There is No Such Thing as Closure
Closure is a myth our culture perpetuates
Closure.
That word gets thrown around a lot, especially when we discuss the end of relationships and try to figure out how to get back to a baseline level of self-esteem and well-being.
“You have to get closure,” a friend might say to us, as if that was the reason we’re suffering and we wouldn’t be heartbroken if we got this evasive thing we call closure.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered what even closure is.
The main idea of closure, I’m guessing, is that it is a feeling we experience about a situation. Since it’s a feeling, it’s a subjective experience, unlike the closure of a factory or a business, which is objective.
So if feel like you’re past a relationship or hardly ever think about a situation in your life, then I suppose you’ve gained some sort of closure.
The idea originally comes from Gestalt philosophy, which postulates that the mind wants things to be “complete” in some way, such as filling in an incomplete circle or adding a missing part of an object.
Closure has since been extended to relationships, where the idea might relate to confronting an ex, learning the truth about a relationship, or even getting your last bit of things from…
