If you have never experienced relationship breakup, then there is a place reserved for you in the psychological equivalent of Madame Tussauds. Yet despite the ubiquity of the experiences of breakup, psychological understanding of the processes is quite insubstantial. Given the applications to clinical work, therapy, and the more abstract understanding of the human condition that many professionals seek to obtain, breakup seems to be an essential topic for the Society’s ‘year of relationships’.