the times | Wednesday January 26 2022 3
times2
CASIE ZALUDNow, I know you’ve heard enough
about parties, especially those of
notable people.
Not something I thought would be
possible after such prolonged and
starkly joyless times, but yes.And I am sure you don’t want to
hear about yet another birthday
party, in particular.
I’m properly apathetic. At this point,
mid-lockdown images emerging of
Boris shirtless and covered in
DayGlo paint wouldn’t surprise me.But there is a new party planner
you might like to hear about
(although he sadly may not be
available for hire).
I’d love to know who’s bold enough
to start an events business in this
economy.He goes by the name of Javier
Bardem.
Like the Spanish actor?Not like — the very same. It
transpires he is an expert bash-
giver — for the right people.
First, I believe they are known as
fiestas on the Continent. Second,
says who?MI6.
Don’t tell me they were having ’rona
raves too?You’d never find out if they did. I
suspect comms are a little tighter
round there.
That’s not the point!I know. Which is why it’s lucky I
mean the fictional MI6 — the one
that employs James Bond. It has
emerged that Daniel Craig once
had the pleasure of Bardem
planning a birthday party for him.
The pair have apparently been
engaged in a bromance since
starring in Skyfall.
That’s nice. What sort of party man
is he? Sausage rolls and Party Rings,
or strippers and champagne?The sort that jumps out of cakes
dressed as a Bond girl and sings
Happy Birthday in the style of
Marilyn Monroe... so I hear.
Wowee. Was he washing his hands at
the same time?
Hannah RogersgThe lowdown
Javier Bardem
have come to expect from these
recovery narratives.”
Her blood was tested by Cole before
and after her river trip. Afterwards,
a year on from the divorce, she was
disappointed to still be stubbornly in
the danger zone: it had not helped at
all. Looking back on it, she sees that
going into the wilderness alone was
completely the wrong thing to do —
wasn’t this, after all, her primitive
body’s worst fear? Isolation gave her
more time to brood.
Williams then became intrigued by
the new research on the therapeutic
benefit of psychoactive drugs, in her
case hallucinogenic mushrooms, and
cautiously signed up for a carefully
monitored day-long “trip”. (When her
teenage daughter found out, shocked
that her mum tripped on mushrooms,
it necessitated a conversation about
how Williams would never do it
outside a therapist’s office.)
Williams had hallucinations that
sound like sleeve notes from the
Beatles’ Strawberry Fields era. “I had
visions of myself as a particle of light,
just one among many other particles,”
she says. “I was not significant, and it
was lovely to feel that. It put my
individual ego and problems into
perspective. It was very similar to
when we feel ‘awe’ in nature, when
we feel more connected to each other,
and humbled, in a positive way.”
The river trip and the hallucinogenic
trip felt at opposite extremes, the
latter being “very comforting”. Which
was the most useful? “Taking the
psychedelics was profoundly
enlightening and helpful, actually
one of the most helpful things I did.”
Four years is the average time for
people to recover their equilibrium
from divorce, according to one study,
and, now at that point, Williams is
looking pretty radiant. It’s impossible
to ascribe the cause — possibly it was
just time — but her bloodwork started
to turn the corner shortly after her
hallucinogenic trip in year two. At
this point her antiviral defences began
to rise, her inflammation calmed, and
the expression of a gene associated
with ageing was down 90 per cent
since the start of her divorce. Her cells
no longer looked as if they lived in a
severely lonely person. “We need to
take heartbreak seriously,” she tells
me. “We need to heal up and help
each other heal up as fast as we can.”
Looking back, if Williams had to
devise a fast-track physical recovery
programme for heartbreak, she would
divide it into three phases. First,
“calming down”, then “connecting”,
which might include well-studied
activities such as outdoor walks with
friends. But the third piece of the
puzzle is less known. Cole told her that
in his experiments, a sense of purpose
was more protective against unhealthy
gene expression than reported
happiness or sociability. “The best
antidote to loneliness is mission, not
togetherness,” Cole told her.
Find something that makes you feel
useful, Williams says. For her, writing
a book about a cure for heartbreak
turned out to be part of her cure for
heartbreak. She is now enjoying a new
relationship and manages to feel
grateful for the divorce most of the
time, “though not every minute”.
She gave her ex-husband drafts of
the book to veto personal elements.
After reading it he apologised.
“He said, ‘I didn’t know how hard
this was for you.’ Part of me wanted
to roll my eyes... but it was actually
very nice to hear.”as a science writer with a piece for
The New York Times in which she
tested the pollutants in her breast milk
after her children (now aged 18 and
20) were born, which led to her first
book. Was she shocked at the physical
toll her divorce took?
“Absolutely. And my medical doctor
agreed it was urgent. After I was
diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which
is an autoimmune disease, my doctor
said, ‘You need to take care of yourself
right now.’ I’d never been heartbroken
before. To use a pandemic metaphor,
I had no acquired immunity. It hit me
really hard.”
One of the first things she
discovered was that activities that are
marketed under “self-care”, especially
for women in romantic distress, are
not effective. Wine, ice cream, facials
and similar have an “unproductive”
response, according to those
biomarker researchers. Friends
advised her it would be years before
she could think about dating. Studies
show fast “rebounding” seems to be
a strategy most effective for happiness
in men, not women. Instead, weeks
after the separation she was surprised
to find herself propositioned at a work
event by a handsome devil, and even
more surprised to find herself
agreeing. Williams has the scientific
and writerly instincts towards the
truth. That night had equivocal results.
“It was wonderful and magical and
made me feel alive again,” she tells me.
But at the same time “that guy did not
turn out to be a good guy”. He got out
the nipple clamps, declared Williams a
“boner-killer”, then confessed that he
hunts down newly divorced women
“because they’re so easy”. It turned out
that he had a collection of divorcees
on the go, or, as Williams remarks
drily, he departed to clamp “about
eight other nipples”. For a previously
sedate middle-aged mother, this would
be the start of adventures her married
self would never have contemplated.
She has asked her children not to read
the book, “which isn’t such a big ask
as they haven’t read any of my books,
but who wants to read about their
mother’s sex life? Nobody.”
The evolutionary hypothesis is that
humans, like all primates, depend on
the tribe for our survival, and the body
registers “being cast out” as a physical
emergency. One researcher posited
that the reason immunity to viruses
wanes may be because viruses are
spread in close-contact groups, while
inflammation may rise to help the
body to fight wounds from the
increased danger of skirmishes.
“As a hyper-social species our brains
are very sensitive to social cues,”
Williams says. “It doesn’t make the
distinction between feeling rejected
and actually being kicked out of your
clan. And so what may be a helpful
physical response for a couple of
weeks navigating the jungle alone is
not helpful for years of modern life.”
Williams tried a lot of things: a
trauma therapy called eye movement
desensitisation and reprocessing,
meditation and so on, but it was
meant to culminate in the solo river
navigation where at times she did not
see a soul for weeks. She had read Eat,
Pray, Love and other such heartbreak
memoirs, “where you go somewhere
beautiful, and by the end of it, boom,
not only are you healed but there’s a
really handsome man waiting for you
at the end whom you fall in love with.
And that didn’t happen, spoiler alert.
Part of what I was interested in was
busting some of the myths that weafter the divorce she was diagnosed
with type 1 diabetes. If she couldn’t
muster a fast and resilient recovery,
that would probably be only the start
of her physical problems and she
would be in a “death spiral”, Cole
told her. What, Williams asked him,
was she supposed to do? “Don’t be
heartbroken for ever,” he replied.
That left Williams on her own, yet
again. Medical research is at a point
where it shows how damaging
loneliness, grief and divorce is for our
bodies — a 2021 study on middle-aged
Finnish men found that loneliness
increased their risk of cancer by 10 per
cent — but it is not as clear on the
prescription. The UK, by the way, is
rapidly becoming one giant heartbreak
hotel: in 2020 the proportion of
one-person households ranged from
23 per cent in London to 34 per cent
in northeast England and Scotland.
“There was plenty of heartbreak art,
but I wanted science,” Williams writes.
“If this was such a common and
devastating experience, why wasn’t
there a validated protocol for recovery
beyond weep-dancing while belting
out Gloria Gaynor?”
This is where her experiment, which
would be fun if it wasn’t so anguished,
began. She would undertake multiple
heartbreak remedies and have a raft
of sophisticated markers in her blood
monitored by Cole to see if she was
responding, a protocol researchers
hope will one day be made available to
all. In an era of personalised medicine,
divorcees could have an automatic
doctor’s appointment after seeing the
lawyers, to begin monitoring how
well each lifestyle intervention brings
down their health risks.
Williams is open to self-
experimentation. She made her name
Journalist and author
Florence WilliamsTo use a
pandemic
metaphor,
I had no
acquired
immunity.
It hit me
really hard
Heartbreak: A Personal
and Scientific Journey
by Florence Williams
is published by WW
Norton on February 1
at £19.99