The Breakup Theory cover art

The Breakup Theory

The Breakup Theory

Written by: The Breakup Theory
Listen for free

About this listen

 Conversations on collective liberation and ending things Philosophy Relationships Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Episode 34 - A Listener Letter with Amar: All Relationships have some form of pain

    Episode 34 - A Listener Letter with Amar: All Relationships have some form of pain
    May 5 2026
    Today, I tackle a letter with an old friend, Amar, who some of you may know from his work on The Final Straw Radio. He is one of the reasons I am making this show, as The Final Straw invited me in to start recording conversations. In past Final Straw episodes, Amar and I have tackled different internal and external struggles with people addressing conflict or proposing new paths for social relations. Amar's curiousness and openness has always been personally helpful to me when trying to chew over difficult feelings and ideas. He has a capacious understanding and gives so much grace to the experience of problems we run into while we are trying to do good. Now, this letter has actually been sitting in my inbox for a while, and I feel bad that I let it go for so long. I can make excuses, like last year involving a bunch of personal stuff that took up most of my attention, and then the need to finish my new book. But I'll also admit that at first I wasn't sure how to tackle the issues the letter writer raised in a way that honored all of the feelings. There were many factors going on in a time of great crisis and I wanted to try to hold them all together. I kept batting around ways to approach it, until finally I realized Amar would be the perfect person to bring into the conversation. And as you will see, I was not wrong! In our conversation, we tackle the breakup of a long monogamous relationship and the debut of a new polyamorous life, an international romance beset by war and geopolitics, and the sudden letdown of planned encounter canceled at the last minute. There are so many big feelings here that the letter brings up and each one could be the focus on its own conversation. Bringing them all together surely tangled up the writer who was trying to sort out a new phase of life and a new way of relating to lovers. I hope the writer is still listening to the podcast and can find some support in our conversation here. It is likely that their life has moved on in ways, but perhaps there is some feeling lingering here that can find some reflection in our engagement. But of course, I imagine that our discussion will reach other listeners too. With this letter episode, my wish is to spark some more correspondence. It hasn't been the focus of the most recent Breakup Theory shows, but it is one of my favorite things to do and I know listeners love to hear these discussions—whether they are the one who wrote or not. We are all getting hit hard out there. So please write, or tell your friends who are struggling to reach out. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or use the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories (the latter is encrypted and anonymous). Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me with your question. I really love hearing from you—and so do the other gay anarchists and friends who listen. If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing. If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@proton.me I will be hosting a book club on our discord server June 3 at 5pm eastern on the queer anarcho-nihilist journal baedan (the first issue), a hugely influential text for me. Subscribe and join us, whether or not you read the book! Everyone is welcome! As Amar says at the end, go find The Final Straw Radio. It is a long-running resource to learn about anarchist actions, struggles, analysis, and ideas. The show is so wide-ranging in its subjects and guests, it will surely open up your horizons. Plus, they make zines out of the transcripts of different episodes. You can print them out for the event you are tabling at. You can find them on any podcast app and select radio stations. But also support them at https://www.patreon.com/tfsr There are different tiers of membership that help fund the transcription. You can get gifts like zines, stickers, and pins. You can even get your zine sent to an incarcerated comrade. You can find their tremendous back catalog at https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/ If you search, you will see the episodes I contributed (under an old name). I'm linking to a conversation we recorded with Vicky about a really interesting essay put out ...
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Episode 33 - Opening Up the Personal Essay (Trans Style) With Megan Milks

    Episode 33 - Opening Up the Personal Essay (Trans Style) With Megan Milks
    Apr 8 2026
    Today I talk with the great writer and friend Megan Milks about their new essay collection Mega Milk, published this year by Feminist Press. I just have to say that Mega Milk by Megan Milks is maybe the best title/author combo that will ever exist. But beyond that amazingness, Megan's book contains many paths of exploration through milk both literal and metaphorical toward questions of names, transition, family history and dynamics, nourishment, connection, and human relationships with animals, agriculture, business, and land. The book is vulnerable, freaky, kinky, funny, and informative, all at once. As I say to Megan, I find the genre of the personal essay to be one of the most difficult types of writing to pull off well. You need to find something singular enough to make broad connection with an array of readers, and often the most successful type nestles such a memoir inside a tangential impersonal narrative based in research and fact. With a book, there is typically a thematic line (here, milk) that is able to hold the essays together loosely without strangling them. The key is for the writer to open the essay up to all of the contingent possibilities while still maintaining a formal hand to guide the reader. It is not a genre I have delved much into, stopping immediately at the vulnerability. One of the most interesting things to me about the trans personal essay collection in particular is how it gets at transition askew. It is not a transition narrative, from A to B (the classic kind). Nor is it a realist stylization of trans experience. Where transition comes in, it is in pieces, resisting linear time, often becoming incidental to the thoughts, feelings, and research of the writer. And yet, transness is somehow always there. I think it is an exciting place for trans literature to go, navigating out of the genre stereotypes that congeal every half decade or so. As with names, which Megan and I discuss, there is perhaps a kind of ambivalence towards the representation of transness. I bring up Ralph Ellison's essay, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," which ruminates on his near namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, placing Ellison into a particular relationship to American literature, a burden of an inheritance to take on as he also aimed to escape the nightmare of history into invisibility. The name works retroactively, creating meaning where maybe there was none. This pertains too to the trans narrative, told retroactively often with an attempt to make it seem fated from the beginning. Megan's name is not hidden, but they wrestle with its potential fatefulness, with transition coming in as a kind of freeing or loosening while still retaining that meaningful burden. Okay, I'm getting all lit crit on you. And perhaps this veers away from Megan's own thinking here. So I will let Megan talk for themself in our conversation. But first, I can't recommend this book enough, so pick it up at your favorite bookstore. Megan has two other books with Feminist Press, the novel, Maragaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body—which I loved so much as it plays with the kid detective genres of my childhood—and Slug, a collection of short stories. Get them all! Megan is also out on book tour. If you listen to this when it comes out, you can still catch Megan in Chicago on April 10 at Women and Children First. Also 5/14 in Decatur, GA at Charis Books as part of Sam Ace's Meet Me There Series, with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (another beautiful writer). And 6/11 in Boston at the Model Cafe - T4T Reading Series. You can follow Megan on Instagram @sklimnegam . Megan often offers workshops, which you can learn about there. Before we get into the conversation, I'll do my usual rundown of ways you can support this project. If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! I love hearing from people about their thoughts—but as always any questions you might want us to tackle on the show. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or using the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories. Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me. If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing. If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@...
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Iran and the US-Israeli Death Drive Economy

    Iran and the US-Israeli Death Drive Economy
    Mar 14 2026
    Today I am sharing a conversation I recorded with Elia Ayoub to discuss and analyze what is going on with the US-Israeli war on Iran. We recorded on Tuesday March 10, and events keep changing, but this conversation will still be relevant insofar as we look at the geopolitical causes and consequences. After Elia lays down the groundwork of the current situation, we discuss the complex politics among states, non-state groups, and civilians. One of the issues that I have continued to run into since the attacks on Iran first began is some people's utter confusion in how to place the state of Iran and its government in relation to anti-imperial struggle. It turns out you can be anti-Zionist and not pro-Ayatollah! Elia helps understand the authoritarian role of the Ayatollah, from the 1979 revolution onward, while also bringing us into similarly complex analysis of Lebanon and Hezbollah. Both Iran and Hezbollah have countered Israel with military force; and they have both done their own share of murder of populations and interventions on behalf of authoritarian regimes. We put all of this in the context of Israeli's continuing genocide of Gaza. Elia provides some possible scenarios that could develop from the war continuing and also possible ways it might end or be stopped. As we experienced with Gaza, it seems to a certain extent that either the will of the US or a coalition of other European states is necessary to put an end to the violence. Iran has made some effective decisions that maximize its military and economic power against such terrible foes, and as Elia says, this whole scenario will likely end up realigning alliances in the region. As long as the US is willing to press on in this war, Israel will also deploy all of its might to continue its destruction with little regard for any life after. In the end, I think this is where we land: the war itself does not make much political or economic sense, and so for both Trump and Netanyahu it exemplifies a death drive that pairs genocide with ecocide and maybe even omnicide, as desalination plants are destroyed, for example. We don't know what the long ranging effects of this war will be on the people living in the area, but it won't be good—even if it ends now. I'll stop there and let you listen to more of what Elia has to say. If you don't know Elia already, I hope this conversation inspires you so seek more of his work out. Elia Ayoub is an anti-authoritarian historian, researcher and writer. He created The Fire These Times podcast, where he hosts conversations and provides commentary on the most important issues that we face in the anti-authoritarian struggle. He also offers masterclasses, such as his current course on Lebanon. He co-founded the worker-owned media collective From the Periphery, so Elia is pursuing similar aims as CAW. You may have already heard his collaboration with carla joy bergman on their anarchist Star Trek podcast, Resistance is Fertile. He holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis on postwar Lebanon and runs a newsletter on the region called Hauntologies. He is also the Encyclopaedia Lead at the Decolonial Centre. He can be found on Bluesky and Instagram. Elia wanted to share some links to provide funds for Lebanon Emergency Relief. I will include them in the notes for the episode, along with all of the links to Elia's work. The artwork I used for the episode image is "Iran-Iraq War" painted by the Kurdish former political prisoner and exile, Osman Ahmed in 1982. Fundraisers: https://www.chuffed.org/project/171933-lebanon-emergency-relief BuJu https://www.instagram.com/p/DVovwUojIYq/?igsh=cHJoNTlxd2o3M29t Before we get into the conversation, I'll do my usual rundown of ways you can support this project. If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! I love hearing from people about their thoughts—but as always any questions you might want us to tackle on the show. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or using the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories. Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me. If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing. If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@proton.me The Breakup Theory is a ...
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 21 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
No reviews yet