For Your Broken Heart, Consider a Breakup Budget

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For a month after a breakup in early June, I wavered between empowered mania and “Wuthering Heights” anguish. If I’d had access to moors I would have roamed them nightly à la the book’s brutish, tormented hero, Heathcliff, wild-haired and sporting a messy cravat, but I was in Austin, Texas, where there is nary a moor and it’s too hot for roaming. So, as I had done after previous breakups, I dabbled in retail therapy. Once, I spent $100 on a wooden gorilla. On another occasion, I bought a philodendron that has since taken over my home, “Jumanji”-style. (If your aim is to purge a lover’s memory, I suggest a less invasive plant.) After this most recent split, however, I left the sphere of retail therapy and waltzed on the plane of shopping addiction. Sadly, the one thing I deemed too expensive was talking to a therapist. Instead, I bought a ticket to Mexico to join my sister at a resort I couldn’t afford. I signed up for a Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, with its $550 annual fee and impressive travel benefits, reasoning that it would make more trips to Mexico possible. I spent $165 on a deep-tissue massage and $130 on an annual subscription to MasterClass. I mined La Perla’s sale items, which are still preposterously expensive. (You can put a price on a perfect décolletage, and it is $173.)