Crafting The Perfect Breakup Playlist

By Laura Newman

Ok. First things first. Get it through your head. These songs, even when listened to consecutively, will in no way cure you of your last relationship. Like not even close. The only way, the only tried and true Laura Newman endorsed (™) way, is time. 

Spend a year and a half telling anyone who will listen about the loser who you dated when you were twenty. Is he interesting enough to warrant this? No. Was your pain interesting or unique enough? Also no. 

Tell people in the bathroom at house parties. Tell the nurse taking your blood to get your iron levels checked. Tell the goddamn maintenance man at your apartment complex when he fixes your lightbulb and asks why you have fifteen sticky notes on your bathroom mirror reminding you you’re not a piece of shit. 

Talk about it so much that your friends can word for word reenact every single instance you and your ex interacted. If they don’t have to sit you down to tell you you’re killing the vibe with your incessant mentioning of his name, you’re doing it wrong. 

Also, keep in mind, maybe this method won’t work for you.

Maybe you’re the strong, silent type who quietly and dignifiedly navigates through the disillusionment of a relationship with poise and promises of “oh yeah, it was totally mutual” and “still totally respect them as a person”.  And you know what? Maybe you aren’t even lying. Maybe you did have the chillest most amicable split of all time. Maybe you’re the coolest girl in the world who simply doesn’t care. 

This article isn’t for you. 

This blog is for the pissed, unhinged, undoubtedly wronged bitches of America. 

Step one is to have two separate breakup playlists. 

The first one is for self-confidence. Listen, you just got dumped. That in itself is just someone telling you they don’t find you worth their time. I don’t care if they tell you it’s because they “just weren’t ready” or it’s “completely me not you”. Your brain (or my brain at least maybe you’re a healthier person than me do you want a cookie?) will tell you you suck because of this. That’s putting it mildly. To be candid, I don’t have the most natural reservoir of confidence inside. Every positive self-esteem building thing I’ve done I’ve fought tooth and nail for. I have friends who came out of the womb knowing their worth and I applaud those people. I in NO WAY relate to this. And I don’t think most people do. I bet the person reading this right now within the last 24 hours called themselves a “fucking idiot” or something to the same effect internally based on some mundane mistake anyone could’ve made. We’re human. It’s in the job description to be overly critical and cruel to ourselves. But when someone ELSE does it, when you already feel like the worst person ever because you’re twenty and in college and have no idea what you’re doing with your life, and someone treats you exactly how you feel about yourself in the place you thought no one could see, well, it can destroy you if you’re not proactive. 

You need a playlist. 

Make the cover photo a really hot picture of yourself. Put your favorite emojis in the description. Make it long enough to cover your drive home from school. Make it long enough to cover your time in the shower. Fill it with songs you remember singing in the car as a kid. When your head was tilted on the window and you could hear your mom softly singing along from the front. The kind of songs you and your sister would sing back and forth to each other as an insult (see “Mean” by Taylor Swift). Songs that tell you YOU are the prize. Even if you feel like jumping out of the car onto the interstate and taking out your anger on the highway patrol officer. Songs that, maybe in another context, you’d completely laugh at (see “Fuckboy” by Dixie Damelio). Remember, you’re heartbroken, you don’t GET to be pretentious. If it works it works. 

Create a playlist that envelops the way you want to feel about yourself when this is all over. And it WILL one day be all over. Trust me. The pain does end. You stop seeing that person at bus stops and the grocery store when they aren’t even in town. You stop giving a shit when you see them at someone’s birthday party talking to another girl. It’s different for everyone when the moment happens. For me, it took me a year and a half to fully detox from the poison. Then, when you aren’t thinking about it, you’ll pass by their apartment complex and realize “huh, I didn’t even flick him off when I drove by” and the world will feel beautiful. 

To be clear, flicking off your ex’s apartment complex is a crucial step that CANNOT BE SKIPPED. Be as externally angry as you possibly can. If you’re anything like me, if the anger doesn’t go out, it goes in. If you don’t blame the right person sometimes you wind up blaming the wrong one. And for me, it’s typically myself. So be angry. Be pissed off. Make people uncomfortable when you first meet them by telling them the worst thing he ever said to you (ok that last one was a joke, don’t do that). As beautiful as forgiveness is, it can also be a red herring. A premature forgiveness when you don’t really mean it can cause you to take all that stored up anger and aggression and annihilate your worth. I am a firm believer in forgiveness not being necessary. It’s just not. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t need to forgive the guy you were in love with who ghosted you for 72 hours after he asked you to be his girlfriend. You know who you do need to forgive though? Yourself. You’ll never talk to this guy again. You shouldn’t want to. What’s the point in forgiving then? But guess what. You talk to yourself every single fucking day and you need to be on good terms with them. Hence the playlist. 

Pump it with songs that leave no room for interpretation. “Confident” by Demi Levato. “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus. “Truth Hurts” (I cannot stress this one enough) by Lizzo. I’m a very lyric based person when I listen to music. I want to dissect and drown in metaphors. This is not the kind of energy you need right now. Listen to music that tells you exactly what to think about yourself. Music that tells you over and over again in different chord progressions that you are “that bitch”. Listen and listen and listen until you believe it. Or at least until you can sing them in the car without feeling like you’re lying. 

Surround yourself with people who make you feel like this too. Maybe it’s not the best time to hang out with that family member who you love but always has a million different suggestions on how to live your life better. Talk to new people with this new persona you’ve adapted through the music. Fake it till you make it. Become the person who is a walking embodiment of a Pink female empowerment anthem (see “So What”). 

But guess what? There will come a time for the very necessary and tedious work of deep emotional reflection. And, you guessed it, you’ll need a second playlist. This one is for all the feelings and anthems you can’t necessarily put on a catchy t-shirt. The deepest darkest fears you have about yourself and the way you’ll continue to move through the world. Power ballads you might’ve listened to as a kid and sung in the car at the top of your lungs laughing with your sister that now make you cry until you fall asleep (see “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele). Give the playlist a name that perfectly symbolizes the hurt that you feel. Mine, for example, was titled, “you’re just a man, it’s just what you do” (of course memorializing the queen of sad music, Lana). Use a photo as the icon that upon reflection in five years, feels insanely melodramatic. Maybe a close up picture of your eye as a tear falls down your cheek. The cringier the better. Remember, this playlist is for you so make it so deeply personal and “cringe” that you have to hide it from your public profile on Apple Music. Or leave it up for attention. Up to you. Again, there’s no greater feeling in the moment than dumping your ex-boyfriend lore on someone who didn’t mean to ask. Bask in the cringe. Sulk in the feelings. Marinade in the stage of life you find yourself in. The only way out is through. 

And although the songs you choose to surround yourself with during this time won’t completely change how you feel about yourself or your situation, they can at least act as guide posts to how you’re feeling. 

I for one thoroughly enjoy looking back on these playlists now as a “healed” person and remembering the stages I went through to reach this point. It makes me feel accomplished. The first song I added to my “you’re just a man” playlist was “Vampire” by Olivia Rodrigo and the last was “The Manuscript” by Taylor Swift. Two completely different points in my journey. One is angry, one is acceptant. Both made me cry. Both are necessary. 

Curating music for any emotional upheaval in life for me is essential. If you’re currently going through a terrible heartbreak you can’t see the end of and need a playlist but don’t know how to start, start with these five songs. 

1. “Hard Feelings/Loveless” by Lorde 

   1. This song is imperative. It’s two songs in one glorious package. The first being nostalgic and bittersweet, lulling you into a false sense of security and solace before adding an upbeat melody and threatening to ruin a man’s reputation. The perfect song. It captures the essence of separating from someone who really really did you dirty. The kind of breakup where they’re “gonna wanna tape my mouth shut” but “guess what? I like that. ‘Cause I’m gonna mess your life up!” While also pausing in the moment where they told you it was over. Reminding you of the time when you begged them to stay. To “give it a minute before we admit that we’re through”. When you know it’s the last time you’ll ever talk to them as intimately as you’re doing now. The duality of emotion Lorde presents here is priceless. 

“Three years, loved you every single day

Made me weak, it was real for me, yeah, real for me

Now I'll fake it every single day

'Til I don't need fantasy, 'til I feel you leave

But I still remember everything

How we'd drift buying groceries, how you'd dance for me

I'll start letting go of little things

'Til I'm so far away from you, far away from you, yeah”

2. “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead 

   1. I mean if this song doesn’t make you think slightly more about your parents divorce than it does your own break up you are privileged and I don’t want to talk to you. Just kidding. But seriously, this song is kick ass when it comes to talking about the feeling of realizing the person you loved isn’t real. The song starts with “Her green plastic watering can. For her fake Chinese rubber plant. In a fake plastic Earth. That she bought from a rubber man. In a town full of rubber plans. To get rid of itself”. Yes. So true. Sometimes we think the person we love is someone else because they’re actively tricking us. Sometimes it’s because you’re delusional about who they actually are. Sometimes it’s a mix of both. This song perfectly encapsulates that feeling to me. 

“She looks like the real thing

She tastes like the real thing

My fake plastic love

But I can't help the feeling

I could blow through the ceiling

If I just turn and run

And it wears me out

It wears me out

It wears me out

It wears me out

And if I could be who you wanted

If I could be who you wanted

All the time

All the time”

3. “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day

   1. I love this song. Like so much. I remember my Dad playing it in his matte black Diesel truck on the way to the Home Depot. When I was going through my first bad, real breakup, I spent so much time wishing a car would hit me and put me in a coma until all the feelings left my body. Sure there are some holes in that logic. Like imagine getting dumped and then immediately getting hit by a car and going into a coma for twenty years and then you wake up when you’re forty and still crying over the situationship that ruined your life sophomore year of college. Yikes. But in theory, it is nice to say “wake me up when this is all over”. And although it can’t happen, it sure is nice to sing about in the car. 

“Here comes the rain again

Falling from the stars

Drenched in my pain again

Becoming who we are

As my memory rests

But never forgets what I lost

Wake me up when September ends”

4. “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” by Train

   1. I randomly became obsessed with this song while watching my friends play intramural volleyball. It came on the speaker the court attendant had and my roommates then heard it blasting from my room for the next six months. I ask everyone who’s around when it's on how they interpret it and I always get different answers. One of my friends thinks it's a happy, cheerful song. One of my friends thinks it’s deeply sad. When I hear it, I hear an angry voice. A patronizing one. I hear it as almost sarcastic, “Tell me, did Venus blow your mind? Was it everything you wanted to find? And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?” I used to get worked up when I sang it on the way to work. Picturing myself bitching out my ex, demanding that he showed me what he found that was SOOOO awesome and wasn’t me. 

“But tell me, did the wind sweep you off your feet? 

Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day 

And head back toward the Milky Way?

And tell me, did you sail across the Sun?

Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded

And that Heaven is overrated?

And tell me, did you fall for a shooting star?

One without a permanent scar?

And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself?”

5. “The Black Dog” by Taylor Swift

   a. Are you proud of me for only putting one Taylor song? You should be. It was hard. But for real, this song helped me personally so much. It’s so angry. It’s so sad. It’s so honest. It’s for the girls who generally consider themselves to be smart people but can’t for the life of them figure out how they got tricked so horribly. How they could’ve miscalculated the risk so terribly, that they ended up with someone they would’ve cheered if their friends broke up with. But love is not a science. It’s not logical. It makes ZERO sense to the naked eye. Hearing her go through these emotions with Ma**y H**ly made me feel so much less alone, and even more importantly, so much less stupid. It also goes with the saying Taylor coined, “you don’t need to forgive and forget to move on”. You can wish them the worst and that they live out the rest of their days in a shitty bar. That’s ok. As long as you wish yourself better. 

“Six weeks of breathing clean air

I still miss the smoke

Were you making fun of me

With some esoteric joke?

Now I wanna sell my house

And set fire to all my clothes

And hire a priest to come and exorcise my demons

Even if I die screaming

And I hope you hear it

And I hope it's shitty in The Black Dog

When someone plays "The Starting Line"

And you jump up, but she's too young to know this song

That was intertwined in the tragic fabric of our dreaming

'Cause tail between your legs, you're leaving

I still can't believe it

'Cause old habits die screaming”

I think about this quote about heartbreak A LOT. It’s from Dr. Lilly Jay, “Some of what you loved most about your partner was actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it’s yours to keep and carry forward”. I tell it to everyone going through a breakup because it’s so true. The qualities you once were so attracted to you realize was just stuff you saw in yourself and wanted to see in them. Your ex making mozzarella sticks at the function isn’t because he has a deep sense of care towards people, he’s making them because he’s fucking hungry. Or because he wants to be the guy at the party handing out mozzarella sticks. Probably both. Your ex-situationship telling you they “care too much about you to date you” isn’t because he’s looking out for your best interests, he just doesn’t like you enough to commit. YOU are the person who cares about people. YOU are the person most attuned with your own needs. YOU are the magic you thought you saw in them (and you don’t have to make preformative mozzarella sticks to prove it!). 

If you’re going through a breakup right now, my heart goes out to you. Shits hard. It makes you look at yourself differently. It makes you experience this world differently. But I wouldn’t trade the years I spent wallowing in the shell of a relationship I was never meant to be in for anything. I learned how to curate exceptional playlists. I took up and then dropped crocheting. I cried in the bathroom at twenty different parties. I looked at the moon the night he left and laughed until I cried. I went on 600 bad Hinge dates. I forced myself out of the house and ended up having some of the best experiences of my life. I tried ahi tuna for the first time. I set off the fire alarm burning my ex’s and I’s “soul contract”. I saw three different psychics. I learned how to read Tarot. I threw picture frames off my wall in a blind rage. I learned how to sit in myself. 

So, if you’re anything like me, make the playlists. It won’t solve anything, but at least you’ll have a list of songs to look back on one day when you can’t even remember that man’s name.