A blank check. A photograph of a former lover with his pros and cons listed on the back. An oven mitt.
All this and more were headed toward a bedazzled paper shredder while a crowd cheered: “Shred it! Shred it! Shred it!”
This scene was unfolding at a party called “The Ex Files,” on the Monday after Valentine’s Day, at Fabrik, a co-working space in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. Dozens had gathered for a candlelit evening to get over their exes — ex-lovers, ex-bosses, ex-friends — and commiserate over the sting of heartbreak. At the candlelit party, guests sipped cocktails called “Cold Shoulder” and “Kiss of Death” at a bar adorned with skeleton bones and sliced blood oranges and pomegranates. The vibes were equal parts coven and schadenfreude, and stories about horrible exes that in other settings would have killed the mood were regarded here as badges of honor.
“Heartbreak is misunderstood,” said Sofia Kavlin, 30, who was inspired to create this event after going through a breakup and losing her grandmother on the same day. “It’s extremely painful, but, for whatever reason, there’s a lot of shame around feeling that extreme pain, as if it’s not valid.” What people need, she added, is a space to feel it and share it with others.
The fact that the event sold out with little marketing, and attracted guests like Alysia Reiner, an actress who recently appeared in “The Diplomat” on Netflix, seemed to affirm this assertion.
“I was invited by a dear friend, and at first I was like, ‘Oh no, no, no, I met my husband when I was 20, so I have nothing to deal with,’” Ms. Reiner said. But when she took her 16-year-old daughter to see the Broadway play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” it brought back painful memories. “From the age of 13 to 19,” she said, “there were so many men who were so much older than me who I had inappropriate relationships with, and I never fully dealt with it.”
The heartbroken, like Syeda Zaidi, a 42-year-old relationship coach, came to the event armed with the ephemera of a past they wanted to purge. At the start of the evening, guests were asked to write anonymous notes to their exes and throw them into a bowl.
Ms. Zaidi brought a dress her ex-boyfriend, a fashion designer, had made for her. She couldn’t bring herself to put it through the shredder, but it felt significant just to show it around. “He didn’t even get my measurements right,” she said as she held it up.
Under a banner that read “Wall of Shame,” guests posted pink sticky notes with handwritten anecdotes — the more tragic, the better.
“I kissed my ex’s dad,” one read.
“Dated a man who lived in an office lol,” read another.
A man named Ed, who didn’t want to share any other personal details because his breakup was so recent, said reading the wall was therapeutic. “You catastrophize your own life and then you have some perspective when you learn about other people who actually had really bad breakups,” he said.
The event was hosted by an organization called Unsent Letters, founded on Valentine’s Day two years ago by Ms. Kavlin while she was a student at the Parsons School of Design. She created a large, wooden mailbox that she took to Washington Square Park, asking people to submit anonymous letters that they wanted to send but couldn’t or haven’t. In return, they could read someone else’s letter from the mailbox.
“The central appeal of this project,” she added, “is that you write a letter, you get it off your chest, you read one and you realize that you are not alone.”
Over the past two years, Ms. Kavlin has organized writing salons and other pop-up events. But this was Unsent Letter’s first anti-Valentine’s event. Ms. Kavlin co-hosted the evening with her friend, Bonnie Blue Edwards, a theater producer, who was a guest at one of Ms. Kavlin’s events last year. Ms. Edwards, 37, had, at the time, found out that her boyfriend of two years had been cheating on her.
In their shared pain, they came up with the idea for “Ex Files.” (Ms. Edwards now has a partner, and Ms. Kavlin is single.)
At one point in the evening, an improvisation crew called Headshop Guerrillas plucked anonymous letters from the communal bowl and turned them into stand-up prompts. Letters were read aloud, with commentators picking apart the performance. Some were sung aloud as if they were the plot of an imaginary musical. Others were read as if they were Shakespeare. Turning raw emotions into tragicomedy was the point.
“When you can laugh at something, you can say you’re on the other side of it,” Ms. Kavlin said.
Then the shredding ritual began. Buoyed by the sound of the crowd’s cheers, one by one, guests stepped up to the sparkly altar and dumped their materials into the shredder.
“Ah, the beautiful sound of shredding,” said Iris Bahr, a comedian and the evening’s emcee. “Sounds like my vibrator.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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