I remember once finding a book called It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken. Although I never read it I found the title again years later after a relationship ended. I was left feeling very broken. The problem was there was technically no “breakup” to be found. Could we have stayed up till dawn texting and talking incessantly? Yes. But we’d never left the talking stage, let alone become social-media-official. And yet, here I was feeling like a pit had opened right where my heart should be. It felt unjust, like I had no right not to feel this way even though nothing had. Actually happened, so I didn’t think it was worth bothering my friends with my feelings. I knew what they would say: “Just get over him already.” Nevertheless, it all felt painfully real.
I know I’m not alone in mourning a relationship—or potential relationship, even—that didn’t go anywhere. And yet we tend to minimize this grief because other people don’t seem to understand. After a divorce, soothing platitudes are plentiful; when a crush or short-term fling becomes a failure to launch, there’s less support to be had no matter how devastated you might feel. And it’s common enough that there’s a name for this phenomenon: disenfranchised grief.
“We have still formed a significant attachment which gives us feelings of connection,” says grief psychologist Bêne Otto, who has dedicated her practice to normalizing the grieving experience and helping society become more grief-literate. “When this is lost, we grieve the hopes that we had for the relationship; we grieve the path untraveled. This is incredibly painful.”
It is also known as disenfranchised grieving. “Grief becomes disenfranchised when the people around the griever deny them the right to grieve by failing to acknowledge the loss or by invalidating the grief,” Otto explains. People can experience disenfranchised grief for a number of reasons—the loss of a pet, the death of someone you hadn’t been close to for some time, the ending of a friendship. Yes, even relationships that have ended in failure. The grief is real, regardless if people around you behave like it’s not.
“When people do not recognize your grief or invalidate and minimize your experience, they likely won’t understand your need for support,” Otto says.
Katie, 35, finds it all too familiar. After being rejected by a potential romantic partner, she felt like she had to go through the grief of getting over her crush completely alone: “The friends I told were supportive but brushed it aside, saying, ‘Let’s move on to my problems now because there’s nothing we can do about yours.’”
Luyanda, 19 years old, experienced something similar. “When [my crush and I] stopped talking, I was hurt,” she says. “But it was hard to voice that because we were never official, and I felt like I would seem crazy or clingy. It was something I wanted to talk about. Nobody asked me how I felt. No one could understand what I was feeling. It made me feel terrible about bringing him up again.”
Courtney, 22 years old, had a relationship that ended early due to bad timing. “When I realized that it wasn’t going to work out, it hit like a ton of bricks,” she tells me. “You grieve even though it’s not something that came to fruition. A lot of people don’t understand that you can grieve things that you It is hoped would be.”
Owethu (20 years old) describes the worst part of experiencing disenfranchised grief isolation as being the hardest. “I was left devastated for months,” Owethu says, after it became clear a prospective romance wasn’t going to happen. “People I thought were my best friends were like, ‘The two of you didn’t even date, why are you so upset?’ I felt very isolated because I disregarded my own hurt. I still had the time and love that my parents had given me. It was okay for me to mourn the loss of what could have been.”
Source: Glamour
