为什么分手后走出来会让你成为更好的人

‘It is small use telling oneself “Stop being in love”,’ wrote Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good (1970). ‘Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will.’ If you have ever suffered a romantic breakup, you will be familiar with the challenge of moving on. You cannot just decide to do it. It takes time. To quote a message I once received: ‘You’ll get there, and it hits you really suddenly, one day you’re like, wow what, I don’t care?’ All I had to do was wait.

Because moving on from a heartbreak requires such patience, it can seem like time itself is what does the work of healing you. Just as for a broken bone, time is the best healer for a broken heart. This is the passive view of moving on. Let time do its thing and all will be well.

But a broken bone, without a splint and support, will heal defectively. Likewise, if I remained passive, could I really expect to get better? After all, it is when a relationship is truly and permanently over that we need to move on. And what is permanent once remains permanent forever; time alone makes no difference to the permanence of loss. If all I could do was wait, would that be reassuring? I would have no agency, no way to shape the moved-on version of myself.

So perhaps it is preferable to think that moving on takes a while not because it is a passive process in which time itself heals all wounds, but for the opposite reason: it requires challenging, active work. As Murdoch put it:

What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source … Deliberately falling out of love … is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.

The question this active view of moving on raises is this: what is this work of acquiring new objects of attention, this different kind of energy, its different source? What is the activity of moving on?

When you’re in a relationship, all being well, you have what philosophers call a unified valuational perspective: you value your partner and your life together, and this value shapes your choices and actions in consistent ways. Take Joel and Clementine, who share this kind of love. Joel turns down the advances of attractive strangers on a night out. Clementine makes career choices that allow her to live in the same location as Joel. They don’t value these other things – freedom to date other people, career progress that eats up all their quality time together – in a way that inherently puts them in tension with valuing their relationship. In other words, valuing their relationship is compatible with the rest of their lives; it’s what the philosopher Valerie Tiberius calls an ‘appropriate’ value. When that changes, their relationship starts to strain, and it takes work, together, to put it right.

But if that work fails, maybe Clementine will break up with Joel. Then Joel’s valuational perspective fractures. Losing someone you love leaves you wanting them back. That value has become inappropriate. This creates a small part of you that recognises there might be value in no longer endorsing that value. It has to be that way: no one really thinks that being distraught is a good way to live the rest of their life. The trouble is that you can value only one of those things – to be back with your ex or no longer to need them – to the extent that you do not value the other.

The kind of activity needed to move on: acting consistently as if he fully endorsed the value he does not yet truly grasp

Therefore, it becomes almost impossible to act consistently in line with your values. You can’t act in line with two conflicting values at once. Joel fails to show up for his friends, preferring to spend the day sulking about his ex. He neglects his duties to his colleagues, because he cannot see the value in working hard to secure a future without Clementine. These behaviours align with valuing his relationship, yet that’s no longer an appropriate value behind which he can unify his perspective. But sometimes, he might take a different path and act in accordance with the value he is aware of but does not yet fully endorse: moving on. He might show up for his friends and respect his colleagues, despite often failing to see why he should bother. Perhaps we might even think that this makes him a particularly good and impressive person – rising above it.

And we’d be right, because what Joel would be doing here is precisely the kind of activity needed to move on: acting consistently as if he fully endorsed the value he does not yet truly grasp, and thereby bringing it into view. What is the nature of this as if, the engine necessary to move on?

In her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018), Agnes Callard offers an account of this kind of activity. Aspiration is a ‘temporally extended process by which someone works to become a different and better person’. When you aspire to some value, you have an inkling of why it is valuable. But you don’t fully appreciate it, otherwise no change would be necessary for you to become the person with the value. For Callard, we do this over time by acting in response to a double ‘kind of reason’ arising from such a fractured perspective: an inkling of the potential value of a future good, fused with a recognition that our appreciation of that value is deficient.

When moving on, you lack complete knowledge of the value of having moved on – of single life, or of emotional independence, or of loving someone else. Insofar as that value is absent for you, it is possible to be motivated by the recognition that your valuational perspective is deficient. You recognise that you probably should want to move on and therefore that not wanting to move on represents a failure to appreciate that value. But this works only because you are motivated, however minimally, by the value of having moved on. It’s that flicker of motivation that gives the deficiency in your appreciation any normative force. As you gain a fuller understanding of that value, as the flicker becomes a flame, it will be less its deficiency that motivates you and more the value itself.

He starts seeking out the experiences of single life, new partners, or greater independence of mind and interests

Joel’s friends want him to get out there. But why would he get ‘out there’ when Clementine’s not ‘out there’? And yet, Joel can sense that he might be missing something, that it might be better to see that value. His friends’ persuasion appeals to this sentiment, so Joel reluctantly goes along on a night out. He doesn’t have a great time – it feels forced, like he’s pretending, dancing while fantasising about going home to Clementine. He knows he isn’t there because he wants to be, but because doing so might address the deficiency in his valuational perspective, a tentative step toward endorsing a value he knows of but doesn’t yet feel. Yet he gets something out of it, however small: a glimpse into the value of a life without Clementine, his ability to survive it, the experiences it could offer.

With time, actions of this kind expose Joel to the value he is in the process of acquiring, and he starts responding to that value itself. He starts seeking out the experiences of single life, new partners, or greater independence of mind and interests. Joel does these things less because they are a way to teach him the value of being moved on, and more because he is beginning to understand that value. He is working to address his deficient appreciation of it, and coming to recognise it for the value it holds. Aspiration, moving on, is about learning. As Callard puts it, ‘we aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better.’

And by learning to do these things better and better, you become, in fact, a better person. Aspiration isn’t just about changing; it’s about improving. Acquiring knowledge of value, unifying yourself over time behind a consistent valuational perspective, is how you become a good person.

For consistently behaving in accordance with your values is how you constitute yourself. Every time Joel makes a choice, he will face competing, incompatible impulses of varying strength. If moving on is an active thing that Joel does, there must be some sense in which he rises above these impulses acting upon him and makes the choice himself, in a principled way. By doing that, he affirms his own agency, constituting himself as a person who does things for reasons he endorses.

Breakups splinter our values. But our job is to reunite ourselves, and get better

To do that, he must consider how he could feasibly ask anyone else, including his past and future selves, to act in relevantly similar circumstances. That means acting consistently, following his principles and values. For part of valuing something is endorsing that value, seeing it as something that should motivate someone in your situation. But it also involves showing integrity, principle and respect towards others. People with a unified valuational perspective are better able to see what is right to expect of themselves and others, and act accordingly. When your values are fractured, that’s tough. You cannot clearly see these things. Moving on is a process by which we actively bring these perspectives into view.

Things happen in our lives, like breakups, that tear us apart. But our job, as Christine Korsgaard writes in Self-Constitution (2009), is to reunify ourselves, and get better:

And in the course of this process, of falling apart and pulling yourself back together, you create something new, you constitute something new: yourself … And if you constitute yourself well, if you are good at being a person, then you’ll be a good person.

Ultimately, this is the reassurance I have taken in the difficulty of moving on. Not that I can just passively sit back, wait and, with time, I’ll get better – that is, heal. But that I can do the opposite, actively acquire a new perspective, and with time I’ll get better – that is, improve. So take steps, however small, in what may be a long journey. You can’t move anywhere in an instant. For by embarking on that journey, you’ll become a better person.