I just returned from a few weeks touring in the former Yugoslavia. The last city we visited was Zagreb, Croatia, where we went to a unique attraction: The Museum of Broken Relationships. Founded in Croatia in 2006 by divorcing artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, the museum has since become a global phenomenon, with its exhibits touching the hearts and minds of people from all walks of life.
Artifact: A stuffed Snoopy doll
He gave Snoopy to me on my 17th birthday. We had fallen in love six months earlier, on October 5, 1981. Thirty years down the line, we had three sons, a house etc. He fell in love with another woman and he chose her… He broke my heart. Telling me that he hadn’t really loved me in those 30 years. I just don’t understand.
Leiden, Netherlands
As visitors make their way through the museum, they encounter a diverse range of objects, each accompanied by a brief narrative explaining its significance. Rather than displaying artifacts of historical or cultural significance, the museum showcases a collection of personal items donated by individuals around the world, each carrying a story of love, loss, and resilience. From handwritten letters and photographs to clothing, jewelry, and even a hacked off set of dredlocks (!), these artifacts represent the tangible traces of relationships that have run their course.
Artifact: A galileo thermometer
A teenage crush on campus. Now I am writing it all down in remembrance of the pure love. At the time, I had an almost feverish imagination about what kind of a boy I would fall in love with, and I even listed all the criteria. He should: 1. Be tall 2. Be tanned 3. Play music 4. Love post-rock 5. Especially love ‘Explosions in the Sky’ 6. Be able to cook (hopefully) And I met him! He satisfied all the criteria I had listed above, even the sixth! As luck would have it, this boy, my Prince Charming, also fell in love with me. We started our whirlwind romance. Like any girl in love, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. This passionate love lasted about six months. One day I suddenly realized that a criteria-fulfilling boy might not necessarily be a considerate and tolerant lover. He might not understand you. He even gave me a Galileo thermometer, wrapped in a crushed paper box, as my birthday gift. WTF! Could that be the kind of birthday gift a 20-year-old girl would expect?! So we broke up. From that day on I have never made another list.
Taichung, Taiwan
Some of the relationships and artifacts are familiar; a few are disturbing or even concerning. Most are about romantic break-ups, but some are about estranged family members or friendships. One or two are even about ending relationships with food or habits, which felt like a cheat.
Artifact: A fancy key with a hidden bottle opener in the shaft
You talked to me of love and presented me with small gifts every day; this is just one of them. The key to the heart. You turned my head; you just did not want to sleep with me. I realized just how much you loved me only after you died of AIDS.
Ljubljana, Slovenia
The stories shared in the museum are raw and honest, shedding light on the complexities and fragility of human connections. They remind us that relationships, whether romantic, familial, or platonic, are often marked by both joy and pain, and that their endings can leave lasting imprints on our lives. The museum creates a space where these experiences can be acknowledged, shared, and understood.
Artifact: a woman’s black stilleto high heeled shoe
It was 1959, I was ten, T. was eleven. We were very much in love. When I told my mother we had gone skinny dipping in the canal, I got my ears boxed and was sent to spend the rest of the school holidays with an aunt. When I was fifteen, we had more wonderful times together until he moved to Germany with his parents. Our goodbye came with many tears and promises. We would write every week and never marry anyone else.
It was 1998 and I had just stopped working in prostitution. I wanted to write a book about S&M and was going to work for a dominatrix for a few weeks. On the second day, the dominatrix allowed me to belittle and whip a client. First I made him lick my stilettos. Because he wasn’t submissive enough and had the nerve to address me with ‘mistress’ (instead of ‘high mistress’), I wanted to whip him harder. And that was when I recognised him, ‘T., is that you?’ He was startled and stood up. At once we were back in 1966. He told me he had the desire to be submissive because his father had often beaten him as a child.
T. was now in his second marriage, and he wanted to make it work. It was better we never saw each other again. After a few hours we said our goodbyes, and he asked, ‘Can I keep one of your stilettos as a memento?’ When he walked out the door, it felt like my stiletto-less foot was no longer mine.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The museum encourages reflection and introspection, prompting visitors to contemplate their own experiences of love, loss, and healing. It invites us to question the nature of relationships and the lessons they teach us about ourselves. By confronting the complexities of human connection, the museum challenges us to embrace vulnerability, compassion, and resilience in our own lives. It reminds us of the importance of tangible connections, of the physical and emotional traces we leave on one another. It encourages us to cherish and nurture our relationships, knowing that they have the power to shape and transform us.
Artifact: Postcard of a man & woman sitting in grass
I am a 70-year-old woman from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. I visited Zagreb back in 1967 and the city is very close to my heart. When I found out from a local newspaper that there exists the Museum of Broken Relationships, I was sad and happy at the same time. This is a postcard that was inserted through the slit of my door a long time ago by our neighbours’ son. He had been in love with me for three years. Following the old Armenian tradition, his parents came to our home to ask for my hand. My parents refused saying that their son did not deserve me. They left angry and very disappointed. The same evening their son drove his car off a cliff…
Yerevan, Armenia
While I could certainly twist this experience into a discussion about the “exit narratives” that we can read all over the internet of people who’ve left the Church, to me that’s a whole different thing. This experience felt like it was an important part of understanding how we connect with other people, and what we learn when those connections fail or end. We all have relationships in our past that have ended. In many cases, we carry artifacts from those relationships, even if it’s something that might not have felt meaningful at the time.
Artifact: The Toaster of Vindication
When I moved out, and across the country, I took the toaster. That’ll show you. How are you going to toast anything now?
Denver, Colorado
The first thing I was reminded of was in Jane Austen’s book Emma, when her protege / friend Harriet (whom she has encouraged to develop an infatuation with the handsome vicar, Mr. Elton) finds out that Mr. Elton doesn’t reciprocate her feelings and goes through her “treasure box” with Emma to dispose of the items she’s been keeping to fuel her feelings: a discarded pencil, a scrap of plaster (essentially like a bandaid from the Regency era). These items were always worthless. The only thing that imbued them with meaning was the feelings they fostered in her as she thought about her crush.
Artifact: a pair of men’s suede boots
My husband of 31 years, bought a pair of stylish tan Boots to impress his –unbeknownst-to-me—then girlfriend/mistress. The affair was discovered when he fell asleep in a drunken stupor onto the bed, wearing said boots, iPad open and showing their lascivious ‘Wickr’ chats. After reading his chats and watching a video of his showing off the Boots to ‘Violet’, I proceeded to remove the Boots from his feet, place them into one of my shoe boxes and put it high into the closet. The next day when he asked about the Boots, I feigned no knowledge of them and that I didn’t know what he was talking about. Within a few weeks, he was out of the house and though he kept asking about the boots, they were my secret to keep, locked up nevermore to impress. Our relationship broken beyond repair and now after 3 years, we are today, December 3, 2019 officially divorced and so I mail these Boots off to the Museum of Broken Relationships . . . I’d love to write a song about Boots, but many before me have done so and thus to quote Tammy Wynette: “These Boots were made for walking . . . One of these days these Boots are gonna walk all over you!” For now, the Boots walk symbolically in the halls of a museum, still my secret!
Location not cited (Jan 1984 – Dec 2019)
The museum made me think back to various artifacts of relationships long gone, some relationships which I regret, some I don’t, and what stories these objects tell. To anyone else, these things might look like trash (I’m sure they will be thrown out one day when I die, if not sooner). They only carry significance to me because of the relationship they represent bearing some level of importance to me. I’ve often thought that the person we become is greatly affected by the closest relationships in our lives, particularly life partners, but not exclusively. Broken relationships are the ones that stopped being an active force in our life, but on some level, they still exist for us, in their dead state. They become a lesson or a story that we use to explain our behavior or theirs.
- What artifacts of broken relationships do you still carry with you?
- What have you learned from these broken relationships?
- Do you find it useful for personal development to try to learn about yourself from these now defunct connections?
- Would you donate your item to the museum collection?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
From my broken relationship with the church: still one of the green hymnbooks propped on the piano. Every now and then I sit down and play a hymn for old times sake.
I have a couple of books in German, one of poetry and another a detective novel, gifts from a boy I wrote to as a teenager, when our respective youth music groups were involved in exchange trips. Turned out he thought he was writing to my sister, and upon discovering his mistake on the next visit never wrote to me again!
I’d have been really excited to get a Galileo thermometer as a gift though.. had one for many years that my mother bought for my husband and I.. unfortunately it was broken last year..
When I saw your headline I thought this would be a piece about TBM LDS families who have less active family members.
Angela C – thx for a marvelous/interesting/appealing post. You are the best.
My first relationship was in college and lasted about a year. It was the best of times . . . and the worst of times. I learned a lot of about how relationships should work, and some about how they shouldn’t. That is one of the purposes of dating after all. Along the way, they started up a decent sized project hand making something over the course of a few weeks, and, because we spent all of our free time together, I helped in making it. (They had all the skill, I was just some unskilled labor.) At the end of the project, I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover that I was the intended recipient! In the end, the romance reached a point where it wasn’t going anywhere and it was time to end it, even though there really wasn’t a specific reason to end it. They broke up with me, and while I didn’t agree at the time, looking back, it was the right decision. Our efforts to remain friends afterward were not successful, as we couldn’t figure out how to find the appropriate level of involvement as friends after being so joined at the hip while we were dating. Decades have passed, and I still have the results of our (mostly their) labor stashed away in a closet, definitely worse for wear after all these years. Over time, it’s meaning to me has shifted from being a present from them to just being a possession of mine. After all, I’ve owned it now for far, far longer than we dated.
And now, I suppose I have to explain why I’ve been so, so vague in my descriptions. Well, I recently pieced together some details that one of the regulars here at W&T mentioned, and it turns out I once dated their spouse. So this is me trying not to make things too weird for other people.
When I was going through my disaffection from the church, I had two close friends. One told me we were the forever kind of friends, we had so much in common. The other swore we were closer than sisters, an eternal friendship. I had been close friends with both for five or more years, sharing many intimate feelings while we went through the process of healing from abuse.
The first, I was talking with on the phone, and we were talking about priesthood leadership. I actually quoted my stake president who had told me that his job was not to get inspiration for the people in his stake, but to help them know of God’s love for them so that they could get the inspiration they needed for themselves. His model of priesthood leadership was Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Show love to others. My friend had a much more authoritarian model of leadership apparently because she got screamingly angry and hung up. I was confused because I could not comprehend her wanting to turn her relationship with God over to some human male. Especially since she was like I was, a child sexual abuse victim with a serious problem trusting men. She hung up on me and never spoke to me again.
The second friend was also a child sexual abuse victim, and she had serious trust issues with anything human. She threw her trust at people, then turned against them at the first hint of them being human. Early in our relationship, she had asked me if I thought the Book of Mormon was true. I tried to explain that I had issues with Joseph Smith and had trouble trusting anything he said. But that there were good ideas in the BoM, just like the Bible. Too good of a description of real human feelings in Nephi’s Lament to be anything the shallow Joseph Smith made up, but too shallow of a book to be real history. We had talked about how the Bible was a collection of myth, history, and people’s stories of their interaction with God, but not the inerrant word of God. I said I thought the BoM was scripture of some sort, but not to blindly trust me anymore than anything else. But then further into her own disaffection she asked me again and I tried to give her the same nuanced answer, and she blew up on me because I gave her an answer that was human, not the kind of black and white answer she could blindly trust. She sent me over 200 angry emails before I blocked her, then never spoke to me again.
One friend hated me forever because I wasn’t religious enough for her, the other because I wasn’t totally apostate. Either way, they hated my non black and white thinking.
So, what did I learn from these two angry breakups? That many people want to blindly trust anybody but themselves. They go completely crazy when the person they want to blindly trust is inferred to be human. This seems to be why we have religion in the first place. People desperately want to be given answers, not search them out for themselves or have to think for themselves or develop their own relationship with God.
I have a small Steiff teddy bear that was given to me by my first high school boyfriend. It’s probably only about 7” or 8” tall but it was still something that probably was a financial stretch for him at the time.
He was a really sweet guy. Almost 60 years later I still keep the bear next to my bed and I can still remember his face a clearly as if it were a photo.
I can’t remember why we broke up but a friend who still lives in the same area and has retained many of her high school friendships sees him from time to time and tells me he’s still devotedly married to the woman he left me for. For my part I had a number of subsequent relationships before I met my husband of 56 years. I still have the same tender feelings for that first love as I have for the bear and I thank him for finding his right person and leaving me free to find mine.
I happily and gratefully released that boyfriend a lifetime ago. I’d never give up the bear. Not even to each of my kids who inquired about it and coveted it as a playthingin turn. I could never send it to a museum and perhaps there are as many treasured mementos of broken relationships as the sad ones that have been relinquished. At least I hope everyone has someone who shaped the idea of love and belonging like my first love did for me. And I hope they have someone who filled the promise like my last and current one.
Somewhere in Utah, I lease a deposit box filled with baseball cards which may or may not be worth anything. But I pay a yearly fee to keep them safe. Somewhere in a plastic tote in my parents home, there is diamond ring I don’t give a damn about. Puny, unimpressive stone. Not even the pawnshop in downtown Ogden wanted it back in the day.
I also have a little teddy bear named Russ. Received him from a TBM-gorgeous-sorority-girl-soprano in college choir, when we spontaneously decided to exchange Valentines as friends. Totally platonic, which is to say I never had a shot with her. Also, she was still kinda high school in her personality at the time. We lost touch for a little while when I went inactive from Church and gave up on being a Music Major. Then, somehow, we found each other and hung out one night. She was engaged to a guy running one of Weber State’s frats, a Roman Catholic hunk headed into officer candidate training for the Air Force after graduation. She invited me to attend mass with her one night. I told her about my spiritual wanderings, and she talked about how she and her fiancé were mapping out their plans for a mixed-faith marriage. It was one of the only perfect goodbyes I experienced in college. She seemed so grown up. Nobody gets that teddy bear until I’m dead.
My first love after my mission was a girl who from a looks perspective was out of my league. For some reason she seemed to fancy me and I willingly enjoyed an emotionally intense summer with her before I left for BYU. I think deep down I knew the long distance relationship wouldn’t survive; and sure enough she broke up with me 6 weeks later. It deeply hurt – I had girlfriends in high school but this breakup devastated me.
Every now and then I hear the Garth Brooks song “Unanswered Prayers” and I’m deeply grateful it didn’t work out. About once every few years I look at her Facebook profile and wonder how her life in Manti Utah is. In fairness to her – if she even thinks about me – she probably wonders how the guy in finance who’s left the church is doing and thanks God she didn’t go that route.
No physical relics but when I hear a certain name that is not uncommon I think of her. As my kids might say a tiny part of her lives rent free in my brain. I leaned that while I shouldn’t follow all advice from my family, in this case they saw red flags that I was unwilling to acknowledge. They still tease me about her from time to time.
Your piece is both interesting to me and triggering.
I wager I will die of a broken heart. (Being dramatic.) And my worst fear is that my funeral will be poorly attended, owing to all the obligatory apology letters I’ve received over the years. (Not exaggerating.) You know, the insincere apologies given to make themselves feel better, not you, after they took advantage of you and then insulted you, and you realize they were never being honest with you in the first place.
I’ve kept the letters to learn to be a better judge of character. I’m finally getting the hang of it now that I’m pretty close to kicking the bucket! Lol.
Maybe my funeral should be a Museum of Apology Letters. A few letters that should be there won’t be though. Those people and organizations don’t issue apologies to anyone.
This is really a well-written post. The idea of a museum of broken relationships is haunting. Thanks for including all the specific stories.
I have many broken relationships, but I don’t do mementos. I don’t like reminders. I don’t even have my wedding ring. My XH took it back after the divorce and I’ve never asked him for it. I don’t know what he did with it. Years after the divorce, he told me he took it, along with most of our wedding photos, because he was afraid I would get rid of it. That’s fair. I did throw away the photo album of our honeymoon. We’re friends now, but the divorce was a pretty tough time and I was just trying to throw away the pain of the reminders.
I love this place. Such a unique and affecting idea. After seeing your post, Angela, I retrieved the A Diary book available at the museum that we brought home from Zagreb. I stumbled on the entry below opposite a photo of some chintzy frog statuette.
“Mom left when I was 3. This is one of the few Christmas gifts that she has given me.”
Sure, there are lots of donations to the Museum of Broken Relationships that tell a tale of young love, illicit love, brief love, heartbreak and heartache, but scattered throughout are also examples of true betrayal and indelible pain that put the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl stories in their proper place. I was amazed at how broadly the museum captures much of the human experience.
I still keep a box of mission memorabilia that is mostly just a bunch of junk. I won’t get rid of it because it represents the first trying, adult experience I ever had and it was in service to the church. (Or maybe it wasn’t because I was a crappy missionary, but it was on the surface a faithful exercise.) The crap in the box also represents an experience that is the reason the church and I broke up. She wanted me to be something I’m not and wasn’t comfortable with my desire to have a more wide ranging and diverse human experience. She also wasn’t comfortable with a lot of questions, and there are so many questions. Ultimately, it was for the best. We were never all that well matched, anyway.
It is unlikely I will ever get to the museum in Zagreb (although I think I would love it). I did watch a film with a strikingly similar theme, “The Broken Hearts Gallery”, a fictional story set in New York (screenwriter claims story developed independent of the actual museum). What do I keep? A love letter written by my husband one month before he died, a few items that belonged to my parents, a few small things from my daughter’s childhood, a handful of little yet meaningful gifts from earlier in life. Stuff from broken relationships? Not so much. Any remains were pretty well swept clean.
I guess I could say I have a “cracked” relationship with the Church these days. It’s not completely broken, nor is it solid. So I still keep my various certificates and documents in a file folder, my Quad, hymnals and songbooks. Gone are the Deseret Book volumes, pictures of temple on the wall, etc. It seems that more and more gets discarded as more cracks develop, but I think I will keep a few things. They document earlier stages of my life/spiritual life and have some value.
this is a tangential comment, but I really like Anna’s comment and it made mw think about a certain kind of TBM. Outwardly they’re TBM but when confronted by some of the inherent contradictions in the whole framing of the Mormon project, they have internal panic and uneasiness.
And one thing they do is to trust in someone whom they perceive to be smart or intellectual in some way, essentially offloading their spiritual anxiety onto the persona of someone else. The thought process is something like
“I can’t resolve this contradiction in my mind, but Bro./Sis. so-and-so is a really smart and intellectual person, they must’ve resolved this in their mind and they’re still coming to church, so even if I’m to stupid to puzzle this out, I don’t have to worry about because someone smarter than I am has fixed these problems”
and when that person shows any weakness or some degree of uncertainty, you feel betrayed
I think I’ve been on both sides of that relationship throughout my life
It was a great day when I decided I did not need to read General Conference in the Ensign/Liahona cover-to-cover.