Originally published in 1987 and continuously in print since then, Coming Apart has been an important resource for hundreds of thousands of readers experiencing painful breakups. Whether going through a divorce, separation, or break up, bestselling author Daphne Rose Kingma, offers the tools and validation needed to move forward.

ContentsForeword A Note to My Readers Introduction to the Revised Edition 1 A Hand to Hold 2 Why Is Breaking Up So Hard to Do? 3 Exploding the Love Myths: Why Are We Really in Relationships? 4 Charting the Life-Span of Love: Seven Relationships and Why They Ended 5 The Emotional Process of Parting 6 The Unconscious Process of Parting 7 Binding the Wounds: How to Get Through the Ending 8 The Postscript Relationship: An Antidote to Love 9 Finding Resolution: A Personal Workbook 10 Is There Love after Love? 11 A Ritual for Parting A Diagnostic Coda: When Love No Longer Works—Signs and Symptoms of Ending

"Kingma deals with love so directly . . . that Coming Apart brings immediate comfort to anyone in pain." —LA Weekly, Reviews "Thought provoking perspectives on relationships." —News Tribune, Reviews “In this book, Daphne will take you under her wing (and yes, hers is indeed a literal angel's wing!) and lead you step by step through a profoundly intelligent, compassionate, and kindhearted healing process that is highly transformative and which will literally weave you back to wholeness in all those places where you've felt betrayed, battered, broken, and bruised.” —Katherine Woodward Thomas, MA, MFT, author of the New York Times bestseller Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

From the book: Obsolete Mythologies of LoveAnother thing that makes breaking up so painful is that we have a number of myths about love and relationships, about how love and marriage “should be,” that are no longer a reflection of reality. Our beliefs about love no longer match up with what's going on in the world, and they are contradicted when our relationships end. I call these out-of-date notions the obsolete mythologies of love. Love Is ForeverOur primary and probably most potent myth about love is that love is forever, that when we make a relationship, it will last for our whole lives. Our marriage vows—“Till death do us part”—are the public ceremonial expression of that myth. We don't say, “I'll love you as long as it feels good,” or, “I'll love you until I find somebody else.” We say, “I'll love you forever; I'll live with you until one of us dies.” We expect the person we choose to be our partner to be with us for our whole lives. It is this assumption in particular that makes breaking up so hard to do. In ending a relationship, we negate the myth of forever; we violate the assumption that our relationship will last us for our whole lives. What we see is that instead of being forever, our relationship was just an episode. Because almost all of us have subscribed to the myth of forever, when our relationships end, the only thing we can say is, “I must not be any good; there must be something the matter with me. I created this relationship with the intention it would last forever, but now it's ending. It certainly can't be ending because the idea that love is forever is wrong, so it's got to be me who is wrong.” We spend an unbelievable amount of time in self-flagellation because we can't imagine that the notion of forever could possibly be inappropriate. But it is. There isn't a person in the United States who hasn't witnessed a divorce or the heartbreaking end of a romance. The truth is that relationships end. It is high time we explode the myth that love is forever, so that when we end relationships, we can do so without such devastating crises in self-esteem.