The balls were a gift from my ex-girlfriend Andrea, who made them out of socks stuffed with rice. They were exactly the right size for my hands and, more importantly, reminded me of the day I taught Andrea to juggle on the lawn outside my apartment. I went inside while she practiced, catching her profile through the window: hair spiked, body tilted to 45 degrees, chasing her tosses across the window before disappearing. I laughed, but when she came back for another pass, I began to cry—overwhelmed by the knowledge that I was absolutely, incontrovertibly in love with this crazy person running through my yard.
But nine months of elation dissolved into nine months of hell, until we broke our engagement over differing opinions on fidelity. The Museum of Broken Relationships was conceived late one night at a kitchen table in Zagreb. They sat across from each other in the house that seemed already cleaved down the middle, divvying up the physical remains of their four years together. Some objects were easily sorted by value—she gets the TV, he gets the computer—but then there were the incalculables, the objects with little monetary worth but pounds of emotional weight.
Objects like the Little Wind-up Bunny. The bunny is scruffy and about five inches tall. If one of them left on a trip, the bunny went in the suitcase, and the partner at home got photos. Olinka and Drazen are artists, and they did what artists often do: They put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival.
It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul. Trinkets that had meaning only to two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience. Love, says one theory, is a form of persistent craving akin to addiction. Stanton Peele, a social psychologist, calls love one of the most powerful addictions on earth. He wrote in Psychology Today that the seven hardest addictions to quit are cocaine, alcohol, Valium, heroin, cigarettes, fatty foods, and, in the top spot, love.
My relationship with Andrea, the juggler, was like an addiction. The relationship went like this: exhilaration, then jealousy, a rapid descent into despair, and a bewildering inability to leave until, finally, the breakup. In the process, I dropped out of school, lost 20 pounds, and started smoking. On the other hand, my prior relationship was relatively sane.
