the ways in which our recent ex harmed us but all the ways in which all the other people have harmed us,” says Agako.
For months afterward, James distracts himself with casual sex to avoid thinking about his past relationship. Just as the pair fell into dating without talking about it, they wordlessly agree to zero contact.
Remembering his relationship with Lori is intimately tied to his depression, he reflexively avoids thinking about it but feels no bitterness towards her.
“That whole six, seven, eight months, whatever it was, is almost not even real in my head because I felt like I was living through some sort of cut scene of my life,” says James.
Despite the sunless space he had occupied, he retains a positive view of their relationship. He regards their connection as one of mutual respect, shared interests and effective communication.
It was a good relationship that “was also never really a relationship.”
“I felt like I was living through some sort of cut scene of my life”
It’s January 2024. Crozier has been in a long-distance relationship with Finn for four months, who is now playing pro hockey in the U.S. Every evening, the two sit on FaceTime for hours. One night, her phone is propped up on her desk as she studies. They are discussing the possibility of a threesome. They’ve had honest conversations about her queerness in the past, about her desire to have sex with a woman and the things he is unable to provide.
He asks her if she’s had a threesome before and Crozier—feeling no threat being honest—responds with yes.
His face fills with hurt. He makes her feel small, dirty and undesirable. He tells her she is “disgusting.”
“That was the beginning of the end for me,” she says.
In the weeks following, she checks out of the relationship. She flirts with other people, says cruel things behind his back and lies to his face. On the last Wednesday of the month, she is sitting in her genetics class when she is overcome with the urge to break up with him.
She leaves school and calls him from her kitchen counter. The hard line of his mouth appears above the kitchen sink, asking if she’s breaking up with him. He tells her she never loved him, she is a horrible human being and he never wants to hear from her again.
Crozier hangs up and gets in the shower where she washes her tears away.
Finn becomes relentless. For months, he writes her letters, leaves cheesecake at her doorstep, brings her his favourite Starbucks coffee and tattoos a bouquet of lavender flowers on his wrist—symbolic of the only cocktail she drinks, a lavender haze.
Crozier blocks Finn on everything but his emails pop up in her spam folder. He sprays love letters with his cologne and slips them through her mailbox.
“The smell of his cologne stank up our apartment for days,” she says.
As a result of his love-bombing, they decide to continue seeing each other.
As Agako notes, when feelings of love occur, we hyper-fixate on positive memories meaning negative events appear less significant than they are. The more we miss our lost partner, the more intensely we crave their affection.
A study in the Journal of Neurophysiology found that a group of participants who were intensely “in love” from a period of one to 17 months showed strikingly similar brain activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) when they merely imagined their partner compared to when they were actually receiving their affection in-person. The VTA is the same part of the brain that lights up under the influence of addictive substances.
Agako says part of the reason people tend to go back to abusive relationships has to do with intermittent reinforcement. “Sometimes a relationship is so painful, so the lows are very low, but every once in a while there’s a high…you don’t know when you’re going to get these highs, and that is very addicting.” She also notes we develop “really intense empathy for the other person,” causing us to justify their bad behaviour. “It’s like wearing off the love drug.”
When Crozier doesn’t reply for several days, Finn engages in self-destructive behaviour and tells her, after the fact, that he thought about killing himself. He always comes back and apologizes, begs her to give him another shot and promises he will be better.
One day, he takes Crozier for lunch. He showers her with presents including white wine and a small bouquet of summer flowers. For once, there is no fighting—only a fragile sort of tenderness.
After, they go back to her mom’s house to savour the wine on her balcony. Stepping outside, she spots a familiar man in the next backyard—her ninth-grade ex’s dad. Crozier isn’t feeling up to the interaction and tells Finn they’d better go inside, knowing he had just discovered her ex is her next-door neighbour.
He yells at her, picks up a wine glass and smashes it on the kitchen floor. It breaks into a million pieces. She then follows him to his car, where he begs to go through her phone. He begins hitting everything in sight from the steering wheel to the side mirrors.
Finally, Crozier finds the strength to end the relationship for good. By contacting her against her wishes, she tells Finn he is only hurting himself. She will never be, and refuses to become, the girl he imagines her to be.
“No matter how I behaved, no matter how small I made myself, he would always find something to tear me apart for,” Crozier says. “I realized that I was completely hiding parts of myself from him and that I was going to become a shell of a human being by the end of it.”
Anonymity Statements:
*This fictional name represents an ex-partner identified by a source whose name is exempt for privacy.
**This source’s name has been changed for anonymity.
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