Notes on Heartbreak: From Vogue’s Dating Columnist, the must-read book on love and letting go

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I nearly say something about one of the characters’ outfits, but then I decide it’s too much effort to complete the thought, so just say “as if” instead. I just want someone to break my heart,” my friend Emily said to me the other day over coffee, exhaling like she was trying to push all the frustration out of her body. And you will realise you cannot lose them even if you wanted to, because they’re part of you for ever in the way that you walk, talk, sleep, breathe. The way Annie talks about Joe is beautiful and made me tear up in public a few times, coming across like both a love letter to him and then herself.

This stunning exploration of love and heartbreak from cult journalist and Vogue columnist Annie Lord, is so much more than a book about one singular break-up. It was a normal evening; we’d just been for a pint with my brother, and as we set off for the tube, my ex pulled me aside and said, “I want to be on my own.No spoilers here, but the book has an intensely satisfactory ending, a phone conversation with her ex that is hopeful and healing and ultimately, full of mutual love.

They felt akin to telling me that all the pain I was feeling was justified; that I should be thankful for it even as it tore me apart. Not only did she want to figure out what heartbreak was doing to her body, she wanted to work out how to get better. Your world might feel as though it’s collapsing, but to the next person, it’s just another break-up. This understanding is one of the things that’s leading to heartbreak being taken seriously in a way it never has been before.

Or when he got with someone new and I kept saying that I was just “too much” for him and he needed an easier, plainer woman because he was too cowardly for me.

Annie Lord: It’s really weird because when I was at uni, I had a column in the uni paper about sex and relationships, which I haven’t re-read because I think they’d be mortifying to read now. I told myself it was because the book was almost four hundred pages long and I had been reading it in a week where I was working almost 38 hours and juggling way too many balls at once. The creation of a shared experience is evidently key to her success in gaining a readership who see their own anxieties, triumphs and losses in love reflected in Lord’s words. Through a sensor implanted in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain associated with emotional learning and addiction, Donaldson can watch individual neurons firing. Annie Lord: It’s weird actually, a couple of times I’ve spoken to male friends for the column and quoted them [about why men might behave a certain way in dating].One morning she was listening to the radio, “a programme about romantic fraud and financial infidelity, when women are groomed or seduced online. There’s all this adrenaline in me; it sparks in my stomach like electricity, it heaves through my lungs. She talks about how clever he was, and how she wanted him to be more ambitious, encouraging him to apply for grants and courses he was not interested in. It’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with.