Over 19 years, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia, has amassed more than 4,000 items: watches, stiletto shoes, espresso machines, self-empowering books, wedding gowns, angry dolls, axes, and breast implants. They’re all items that left a severe mark on the hearts of the people who donated them. Now, they’re displayed for all to see in a 10,000-square-foot baroque palace in Zagreb’s Gornji Grad, or Upper Town — a historic hilltop neighborhood of charming little cobblestone streets.
19 年来，克罗地亚萨格勒布的失恋博物馆收藏了 4000 多件藏品：手表、高跟鞋、浓缩咖啡机、自我赋权书籍、婚纱、愤怒的娃娃、斧头和乳房植入物。这些物品都在捐赠者的心中留下了深刻的印记。现在，它们在萨格勒布上城 (Gornji Grad) 的一座 10,000 平方英尺的巴洛克式宫殿中向所有人展示，这是一个历史悠久的山顶社区，拥有迷人的鹅卵石小街道。
The collection began in 2004, when Dražen Grubišić, a prolific visual artist, and Olinka Vištica, an arts producer, broke up. Afterward, Grubišić found himself trapped by an object that still held emotional value: a toy bunny that he and Vištica had each left with the other while traveling abroad. How would they deal with the bunny post-breakup?
该系列始于 2004 年，当时多产的视觉艺术家 Dražen Grubišić 和艺术制作人 Olinka Vištica 分手。之后，格鲁比希奇发现自己被一个仍然具有情感价值的物体困住了：他和维什蒂卡在出国旅行时各自留下的一只玩具兔子。分手后，他们会如何对待兔子呢？
“I have always found burning and destroying objects barbaric,” Grubišić says. Apparently, so had Vištica. The former lovers talked about creating a place where items like their bunny could rest in peace — and where these cast-off artifacts would be treated like found art. In 2006, they put up an exhibition in a shipping container in the garden of a Zagreb art museum, containing items donated by residents of the Croatian capital. The exhibition made quite an impression. Soon, boxes filled with objects and stories started coming their way, often from beyond Zagreb. Popularity planted the idea in their minds of creating a permanent museum. In 2010, the Museum of Broken Relationships opened its doors.
“我一直认为焚烧和毁坏物体是野蛮行为，”格鲁比希奇说。显然，Vištica 也是如此。这对前恋人谈到要创建一个地方，让他们的兔子等物品可以安息，并且这些废弃的文物将像发现的艺术品一样被对待。 2006年，他们在萨格勒布艺术博物馆花园的集装箱内举办了一场展览，其中包含克罗地亚首都居民捐赠的物品。这次展览给人留下了深刻的印象。很快，装满物品和故事的盒子开始运来，通常来自萨格勒布以外的地方。受欢迎程度让他们产生了创建永久性博物馆的想法。 2010 年，失恋博物馆开业。
Visitors wind through seven rooms, each with a poetic title, such as “Body of evidence,” “Archaeology of the heart,” and “The doors we dare not open.” Smaller museum items are displayed in cases along the walls; others are placed atop boxes.
参观者蜿蜒穿过七个房间，每个房间都有一个诗意的标题，例如“证据本体”、“心灵考古”和“我们不敢打开的门”。较小的博物馆物品陈列在沿墙的箱子里；其他的则放置在盒子的顶部。
Now, broken-hearted lovers can ship their romantic memento and its accompanying story directly to Zagreb. So can anyone with a token of a lost platonic relationship. The donations are typically anonymous. “People have donated items related to war, family, breakup with religion, or breakup with profession,” Grubišić tells me over coffee in the cozy cafe inside the museum. The collection includes a love letter that a 13-year-old boy wrote during the Bosnian war — but never gave — to Elma, a “blonde and incredibly cute” girl whom he met while their families fled Sarajevo in a car convoy.
现在，心碎的恋人可以将他们的浪漫纪念品及其伴随的故事直接运送到萨格勒布。任何有失去柏拉图式关系象征的人都可以。捐款通常是匿名的。 “人们捐赠了与战争、家庭、与宗教分手或与职业分手有关的物品，”格鲁比希奇在博物馆内舒适的咖啡馆喝咖啡时告诉我。该系列包括一封情书，是一名 13 岁男孩在波斯尼亚战争期间写给埃尔玛的一封情书，但从未送给她，埃尔玛是一个“金发碧眼、非常可爱”的女孩，他是在家人乘坐车队逃离萨拉热窝时认识的。
Most of the museum’s items carry the emotional weight of failed romance. Breakups are hard. Donors’ sarcasm and outright bitterness ricochet across many of the exhibited items. Strolling through the museum, I notice a beautiful, azure Frisbee titled the “Stupid Frisbee.” The description begins: “a stupid Frisbee, bought in a thrift store, was my ex-boyfriend’s brilliant idea — as a second anniversary gift.” The donor, who did not appreciate the gift or the ex, describes the donated Frisbee as “expelled negative energy.”
博物馆的大部分藏品都承载着失败爱情的情感重担。分手很难。捐赠者的讽刺和彻头彻尾的苦涩在许多展出的物品中回荡。漫步在博物馆中，我注意到一个美丽、蔚蓝的飞盘，名为“愚蠢的飞盘”。描述是这样开始的：“一个愚蠢的飞盘，在旧货店买的，是我前男友的绝妙主意——作为两周年纪念礼物。”捐赠者并不欣赏这份礼物或前任，他将捐赠的飞盘描述为“驱逐负能量”。
“People want so badly to have closure or a sense of finality, and sometimes it just doesn’t exist.”
Elizabeth Glowacki, a health communication professor at Northeastern University
“人们非常希望有一种结束或终结感，但有时它根本不存在。”
伊丽莎白·格洛瓦茨基 (Elizabeth Glowacki)，东北大学健康传播学教授 Tweet this quote Share this quote
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People often long for closure at the termination of a relationship. Some psychologists say that’s because the brain needs a narrative to make sense of what happened and prevent us from repeating the same faulty relationship patterns in the future. Therein lies the premise of the museum: In addition to curating romantic pasts, it also wants to help us reckon with them emotionally.
人们常常渴望在关系结束时结束。一些心理学家说，这是因为大脑需要一个叙述来理解发生的事情，并防止我们在未来重复同样的错误关系模式。这就是博物馆的前提：除了策划浪漫的过去，它还想帮助我们在情感上思考它们。
“Humans are messy, and relationships are messy and complex,” says Elizabeth Glowacki, a health communication professor at Northeastern University. “People want so badly to have closure or a sense of finality, and sometimes it just doesn’t exist.”
“人类是混乱的，人际关系也是混乱而复杂的，”东北大学健康传播学教授伊丽莎白·格洛瓦茨基 (Elizabeth Glowacki)说。 “人们非常希望有一种结束或终结感，但有时它根本不存在。”
To move on from a bad experience, Glowacki says, we may want to shift our focus from compulsively seeking closure for the past to improving ourselves going forward: taking up new hobbies, forging new relationships, and rekindling old ones with family members or friends.
格洛瓦茨基说，为了摆脱糟糕的经历，我们可能需要将注意力从强迫性地寻求过去的结束转移到改善自己的未来：培养新的爱好，建立新的关系，并与家人或朋友重燃旧的关系。
Still, she doesn’t deny that mailing something to Zagreb might help. Glowacki calls the Museum of Broken Relationships a nice illustration of personal attempts to get closure. “You have a concrete, tangible item you can see, and touch, and feel,” she says. And the descriptions that accompany the artifacts are full of catharsis. “Writing is powerful and journaling [is] very helpful for people who are trying to cope and articulate feelings,” she says.
尽管如此，她并不否认邮寄一些东西到萨格勒布可能会有所帮助。格洛瓦茨基称，失恋博物馆是个人试图结束关系的一个很好的例证。 “你有一个具体的、有形的物品，你可以看到、触摸、感觉到，”她说。而伴随着文物的描述则充满了宣泄。 “写作的力量很强大，而写日记对于那些试图应对和表达感受的人来说非常有帮助，”她说。
The description next to a toy hamburger from Differdange, Luxembourg, is poignant: “His dog left more traces behind than he did.” The text accompanying a rusty key bottle opener from Ljubljana, Slovenia, is heartbreaking: “You talked to me of love and presented me with small gifts every day; this is just one of them,” it reads. “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.” Whether it be sadness at the finality of death or bitterness at time wasted with a partner deemed unworthy in hindsight, maybe the words tagging along with the objects can wash away some of the sentiment suffocating the person.
来自卢森堡迪弗当日的一个玩具汉堡旁边的描述令人心酸：“他的狗留下的痕迹比他留下的痕迹还要多。”来自斯洛文尼亚卢布尔雅那的一把生锈的钥匙开瓶器上的文字令人心碎：“你每天跟我谈爱，还送我小礼物；这只是其中之一，”上面写道。 “打开心灵的钥匙。你转过我的头；你只是不想和我一起睡。直到你死于艾滋病之后，我才意识到你有多么爱我。”无论是对死亡结局的悲伤，还是与事后认为不值得的伴侣浪费时间的痛苦，也许与物品一起标记的文字可以洗去一些令人窒息的情感。
The Museum of Broken Relationships also helps the heartbroken with a more modern problem: What to do with digital mementos of a former relationship. You can easily take down the blissfully toothy vacation picture of you and your ex from your wall, and think you’re done with them, until one day — PING! — the same picture pops up on Facebook.
So donors can send digital belongings to the museum as well: pictures, videos, chat histories, social media posts, metadata, and text messages. Each donation joins the museum’s database and depository, where it will wait until it is curated for permanent display, a touring exhibition, or another project. Donors can even time-lock their digital possession for a chosen period so that no one can see it until they’re ready. The digital collection is part of a collaboration between the museum and researchers with the “Materialising Memories” project, which studies how technology can support remembering. (Other work by Materialising Memories researchers includes advice on navigating digital breakups, from managing Facebook feeds to untangling streaming-service passwords.) The museum also maintains a website where anyone can scroll through a digital collection of stories that its online community has pinned on the map.
Still, there’s something especially compelling about seeing real-life artifacts in a dramatic physical space. The museum’s building once belonged to a baronial family named Kulmer, and its Baroque legacy is still there in the dome-shaped ceilings of the corridors that connect the vividly named rooms. Before sparkling white walls, visitors study texts that explain the romantic symbolism behind glittery high heels, an old bicycle, a blue parachute, a “toaster of vindication,” a Galileo thermometer, and a brown-haired action figure missing a palm.
The museum does not shy away from cheekiness. On the day I visited, a well-groomed man carefully read the description next to a vibrator donated by a woman in Bloomington, Indiana. Her boyfriend gave her the vibrator because they didn’t want to have sex until they got married. They kept their promise and married four years later, had a “beautiful child,” and divorced seven years down the line because they “didn’t click sexually.” “It took me a long time to realize how much good sex matters,” the woman concluded. A smile formed on the gentleman’s face as he moved to the next item on display.
The museum’s contents prove that any item can be important, at least to somebody, given the right associations. What looks like a petrified roach wing placed upon the petrified body of a wasp turns out to be “Twenty-seven-year-old Crust from a Wound of My First Love,” donated by someone from Mürzzuschlag, Austria. When a scab fell off a loved one recovering from a 1990 motorbike accident, the donor kept it, “with the (not so serious) idea that in case of need I could have him cloned.” It may be the only organic matter on display at the museum. More obviously sentimental is the “Plush Snoopy,” given to a woman on her 17th birthday by a husband who, 30 years and three sons later, told her he was in love with another woman.
Finality may be an illusion. Closure may come, or not. And sometimes one bad relationship still leads to other good ones. Maybe the “Forget-Me-Not” — a chubby porcelain doll with orange cheeks, wearing a checkered salopette and black sandals — can illustrate this better. The donor, from Helsinki, Finland, offered it to the museum with this note:
“My first true love. We got together just before we started our studies and we became adults together. We studied and lived together, and then finally realized that we had different expectations for the future. We separated quite suddenly without saying goodbye properly. Six months after the separation, I got this doll from his parents as a Christmas present, together with a letter explaining that the doll’s name is Forget-Me-Not and that they hope I will never forget them. They were always so good to me and I really loved them. I have not forgotten. And I never will.”
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