Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let the 6th Arrondissement Break My Heart
by Elena Makree
Let me tell you something about Paris that the Instagram influencers won’t. You know those reels? The ones with the girl in the beret, biting into a croissant like it’s the first time bread has ever touched human lips, while “La Vie en Rose” plays at half-speed? Yeah. That’s not Paris. That’s a fantasy they’re selling to people who still think “amour” rhymes with “forever.”
Here’s what Paris actually is: the best damn place in the world to have your heart absolutely demolished. And I’m not being sarcastic. Well. Maybe fifteen percent sarcastic. The rest is hard-won wisdom from someone who has cried on seventeen different Métro platforms and can tell you exactly which bench in the Tuileries has the optimal angle for watching the sunset while questioning every life choice that led you to date a jazz clarinetist named Étienne.
Paul Simon wrote “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” back in 1975, and sure, it’s a catchy little number about cutting ties with minimal fuss. Slip out the back, Jack. Hop on the bus, Gus. Very practical. Very efficient. Very American, honestly.
But Paris doesn’t do efficient heartbreak. Paris does the kind of breakup where you accidentally run into your ex at the same fromagerie three times in one week and each time you pretend to be deeply absorbed in analyzing a Camembert’s rind. Paris does the kind of breakup where you have to decide which of the seventeen bridges you’re going to dramatically stare off of, and you better pick the right one because the Pont des Arts doesn’t have the same energy for post-relationship brooding since they took all the locks down.
So in the spirit of Paul Simon, but also in the spirit of every dramatically weeping person I’ve watched eat a pain au chocolat alone at a café terrace (myself included, obviously), here are fifty ways to leave your lover. In Paris. The city that invented the sad girl walk for a reason.
1. Just get lost in Belleville, Lil
Not figuratively. Literally. Belleville has streets that fold in on themselves like a map that’s been through the washing machine. Your GPS will surrender. Your phone will die. You’ll wander past a Vietnamese bakery, a shop selling nothing but enamel spoons, and three different bars playing Edith Piaf simultaneously. Somewhere between Rue de Belleville and Rue des Cascades, you’ll realize you haven’t thought about them in forty-five minutes. That’s when you know.
2. Order a café crème and stare at nothing, Darlin’
Here’s the thing about Parisian cafés: nobody cares if you sit for three hours with one coffee. The waiters have seen worse. They’ve seen the man who brings his own baguette and eats it under the table like a goblin. They’ve seen the woman who practices opera auditions into her napkin. You, quietly disintegrating while staring at the Place de la République? Rookie numbers. Order another coffee. Take your time. The heartbreak will wait.
3. Walk along the Canal Saint-Martin until your feet bleed (well, not actually, but metaphorically)
The canal is where Paris goes to feel melancholic in an aesthetically pleasing way. Iron footbridges. Plane trees. The occasional person reading a book that’s way too intellectual for their actual comprehension level. Walk from the Bastille all the way up to La Villette. Count the number of couples you see. Hate them all, quietly, in your soul. Then keep walking. Eventually the endorphins kick in. Or the blisters. One of the two.
4. Take a wrong train from Châtelet-Les-Halles, Alice
This station is a literal underground labyrinth designed by someone who hated humanity. Twenty-six exits. Five train lines. A shopping mall. A sense of existential dread that hangs in the air like humidity. Get on the first RER that arrives. Don’t check the destination. End up in the suburbs you’ve never heard of. Eat mediocre pizza at a place called “New York New York” (inexplicably run by a man from Lyon). Take a different train back. Congratulations, you’ve just had an adventure and barely thought about how they used to make fun of your laugh.
5. Let a stranger buy you a glass of Sancerre, Claire
Don’t go home with them. Don’t even flirt. Just let a nice person (or a medium-person, whatever, we’re not judging) buy you wine at a bar near the Odéon. Talk about something meaningless. The weather. The way the light hits the building across the street. How you’ve never quite understood why people like oysters. This is called “remembering that other humans exist” and it’s very important. Also the wine is good. French wine for heartbreak is like French pharmacy skincare for acne: surprisingly effective, slightly expensive, and you’ll develop a mild dependency.
6. Visit Père Lachaise Cemetery and put your grief in perspective, Meredith
Oscar Wilde’s tomb has a permanent lipstick-stained plexiglass barrier now (too many kisses, too many ruined stones). Jim Morrison’s grave has a security guard because people kept doing mushrooms there in the 90s. Edith Piaf’s grave is small and unassuming, which feels right for someone who sang about regret like she invented it. Walk among the dead. Look at the dates. 1823-1876. 1899-1942. Your breakup? It’s not even a footnote. It’s not even a semicolon. It’s a speck of dust on the wing of a butterfly that someone else forgot to photograph. Somehow, this helps.
7. Eat the entire Berthillon ice cream by yourself, El
Not one scoop. Not two. The entire thing. You know what Berthillon is, right? The legendary ice cream from Île Saint-Louis? The one with the lines that wrap around the corner? Get the dark chocolate. Get the salted caramel. Get the pear sorbet that tastes like someone figured out how to freeze heaven. Eat it on the steps looking at Notre Dame (still under scaffolding, still beautiful, just like your emotional state). Your stomach will hurt. Your heart will hurt slightly less. It’s called balance.
8. Go thrifting in the Marais and reinvent yourself completely
You don’t need therapy. You need a 1970s leather jacket that smells faintly of someone else’s cigarette memories and a sweater that your ex would have hated. The Marais has vintage shops that charge €300 for a shirt that a dead man last wore in 1982, but it also has the good ones, the dusty ones run by women who look at you like they’ve seen your exact pain a thousand times before and they know that a €12 silk scarf won’t fix it but it also won’t hurt. Buy the scarf. Wear it like armor.
9. Find the Luis Vuitton Foundation at night, Dwight
Look, I don’t know who Dwight is, Paul Simon. But we’re workshopping. The Fondation Louis Vuitton looks like a glass cloud that crash-landed in the Bois de Boulogne. Go there after dark. Walk around the outside. The way the light reflects off those weird glass sails feels like something out of a dream you’d have after eating cheese too late. Stand there. Let the building be weirder than your emotional state. Let architecture hold space for you. Then walk home through the park and pretend you’re not scared of the dark. You’re already scared of love. What’s one more fear?
10. Watch a movie at Le Champo, Joe
Le Champo on Rue des Écoles plays old films all night. You can watch Breathless and remember that Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character was actually kind of terrible and also dead at the end. You can watch Jules and Jim and remember that love triangles are exhausting for everyone involved. You can watch Amélie and remember that you’re not quirky, you’re just sad, and that’s okay too. Sit in the dark with strangers who are also escaping something. It’s communion. It’s cheaper than a priest.
And the rest? Well, you get the idea. Take a cooking class where you learn to make macarons and then eat all forty-seven failed ones yourself. Get lost in the passages couverts and pretend you’re in a novel from 1895. Buy a single red rose from the vendor outside the Métro and give it to a stranger on the RER for no reason. Find the mur des je t’aime in Montmartre (the wall where “I love you” is written in 250 languages) and photograph only the cracks between the tiles. Stand in the courtyard of the Palais Royal and scream into your scarf. Nobody will hear you. Paris is very loud.
Here’s what I’ve learned, after all of this, after the crying on the Pont Neuf and the too-many bottles of rouge and the morning where I woke up in my 14th-floor walk-up and realized I couldn’t remember their phone number anymore.
Paris doesn’t fix your broken heart. That’s not the deal. The deal is that Paris witnesses it. Every crumbling Haussmann building has seen a thousand heartbreaks. Every cobblestone in the Latin Quarter has been paced by someone asking themselves what went wrong. Every bench in every garden has absorbed enough tears to fill the Seine twice over.
You don’t leave your lover in Paris because you’re running away. You leave them here because the city knows. It knows that sometimes love ends not with a bang or even with a bus, but with a slow walk home in the rain, past a boulangerie that’s already closed, your shoulders wet, your phone dark, and the distant sound of someone practicing scales on a piano in a fifth-floor apartment with the window cracked open.
And you think: I’m okay. Or I will be. Or I’m learning the difference between the two.
So slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. No need to be coy, Roy. Just listen to the city. It’s been breaking hearts longer than you’ve had one. And it’s really, really good at it.
À votre santé, you beautiful disaster. The next round’s on Paris.