The Breakup Interviews: Edgar
Interview 12: When You’ve Already Had the “Love of Your Life”
Introduction
In the three years after his breakup, Edgar has been living with a quiet sadness—a dulled sadness. It’s not that Edgar is in a perpetual state of grief or that he can’t function. In fact, three years after the end of his seven-year relationship with Allen, by most measures, Edgar is doing well. They’re friends, they talk, they’ve attended a wedding together since the breakup. Edgar is sober, working, building his life.
But in the opening minutes of our conversation, I asked Edgar whether he felt like he was over this breakup: “It’s so complicated. In many ways I am, and in many others, I’m not.”
And it was a complication worth exploring: Edgar was unable to fully metabolize the ending of his long-term relationship. And as we continued exploring, I found myself interpreting Edgar’s sadness as a radical and singular love his nervous system does not know what to do with.
This is his story.
Falling in Love, Learning to Repair
They met on a dance floor at a techno club: it was one of those magical experiences where no words were required, just a sense of recognition, a sense of familiarity, and an alignment of bodies. They made out for four hours without saying a single word to each other.
Once words were exchanged, it confirmed what the bodies had already said. Edgar was 30, a Colombian immigrant who had built his life in New York on his own terms. Allen had just finished college at 22, still becoming himself. And yet there was a fundamental alignment, one that only strengthened in the subsequent months. Edgar reflected:
“Two months, three months into it, I was very sure that I had met, like, the love of my life. I could see myself going somewhere with this kid.”
It was the magical beginning of a seven-year relationship. By Edgar’s account, it was the kind of love story that everyone around them felt invested in. Edgar described the relationship as a “fairy tale”, “love at first sight”, and “so, so, so honest”. When they were walking on the streets of Brooklyn, people would stop them to tell them how cute they were. They were radiating; the relationship seemed fated.
It’s not that the relationship was perfect or without problems. The success of the relationship came from their ability to repair in the face of challenges. As Edgar put it: “things that a lot of couples around us would not have survived as a couple, we kind of did.” And the evidence he gave me certainly highlighted that:
Fidelity and honesty: When Allen broke the commitment to monogamy they had at the start of their relationship, it didn’t destroy their bond. They used the rupture as an entry point into understand Allen better and into a deeper commitment to honesty. It was ultimately an issue of honesty more than infidelity, and they chose to rebuild around that.
Sexual structure: As their commitment to honesty deepened, so did their willingness to question the structure of the relationship itself. Edgar had always been open to non-monogamy; Allen came to it more slowly, and they eventually opened the relationship. But it wasn’t a cure-all. It surfaced new complications, particularly around the sexual distance that had quietly grown between them over the years, which an open relationship made harder to ignore.
Financial imbalance: Allen stepped away from a stable career to pursue art, and the gap between their incomes became a problem that Edgar began to absorb. For an immigrant who had built everything from nothing, with no family safety net to fall back on, that weight on Edgar was significant, but not something that resulted in him running from the relationship. It was a challenge they explored and carried together.
Substance Abuse: When Edgar’s drug use became impossible to ignore, Allen expressed compassion but also serious boundaries and expectations. Edgar met them: he got sober, they entered couples therapy, and the relationship stabilized. It was real progress. The pandemic had quietly deepened the drug use for both of them, and when the world reopened, the habit didn’t leave with it.
I want to highlight the successes of this relationship that Edgar shared with me, because too often we see the end of a relationship as a failure: we obliterate the beautiful parts. What struck me about Edgar was that he never did that. Even as we began to discuss what led to the end of things, he resisted the impulse to rewrite the story. He shared: “I don’t want to taint the beauty that we had.” He already understood that this ending wasn’t a failure. In spite of what came next, Edgar recognized it as a shift to a different stage.
The Night the World Ended
It’s hard to say if the end of the relationship came out of nowhere or if the writing was on the wall. Edgar had relapsed six months prior, which had revived some old challenges for the relationship. They were at a techno club, not dissimilar to where they had met. Edgar was high and in a state of profound dissociation.
“At the end of the party, I basically couldn’t do anything. I was a zombie.”
Allen, who had grown increasingly triggered by watching Edgar in that state, walked him out. In the car, something shifted in Edgar’s body before his mind could catch up. He described what can only be called a premonition: a deep, embodied dread that something catastrophic was about to happen.
Edgar reflected, as if in a daze: “This is gonna sound really weird, but I think tonight the world ends... the apocalypse. I have this weird feeling about it.”
Allen replied: “That’s so interesting. Because tonight is when we break up.”
During my interviews, I assess breakups as either ruptures or misalignments. This was not a rupture. But the misalignment had a metaphysical quality: Edgar’s nervous system had already begun to register an ending before anything was spoken. Some things resist clinical explanation, and this was one of them: an embodied knowing, communicated not through reason but through something closer to the spiritual. Edgar did not want the relationship to end. But the ending, when it came, felt as predetermined as the fate that had brought them together.
When they got home and talked through the night, Allen laid it out plainly: he couldn’t continue with Edgar’s addiction. He couldn’t keep being financially carried. He needed to leave New York, needed to learn to build his own life. And Edgar couldn’t follow, because his own life had finally started to take root.
What happened next is one of the most striking moments in Edgar’s story. In the middle of a shattering breakup, still chemically impaired, in intense pain, he prayed out loud. Not a desperate plea to undo what was happening, but something closer to a ritual of surrender:
“God, please give me the acceptance for this. Please give me the wisdom to accept this and to move on and to do the best thing and to surround him and myself with love.”
The same spiritual pull that had drawn him toward Allen on a dance floor without a single word was now pulling him toward something larger than himself at the moment of losing him. He didn’t fight, didn’t bargain, didn’t rage. He reached for the sacred. The tragedy is that what followed, for the next several months, offered him very little of what that instinct was reaching for.
Grief, Ritual, and the Half-Open Door
Following the breakup, before Allen left permanently, they did something together that I found significant: they went on a hike. Mostly in silence, walking, looking at each other, hugging. It was close to a closing ritual, a goodbye that honored what they’d had. But then Allen left. And Edgar was alone with the grief, the apartment, and an addiction that was about to get worse before it got better.
Edgar was trying to survive. And, at that time, surviving meant numbing:
“I relied on ketamine a lot. My addiction went even lower than it was after the breakup, for the next four months. I hit a place where I was like, this is either gonna take me out or I’m gonna get clean.”
Getting sober brought its own structure: 90 meetings in 90 days, a sponsor, daily accountability. But those tools were organized around addiction, not around the loss of Allen. The grief lived alongside everything else, unnamed and uncontained. And attachment loss is rarely legible to the people around you in the way that other losses are, you’re expected to move on much faster. So you carry the grief with you into every room, hoping someone will eventually notice it too.
“I was just very deeply grieving, and people in the rooms really didn’t understand. To everyone, it just looked like I was coming from a bad addiction.”
What strikes me, looking back, is how many times Edgar reached for ritual without quite arriving at it. The prayer on the night of the breakup. The letter written through sobs. The guided meditation done seven times over seven days. The hike. These are evidence of someone who understood that grief requires form, that an ending needs to be marked. But ritual requires more than a single intentional act. It requires a container: a beginning, a middle, and an end, held with enough structure that grief can move through rather than pool around the edges.
Edgar reflected on this: “I just don’t think I ever necessarily went in my head and thought, I need to do a ritual.”
It makes sense. Given the grief and the magnitude of change in his life, a structured container would have required a capacity he simply didn’t have. He grabbed what he could, and what he grabbed did help, in partial and meaningful ways. But the grief still felt unprocessed and stuck.
An Invitation
When I asked Edgar what still felt unresolved, the answer surprised even him:
“Throughout all this time — being single, being out in the world again — I have literally not felt anything that remotely inspired me, or feels as powerful as what I had. I can’t conceptualize going through all of that with anyone else ever again. It’s him or no one, kind of.”
I wasn’t prepared to argue, nor did I want to. The love lives so viscerally in him. But a nervous system that cannot yet conceptualize new love is rarely one that has stopped believing in love. It is one that hasn’t yet been given a container large enough to fully grieve the love it lost. And that is exactly what ritual can heal.
Throughout the relationship and the breakup, Edgar has never stopped reaching for something sacred. He just hasn’t yet had the space, the structure, or the support to let that reaching become a true container.
And so my invitation to Edgar is not to stop loving Allen. Love is not the problem. Frankly, the love Edgar and Allen shared deserves to be treasured and honored. But I believe that Edgar’s love needs to be released through ritual. It is still standing in the doorway, half in and half out. The goodbyes were not large enough to match what was lost. A seven-year relationship cannot be fully metabolized through gestures made in moments where he was just trying to survive.
So what might it look like for Edgar to create a container for this ending? I can’t map out exactly what the right ritual would look like for Edgar; it has to be chosen, not prescribed. But I can say that whatever it is, it probably needs to be larger than what he has allowed himself so far.
It might be physical, something that asks his body, not just his mind, to participate.
It might be spiritual, leaning into the sacred language that has always been native to him.
It might involve Allen, a shared marking of what they built and what they chose to release; it also might be entirely alone.
It might be something that breaks him clean out of the routines his grief has quietly settled into: a trip, a ceremony, a conversation with someone who can hold the container with him.
Edgar already speaks the language of ritual. His whole story is evidence that he is capable of stepping into something transformative.
Edgar’s story is one of a person who loved extraordinarily well, survived an enormous amount, and has been quietly waiting, without fully knowing it, for permission to begin again. Three years later, he is still reaching for something larger than himself. The grief has moved, he has healed, but a right-sized ritual might be the way to heal this profound grief further.
The question is simply whether he is ready to create a ceremony that is proportional to the incredibly intense love. The opportunity is for a ritual that allows his nervous system to find peace and a deeper acceptance.