After a romantic or platonic breakup, these people tried hexing spells, smashing plates or erasing all traces of their exes from their digital life.
There’s an ex or two or three who haunts all of us. Or a devastating friend breakup that may be a girl-version of the Roman Empire: something you think about every day.
Before we had virtual lives, romantic or platonic breakups were sometimes followed by extreme diets, juice cleanses, drastic haircuts and makeovers. Sometimes manic cleaning would ensue, maybe disconnecting one’s landline or even changing numbers.
Big and small bonfires of pictures, letters and movie stubs were a common ritual (cue Phoebe, Rachel and Monica holding a post-heartbreak bonfire in a “Friends” episode). These may not have been healthy coping mechanisms, and they have varying degrees of questionable success. Yet a certain amount of heartbreak is inevitable, so it’s not surprising there are many ways to exorcise an ex.
“Closure rituals can symbolize the final chapter of a relationship or friendship that enables us to complete the story we have constructed in our minds,” said Jessica Alderson, a relationship expert at So Syncd, a dating app.
Today’s modes of purging exes look a little different. For instance, social media is bloated with hexing and banishing spells as well as digital tarot card readings to help move on.
Last year, Alexis Neve, a photographer in London, tried a cord-cutting spell to help her stop thinking about her ex-husband. “It was the end of my marriage,” said Ms. Neve, 34, who had learned the spell as a teenager from a Wicca ritual book.
For this spell, Ms. Neve said she entered a meditative state with an object representing what she was trying to let go of, her wedding ring, and then visualized cutting off a physical cord.
For others, when closure is inextricable from the purging quality of rage — think the payback sprees in movies like “Do Revenge,” “John Tucker Must Die” and “Mean Girls” but healthier — there are rage rooms, which are rooms filled with all sorts of satisfyingly breakable objects.
When Darshita Goyal’s boyfriend broke up with her in 2021, she wrote down her frustrations on cheap plates and threw them across the walls of her terrace in a makeshift break room with her friends. Now it is a tradition for Ms. Goyal, a 25-year-old journalist, and her friends. For some, the healing comes when people glue the plates back together and paint over them.
Closure is a spectrum, and “modern exorcism methods tend to place less emphasis on external factors and more on internal healing,” Ms. Alderson said. “Sitting with negative feelings can feel uncomfortable in the moment, but ultimately, it can allow for emotional healing to take place, and there’s far more awareness of this now.”
Dating experts can sometimes serve as closure specialists. Kimberly Anderson, a relationship coach in Paris, had a client his year who used ax throwing in batting cages to help move on. “She actually visualized her ex as the target, which definitely helped her with her aim in hitting the target,” Ms. Anderson said.
Others have done social media cleanses or even purged entire relationships of their digital footprint, essentially pulling a virtual deletion of an ex much like its literal version in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Hania Khataby, 24, a reproductive science practitioner in London, believes in wiping all traces of exes or former friends on social media as a first step in forgetting someone. “I am a very out of sight. out of mind kind of girl,” she said. By removing all digital remnants of someone, “eventually you stop looking for the person,” she said.
But is closure really that necessary, or does a culture of love bombing and then ghosting render it obsolete?
“Lack of closure can leave us wondering what went wrong, and if we could have salvaged the relationship,” said Michele Leno, a psychologist in Detroit. She said that unrestrained worrying could manifest physically and cause headaches, fatigue, sadness and anxiety.
There are other risks, too. Methods like restrictive dieting and juice cleanses — sometimes creating or worsening disordered eating — can provide a sense of control, but they’re also a symptom of underlying emotions. Georgina Sturmer, a psychologist in Hertfordshire, England, said that while we might feel in control of our bodies, it could also reflect low confidence and poor self-esteem.
Our best chance of getting closure is by talking to the other person, Ms. Alderson said. But when that isn’t possible, people use alternative methods to gain a sense of empowerment. Even though some events in life cannot be neatly tied up, “we don’t cope well with unanswered questions,” she said. “And this stems from our need to understand in order to make predictions for the future.”
But all one can do is give it time, break some things and maybe hex a person or two.