Unpacking Heartbreak: The Museum of Broken Relationships
Broken relationships… now there’s something we can all relate to. While the first thing that springs to mind is entanglements of the heart, the Museum of Broken Relationships looks at all manner of love lost.
On display, you’ll find incredibly unexpected items. From the former rings of lovers to the prosthetic leg of a man who survived the Yogslav Wars, this museum displays anonymous items from people all over the world who have managed to survive a broken heart.
Treasure Your Heartbreak
Right on their homepage, it reads, “It is a museum about you, about us, about the ways we love and lose.” The curators offer to “treasure your heartbreak stories” as they display your mementos. In a way, they take on the burden of your pain and, in all likelihood, relieve some of the senders’ sorrow.
Of course, that’s all rumor and innuendo because the curators claim there’s no cure for heartache here, just an avenue to overcome what the museum points out as an “emotional collapse” through creativity.
A Rabbit Encapsulated Their Love
The museum’s inception, like everything else here, has an interesting history. It was established in 2006 by two former lovers, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić. As they were divvying up their belongings, they got to one item that neither of them could bear to part with.
They had a toy bunny that they would wind up when one or the other came home at night. Sometimes, when they were traveling for work, they’d pack the little bunny up and take quirky pictures around the world at tourist destinations. In a way, one silly wind-up rabbit encapsulated their entire relationship. And the rest is history.
Healing After Heartache
Located in a former palace in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, this is a place for people to take a step towards healing after heartache. And it’s not just former lovers. People have sent in ashes from their deceased spouses and bras after their battle with cancer has come to an end.
The simplicity of the exhibits stands in stark contrast to the complexity of the human heart. Each item is displayed against a stark white wall with a short, anonymous description.
An Ax As a Therapeutic Tool
In one display, there’s an ax that might immediately make your mind go to a worst-case scenario. Thankfully, it wasn’t quite that ghoulish. A man and a woman were once in love. The woman cold-heartedly left him – and some of her furniture – behind. For every day she was gone, he chopped up one piece of her former furniture to relieve the strain on his heart and illustrate its condition. When she came back for her belongings, she found them neatly stacked into small heaps of wood by the door. The anonymous donor wrote, “She took that trash and left for good.”