Feb 15

Feb 15 The Museum of Broken Relationships

Go here if: you didn’t live happily ever after.

What is it: When love stories end, we tend to purge our lives of our former partners. We burn letters, destroy souvenirs, throw away the detritus of our lives together. The Museum of Broken Relationships exists to provide an alternative, preserving objects that hold memories of our once beloveds. It holds a collection assembled entirely from mementos from broken relationships that still mean something to someone and that have lasted beyond the relationships that they eulogize.

What you need to know: The Museum started over a decade ago as a slightly quirky art installation by former couple visual artist Dražen Grubišić and film producer Olinka Vištica. As they were dismantling their own four-year relationship, they realized that they had objects that told their story, that held traces of their relationship, and nowhere to put them. Grubišić and Vištica gathered some of these together with similar objects from their friends, and curated an exhibition that could tell their love stories and serve as a testament that though over, these moments in time existed, they mattered.

Capturing a collective emotional nerve, the Museum of Broken Relationships has evolved into a permanent museum in Zagreb, where it opened in 2010. It now has over 3600 objects in its collection. Another venue in Los Angeles is temporarily closed. The Museum continues to travel internationally — with 58 previous iterations to date across the world including recent displays in New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and Romania

Why you’ll love it: The Zagreb museum will take you through thematic displays that chart emotions associated with a breakup. Its displays offer a fascinating walkthrough of others’ relationships, exploring what lingers at the end of a breakup through the physical objects that capture experiences of the lovelorn: An iron used on a wedding suit, the marriage’s only relic. A scab, from a literal wound. A love letter from a 13-year old to his first love, written when fleeing war-torn Sarajevo. A toaster (Colorado, 2006-10) taken on moving out –“How are you going to toast anything now?’ Not all relationships are of the unrequited kind. Next to a pile of Werther’s Originals is the caption, “I got these for you, but you died first.”

How to bring this into your life wherever you are: The online space exists very much in tandem with the offline one, with a virtual collection of personal objects that tell the stories of lost love. You can still donate your own items and tell your own story. A book inspired by the museum shares a similar emotional journey through people’s relationship souvenirs. If you make it to Zagreb, you can visit the Brokenships Café for emotional eating. Not a possibility, watch The Broken Hearts Gallery movie inspired by the same idea.

Why we think it’s special: The pain at the end of a relationship can make us feel singularly alone. We can feel like the only ones who have ever experienced the rejection, hurt, and frustrations that this moment can bring. But the Museum of Broken Relationships with its collection of stories shows us that relationships end for all of us, however that happens. We’ve all been down that road, or close to there. Reading these captions offers comfort; these objects bear witness to our stories, allowing us to realize that even in this, we are not alone.

Unusually for a museum, the Museum of Broken Relationships sits in parallel with our everyday lives; its existence shifts what a museum can be. The Museum of Broken Relationships more closely reflects the actuality of our personal lives, the messiness of our emotions, the randomness of the things we come to value and those we come to love and will one day let go.

In their own words: “Museum of Broken Relationships is a physical and virtual public space created with the sole purpose of treasuring and sharing your heartbreak stories and symbolic possessions. It is a museum about you, about us, about the ways we love and lose.”

Something not to do: We’ve deleted all the emails, torn all the notes, obliterated from our lives all remnants of past loves, and just occasionally we’ve come to regret it. Yes, the choice of our younger selves to destroy all reminders made absolute sense. It was a ritual that could help ease any ending, but did we erase something of our narrative as well? Sometimes we’d like a glimpse of who that person was we fell so heavily for, and who we were when we did that. Moments that we could have captured in time through random stuff, and held onto as treasured, even if the person involved in those memories is no longer with us.

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