Heartbreak Is on Display at the Museum of Broken Relationships

Updated on March 9, 2018 at 1:55 PM

For as long as there's been love in the world, there's been love lost. And when love ends, what do we do with the mementos from relationships that once represented something beautiful but now are like tokens of heartbreak? The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia, and the newer outpost of the same name in Hollywood, CA, are a collection of more than 700 such items from all over the world, representing relationships past, along with the stories of heartbreak or redemption that accompany them.

The collection includes items one might expect: wedding dresses, once-cherished mix tapes, and photo albums. But it's the unique items that steal the show: a small bottle filled with tears, an ax used to smash the furniture, a never-opened bottle of Champagne, the prosthetic leg of a war veteran who fell in love with his therapist, and a pair of size double-zero jeans once owned by a woman recovering from anorexia after an abusive relationship. The museum sees the donations as cathartic, founders said. "[It] offers the chance to overcome an emotional collapse through creativity," a museum representative said.

Read on to see five moving stories, all courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships, that accompany different items that once held a significant meaning for the people who donated them to the museum.

"He gave Snoopy to me on my 17th birthday. We had fallen in love six months earlier, on October 5, 1981. Thirty years down the line, we had three sons, a house etc. He fell in love with another woman and he chose her . . . He broke my heart. Telling me that he hadn't really loved me in those 30 years. I just don't understand."

"This is a postcard that was inserted through the slit of my door a long time ago by our neighbours' son. He had been in love with me for three years. Following the old Armenian tradition, his parents came to our home to ask for my hand. My parents refused, saying that their son did not deserve me. They left angry and very disappointed. The same evening their son drove his car off a cliff . . ."

"She gave it to me as a remembrance before I left. I never did get why she gave a magnifying glass nor did she ever explain what it meant. But she always said she felt 'small' whenever she was around me."

"She was the first woman that I let move in with me. All my friends thought I needed to learn to let people in more. A few months after she moved in, I was offered to travel to the US. She could not come along. At the airport we said goodbye in tears, and she was assuring me she could not survive three weeks without me. I returned after three weeks, and she said: 'I fell in love with someone else. I have known her for just four days, but I know that she can give me everything that you cannot.' I was banal and asked about her plans regarding our life together. The next day she still had no answer, so I kicked her out. She immediately went on holiday with her new girlfriend while her furniture stayed with me. Not knowing what to do with my anger, I finally bought this axe at Karstadt to blow off steam and to give her at least a small feeling of loss — which she obviously did not have after our break-up.

"In the 14 days of her holiday, every day I axed one piece of her furniture. I kept the remains there, as an expression of my inner condition. The more her room filled with chopped furniture acquiring the look of my soul, the better I felt. Two weeks after she left, she came back for the furniture. It was neatly arranged into small heaps and fragments of wood. She took that trash and left my apartment for good. The axe was promoted to a therapy instrument."

"He gave me this piggy when we met on student exchange in the US. It was just a joke over how much he loves bacon and me never wanting to taste it as my heritage forbids it. Many evenings we spent together at home drinking some wine and cooking dinner. Loving and annoying each other. What goes first in the pan?! Enriching each other with family memories and favorite foods. How different our habits and clothes were, how different our food from Israel to Denmark. And yet we are so much the same. We loved each other purely and deeply, we loved our differences and we both knew that was part of our charm. Imagining our children was like imagining how it would feel to win the lottery.

"But for me it was too hard to change my path, to hurt my parents who only wished for me to be happy, with a Jewish boy. I made the wrong decision; one that was not fully and consciously my own. Here I am standing, 27 years old, like a toddler learning to walk, I'm learning I can make my own decisions in life, fully . . . Only now do I know, falling in love has changed my destiny and for this I am grateful. Maybe I evolved too late for this wonderful, wonderful person but I know it's never too late to change. I'm giving you a glimpse at my piggy and a taste of our story, hoping we will all have the courage to consciously make our own decisions and the will to stand behind them. I will always follow my heart!"