Oh, just about anything—depression never needs a formal invitation in order to come a-calling. For some women, heartbreak is the perfect topper to a general feeling of malaise. “I think it was just the drudgery of dating that made me think that I missed him all over again,” says one twentyeight-year-old woman. Says another, “I looked at my life one day and it wasn‘t anything the way I thought it would be. I thought I’d have a glamorous job, a glittering social life, a handsome boyfriend, a great apartment. And there I was, busting my ass in a lousy job, eating frozen dinners in a cramped studio sublet, all alone. I went out on dates that left me completely cold. I was suddenly so disappointed, so malcontent. I blamed it on the fact that I didn’t have a boyfriend. I started to believe that if I could have hung on to him, everything else that I wanted would have eventually come.”
For other women, the triggering device is a little more specific, although no more logical. “It hit me when I was turning the clocks back for daylight savings time,” a thirtytwo-year-old doctor recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘God, when we broke up, it was the day that we turned the clock forward. Has it been six months already?’ It dawned on me that our separation was a reality. It was fact—it was no longer unusual or interesting. The breakup was old news—I no longer had the immediate emotion of it all to connect me to my ex. I wasn‘t mourning anymore—he was a thing of the past. I was totally unattached. I had never felt so alone.”
A large number of women found that heartbreak had the unnerving habit of settling in over holidays or birthdays. “I was sitting at my birthday party with a bunch of friends,” says a twenty-six-year-old grad student, “and I looked around
At all the smiling faces and thought, ‘Where is he? Why isn’t he here?’ I burst into tears. I hadn’t really been thinking about him for a while—we had been broken up for four months— but then it hit hard. I missed him for a long time after that. It wasn‘t a sharp pain, but more of a dull ache that stayed with me for about a month.” And many counted weddings (not theirs) as major contributors to the misery index. “Two months after the breakup, I was a bridesmaid in an old friend’s wedding,” says a twenty-seven-year-old book publicist. “I had been helping her plan the wedding for about a year and a half; my ex had been there through it all. I stood there in my ugly bridesmaid dress and just couldn’t believe that he wasn‘t there to laugh about it with me. I even looked for his face in the crowd; it was so inconceivable that I should be there without him. Then, an hour later, my best friend announced her engagement at the reception. It was too much for me. I was happy for my friends, but it just highlighted my own unhappiness even more. I felt completely hollow. It was a terrible night.”
The majority of the women we spoke to, however, found that their heartbreak was spurred on by a bad date or transition relationship. “My depression started the minute the new guy I had been dating walked out the door,” says a twenty-six-year-old teacher. “I didn’t care at all about him and I guess he could sense it. He broke it off, but I wasn‘t arguing. When he was gone, I sat in the living room, missing my old boyfriend like crazy. I thought, why me? Why do I have to be upset again? I knew then that I had blown it with the one person in the world that I was compatible with. I contemplated the next hundred years of solitude. And then I called my ex, for the first time in months. I knew it wasn‘t a good idea, but I couldn’t help myself.”
Oh, we could be all disapproving. We could make clucking noises and shake our heads.
