Breakups Turn People Into Sick, Hairless Mutants

Love is…well, love is a lot of things, none of which are efficient, easy or safe. It may even be a myth, created by Aphrodite to make sure that her smarter, more career-oriented sister Athena didn’t get all credit for everything awesome in the world. According to some end-of-summer ruminations on romance courtesy of Women’s Health, losing love can also affect us the same as a debilitating case of oyster poisoning, that is, it can make us physically unwell, so much so that we spend hours in the bathroom. I know — it’s graphic and disgusting, maybe even a little crass, but so is love! (Love=diarrhea, you guys — it’s math, so you know it’s legit.)

How does heartbreak turn people into physiological disaster areas? Ah, the scribes at Women’s Health are super glad you asked! “Getting dumped,” so the bio-logic goes, “ignites a series of reactions that ends up feeling like a full-body blow.” Stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline embark on the full-body trick-or-treat tour, clogging your pores, slowing your digestion, fucking your immune system with creepy Easter Bunny masks on and torching your hair follicles. By the end of this traumatic process, heartbreak has rendered you a fat, bald, pimply monster with a really bad cough and a nose that’s always drippy.

Not only that, but you’re also super emotional after a breakup, which means that your brain’s pleasure/pain control centers are flashing like a telethon phone bank at a Muppets variety show. In this state, you’re liable to think about doing anything to ease the pain, even getting back together with (or Facebook stalking!!) Skeeter, the lifeguard you spent all summer making out with at night on the beach in an empty row boat that smelled vaguely of fish heads and wet dog. However, with the inexorable march of time comes the ability to move on, to forget, to re-grow some of that hair and find someone else. Or not find someone else. Maybe set off on your own vision quest in the Mojave Desert and decide to build a spaceship. Out of rocks and good ol’ American know-how.