Women Who Travel

After a Breakup, Travel Is Sometimes the Only Answer

A post-breakup trip can be many things—distracting, empowering, lonely—but it can also offer a way forward.
After a Breakup Travel Is Sometimes the Only Answer
Monique Aimee

When her relationship ended in September of last year, Leah Castillo knew she had to get out of San Luis Obispo, California. Her apartment was littered with reminders of a recent string of belly-up relationships—including the woman who, she’d just discovered, had been with someone else. She moved out of her apartment, packed up her Mitsubishi Outlander, and headed to Zion National Park.

“There were reminders of my heartbreak everywhere and I was left pretty broken. I felt extremely undesirable, my self-worth had taken a hit, and I could not escape the insecurity and doubt I had about myself,” says Castillo. “I couldn't stay where I was and heal properly. But I knew that if I was in some desolate canyon in Utah, my past experiences would be nowhere to be found.” She began a two-month journey through the American Southwest, where she camped in national parks, taught herself how to fly fish, and angry-cried as she drove her car across the desert.

Cutting your hair, quitting your job, moving cities—trying to reclaim a sense of control after a break up is a common reaction when life is flipped upside down. It's no wonder, then, that travel has long been an appealing coping mechanism. It offers the separation of routine, new connections, and, importantly, a chance to focus on the self. Love it or loathe it, there’s a reason Eat, Pray, Love struck a chord with so many. 

But what role can travel really play in the healing process?

“After a breakup, you're going through withdrawal—the dopamine, the oxytocin, the serotonin, all those hormones that love produces for you are no longer there,” says Kathleen Hendrik Ebbitt, a New York City-based therapist in the Alma network who moved to Mexico City following her own breakup two years ago. “It's a really scary space to be in, to need to acclimate to what the brain is when you're no longer in love. One reason that I think travel can be really great after a breakup is that it can stimulate your brain and encourage new connections within your cerebral matter.”

Those benefits begin before you even leave home, experts say. Not only is there distraction in putting together your great escape, but it offers a more practical reason to stop sifting through the wreckage of the split and begin thinking about what comes next. “When you are in the pain and darkness of a separation, people get very stuck in the past,” says Amy Chan, a former relationship columnist and founder of Renew Breakup Bootcamp retreats, which take place in upstate New York and California. “[People] go into spirals of what should have happened, what shouldn’t have happened, and that’s what really keeps them stuck. Travel can be helpful because you put something in the calendar to look forward to. That shift of focus gives a little bit of hope.”

Florence Williams, author of the forthcoming book HEARTBREAK, which explores the science of a broken heart—a journey she went on following the dissolution of her 25-year-marriage—says that planning allows you to take a breather from your emotions. “Psychologists have shown that [planning] engages your frontal cortex and thinking brain, and you get out of your emotional brain for a little while.”

This switching of gears was a benefit that Castillo noticed right away once she hit the road. “When you're traveling, you can't really go on autopilot like at home,” she says. “I would be crying and then I'd have to stop and think, Okay, where am I sleeping tonight? What happens if my tire blows out in the middle of nowhere? How am I going to get WiFi?”

Anyone who’s sat in the muck of a heartbreak can appreciate that relief—even a momentary release from the grip of unanswered questions and the relentless inspection of memories for answers is precious. But distraction will only get you so far, says Chan, who leaned into yoga retreats following a gut-wrenching breakup of her own before founding Renew: You don’t want to just “procrastinate your pain.” The idea of a whirlwind European train trip that sucks up every minute of your attention, for example, might sound great, but the quiet moments, where you’re left staring out the window and forced to return to your thoughts, are where progress can happen.

“In a breakup it’s important to really ask yourself: Am I using the full capacity of my brain and not just having this knee jerk response to escape a situation which is painful?” says Hendrik Ebbitt. “There’s a lot of romanticism around travel—[instead] think about intention and expectation and really look at travel as a healing tool.”

Maybe that means intentionally taking a trip outside your comfort zone, where the stimulation of newness and the opportunity to make decisions can be empowering. For San Francisco-based Alexa Ford, a breakup at age 21 led her to spontaneously apply for a solo hiking permit on the Nüümü Poyo in California, also known as the John Muir Trail. She hiked it across 13 days—her first backpacking trip, ever. “I had no gear, I had never been backpacking, and I was terrified of mountain lions,” she says. “But it took three months to get ready, which was the best distraction after a hard breakup. And there really is no medicine like walking by yourself for 210 miles with some good tunes and a self-help podcast.”

Some travelers might not be comfortable going it alone, but planning a trip on your own terms, even if it’s closer to home or with friends, can help restore a sense of self-agency and identity often lost during a breakup. “What’s at the core of a heartbreak is that your identity gets shaken up—it profoundly affects your self-esteem and your sense of self,” says Williams. “Who are you without this person, especially if it’s been a long relationship? The power of travel speaks to so many things you need to address in order to feel better. You can have self-agency, you’re not just someone things happen to.” 

Taking a trip that you’ve called the shots on can help you reacquaint yourself with who you are, she says. And if you’re the one who’s done the leaving? It can be a powerful way to remind yourself that you did the right thing, because you have a strong sense of what you want to be doing—and who you want to be doing it with.

© Monique Aimee

Monique Aimee

For Hendrik Ebbitt, part of what drew her to Mexico City after her relationship ended was wanting to be in a space where she wasn’t speaking English, nor familiar with her environment. “In a lot of ways I wanted to allow my brain to go into a different terrain in order to better focus on healing,” she says. “I also felt proud that I was doing something which seemed brave.”

While this approach worked for Ebbitt, she says many of her patients worry about getting off track. “The primary thing that women going through breakups are experiencing, I think, have to do with identity politics—who they are, who they want to be,” says Hendrik Ebbitt. “Particularly with younger people I work with, people are getting married later, if at all, having children later, if at all. People are grappling with this ideology we’ve been fed as to who we should be as women, so in addition to the grieving process, [you’re thinking about] not having the same capacity to meet those societal benchmarks that we’ve internalized as steps into womanhood.”

Concerns about a breakup, like having to restart aspects of your life, being out of time, somehow falling behind, is what Chan says is the most universal sentiment echoed by women who arrive at her retreats—whether they’re in their 30s or 70s.

“Our culture really reinforces [a perceived] disability of older women, and their sexual lack of viability,” says Williams. “And it’s just this huge amount of bullshit. You’re not too old to have fun, you’re not too old to have adventures, you’re not too old to find deep meaning and beauty and fulfillment in relationships of all flavors.” It’s important to put yourself in situations where you can be reminded of those things, she says.

It should come as no surprise that a post-breakup trip won’t always be pretty. You might, like Castillo, find yourself screaming out of frustration in the privacy of your car, in the middle of nowhere in Utah, only to realize that the windows are cracked and your campsite neighbors definitely heard. Ford, meanwhile, left her fair share of tears on the Nüümü Poyo. But the real beauty is in experiencing these moments, and coming out the other side. Travel is, after all, meant to move us. It can put our everyday lives in perspective, and make our problems, even if just temporarily, feel like drops in the ocean.

“There's nothing like travel to remind us that we live in a big world and we're a small part of it,” says Williams. “No matter which side of heartbreak you’re on, you're going to be dealing with a lot of emotions, like guilt, or rejection. And those emotions are important to feel but it's also important to have some perspective so that they don't take over everything. A loss of ego is really helpful.”

For Castillo, her breakthrough moment came one night in the middle of a thunderstorm in the Gila National Forest, New Mexico, at a dark sky reserve. “I was having a pretty rough day, stuck in my thoughts, and I got caught in this intense storm—thunder was shaking my car, lightning was striking every two seconds, but I was stuck and all I could do was watch,” she recalls. “When the storm finally passed, I stepped outside. The air was electric from the lightning and there was the most insane blanket of stars that I've ever seen in my life. I felt lucky to just be standing there, alive and healthy, and to be able to travel to see things. And I thought, Yeah, I’m going to be okay.”