i haven’t been in a treacherous breakup since may of 2021, nor do i ever plan on ever going through that again (so, very distant future boyfriend of mine, please don’t hurt my feelings). anywaysss, the "denial phase", of the five stages of grief, is my favorite. nothing is funnier to think back on than how I REFUSED to believe that we had broken up. in my head, it was just a silly little fight and we’d get over it. spoiler alert: we did NOT get over it....i haven’t talk to him in over a year lol. while in denial, i listened to A LOT of music. heavily relied on different tunes, genres, artists, and melodies to try and fully explain to me what was happening; i completely depended on musical instruments and famous people i didn't know to fully understand that i 1) most definitely got broken up with & 2) needed to put into sensible words what i was feeling. i’m pretty sure that during my post break up era, i was just sending my friends certain songs that would describe how i was feeling whenever they asked. lord knows i was not able to fully describe with my own words how i felt because i was too busy crying:)
with this being said, my girl sza just dropped her new album 33 minutes ago (from when i wrote this). i'm half way through, and i can already vividly remember how i felt during that break up while listening to some of these songs. ouch, to say the least. this album has inspired me to gift to you the ten songs that really kicked me while i was already down and beat me like a dead horse. if you’re going through a break up right now (hopefully you aren’t), here are some songs that might contribute to your sadness and make you cry in the shower just a little bit harder…
warnings:
this list is meant for those who want to lay in their bed and just cry until they become dehydrated from how much water they lost
if you are in your healing era, and you listen to these songs and they start sounding like “pick up your phone and text your ex you miss them!”, don’t do it…or do (i've shamelessly have done it too many times to count. we were all young once people, let's not judge.
this is all through the eyes of who i was during my one and only break up from when i was 18 (meaning this is meant for the sad girlies), with some slight recent additions. secretly wishing that i had another heart break situation to talk about but we all don’t get that luxury, do we?!
suggestion:
listen to all these songs as you read the descriptions. it’ll help make more sense of the things i'm about to say. let's make this blog post an ✨experience✨
let's begin!
steff's top ten break up songs for the heart broken & miserable:
1. if the world was ending. jp saxe & julia michaels.
idk what these two put into this song, but it sure as hell was not any intention of making anyone to NOT want to just sit in a dark room and cry all day. this is at the top of my list because of the element of denial this song poured into my body. how dare they both make me truly believe that if in some crazy scenario, zombie apocalypse end of the world type situation, that my ex would still think about me and want to be with me in those final moments…nah. that’s foul. it’s a beautiful love story and during my break up, i 100% wanted to believe that what they were saying applied to the situation i was in. take it from me, it is not. be careful listening to this song, it will make you start believing the impossible. pretty sure my ex would leave me out to the zombies to get eaten now.
2. favorite crime. olivia rodrigo.
ms. Rodrigo’s album, “sour”, released around the same time my heart got atrociously stomped on and i would send her a thank you gift basket for the impeccable timing. maybe i should send my ex one to, because the timing was truly perfect and i wouldn’t have it any other way. this album left me completely PARALYZED to my bed and i related so hard to it that it was almost an out of body experience. This song though? criminal. ARREST HER. i would drive around our small little town, BLASTING this song with tears pouring from my eyes. who writes songs like this, knowing the damage they would do by releasing it. i'll tell you who! lyrical geniuses. thank you olivia for putting all the things i wanted to say into one album.
3. you were good to me. jeremy sucker & chelsea cutler.
this song is stunning. it articulated all the feelings i had leading up to our break up exactly as they came to me. elements of guilt and fear drowned my body during the weeks before the break up. i felt guilty for wanting to give up on the relationship that we had put in YEARS, during one of the most crucial times in our lives, into each other. i felt like a guilty girlfriend, knowing that we had a lot of great times, but i was actively and intentionally letting the bad times block out the good times. i was guilty over the fact that i had only loved him instead of being in love with him. there was an IMMENSE amount of fear when we really finalized our relationship. we had been involved with each other since we were 14 years old and i had just turned 18. i didn’t know anything other than being a girlfriend…being HIS girlfriend. i didn’t wanna go into adulthood lost and not knowing who i was outside of this relationship. this song does a perfect job of thanking your ex for the space and time they gave you, but acknowledging that it was time to let go.
4. nobody gets me. sza (new release)
piggy backing off the reasons from the last song, the fear that i felt during the break up is perfectly translated in this song. one of my biggest fears was the day that he would be moved on with someone else or get into another relationship. i would get so caught up in the idea of him making the same promises he made to me to someone else, him calling another girl all the cute nicknames he had for me, or giving his heart, that had once belong to me, to another girl. i didn’t want to see him with someone else. i knew it would hurt too much and i would just sit with a pit in my stomach seeing that i am no longer apart of his life. i also believed that no one would understand me the way he did. this song HOWLS over the feeling of someone else not understanding you the way your ex did. i wish my 18 year old self knew that there would be people in her future that would understand her more than he ever could, some being platonic relationships, which makes it that much sweeter. maybe it’s a good thing this song, and album, came out now, while im moved on and content with my life, because this song would’ve ran my over like a freight train.
5. white ferrari. frank ocean
i would be flawed if i didn’t add this man to this list. there isn’t another song on this earth that could get me in my feels the way this song does. i’ll be driving at night, down some road, and this song comes on and i’m 18 again sobbing my eyes out on my way out of school seeing him in class. i was a heavy believer in the idea of “in another life” when it came to my ex boyfriend. i comforted myself with the belief that we may not have worked out in this life, but maybe in another life, in another universe, in another dimension, we would have stayed together. i believed that he was my soulmate and just because it didn’t work out now, didn’t mean that it didn’t work out for an alternate versions of ourselves (i was a very dramatic high schooler. again, no judging!!). i want to get the last minute of this song tattooed on me at one point because of how angelic it is. frank is one amongst the gods and i would sell my left kidney for him to drop another album. he is perfection.
6. falling. harry styles.
the scariest part of any relationship is risking not having that person in your life anymore if things went south. high risk, high reward, right? this is a risk and possibility all couples must be okay with, and these chances also lead to many relationships not happening because sometimes it's not worth it. my favorite part about my last relationship was how needed i felt by him, and hopefully he felt the same feeling from me. after a while, i refused to believe that we would ever break up. there was no need for me to ever think of “what if there’s a future and he’s not in it?” i was head over heels in love and couldn’t imagine a life without him (the most teenager way of thinking). my heart sometimes still aches when i listen to this song from time to time. it’s an ache over the fact that we weren’t able to stay in each other’s lives, even as friends. there wouldn’t and won’t be a future where we’d platonically celebrate birthdays together, ask each other how our days were, or see every goal and achievement be completed. that's a hard reality to face and a hard pill to swallow. i am someone he won’t talk about, my biggest fear at 15 came true.
to: 15 year old me,
lol sorry girly
from: 19 year old you
7. all I ask. adele.
some people fiend for closure after relationships. i am people. i need to know, after all the dust settles, why we didn’t work out. i wanted to know every reason why we didn’t work out and what his narrative was of our relationship, AFTER we had both digested and could piece together things to bring up about the relationship. i wanted one more opportunity, for the both of us, to get in our proper goodbye and explanation. i still feel like this is something i would want out of someone after a relationship with me, therefore, i will always offer the “closure talk” if the time ever arises. for a while after getting broken up with, i let me not remembering when our last kiss was eat me alive. i didn’t remember the last good moment we had because they had been covered and piled up by all the terrible moments leading up to our break up. the chorus of this song is something i begged for, HANDS AND KNEES BEGGING THIS KID. i wanted just one more moment with him. i wanted to end on a good note, share one last kiss or embrace that would satisfy that part of me that wanted to believe that what we had WAS special and made from love. i feared that if we, and by “we” I mean “me”, didn’t get that closure from our relationship, it would scare me away from ever dating again…honestly, it kinda did for a while. It doesn’t hurt that adele can’t write a bad song, even if she tried.
8. 25 in barcelona. jp saxe.
this man is a killer, he DOES. NOT. MISS. i was dumped the day before my birthday. brutal, i know. i spent my birthday ugly crying my eyes out, begging him to come over to come talk. the funniest part, looking back at the situation now (def wasn't funny when it happened), is that i didn’t wake up to a “happy birthday” text. instead, i woke up to a whole bunch of silence. i genuinely believed that he would at least say happy birthday, i sat there waiting for HOURS, hoping he’d say it a least once, hoping that my phone would light up its his name or he’d just magically show up at my door. this song is a very niche feeling, hitting on the yearning feeling you can have on your birthday, hoping for an ex to hit you with the “happy birthday” text as an excuse to slide back into your life. it didn’t happen though. even though it was meant to be “my day”, i still wished and expected that he would’ve been apart of it…even if it was through some obligatory text message.
9. kissing in the cold. jp saxe & julia michaels.
i had to throw in a sad holiday song with the holidays around the corner. these two KNOW how to tell a story. i found this song outside of the holiday season, and i didn’t realize it was a Christmas song until recently lol. i like to freeze moments in my life without taking a picture to remember it, because sometimes a picture will never do the moment justice. in the effort of trying to remember the good from our relationship, i choose to remember our relationship during christmas time. i choose to remember all the times we held hands in the cold, warming each other up by scooting or walking closer together, picking out presents to get him to show him my love, and being thankful for spending the holidays with someone i loved. i adore this song because it helped reminisce all the parts of our relationship that made it something worth saving. in my mind, we will always be that 15 year old couple, sitting on the ground, watching the sky in 40 degree weather with my dog lilo.
10. last kiss. taylor swift.
THIS IS THE SONG THAT KEPT ME IN THE BREAK UP SADNESS CHOKEHOLD. this song sounds of tears and disappointment! there is no one that gets a break up the way t swizzle does. post breakup thoughts often stemmed from remembering every detail of the break up. i replayed it in my head and marinated in all the things i could’ve or should’ve done or said. man, this song really just keeps firing even after you already waved your white flag. line after line will take you by the hand and leads you into the ABYSS of heart ache. all of these songs do have elements of denial, but homegirl taylor just comes out and says that she is in disbelief. i am all for remembering your relationships! think about all the times you spent with your once-upon-a-time-favorite-person. as mentioned before, i sat in denial for a while and i put 100% of the blame on THIS song. minutes 3:46 through 4:39…it could send anyone into a disgusting spiral. i'm listening to the song as i'm writing this and the intrusive thoughts and intruding, and that’s what i call a job well done from taylor’s part. congratulations taylor, you are doing your job, and you are doing it well.
i will now laugh at my thought process after getting dumped. getting broken up with just sucks. it’ll leave you in the shadow realm to just fend for yourself. luckily for me, i got to see the light of sun again, and we are FAR past this situation and happily and full heartedly move on. these songs don’t have the power they once did, but i would guarantee that if my feelings ever do get hurt again or someone wants to throw my little heart of the floor and do a little stomp dance on it, these are the ten songs i will be running to in order to feel everything happening to me.
please don’t call your ex.
with all my love,
♡steff
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