LA’s Museum of Broken Relationships reflects on life, love and the human experience

Need I ask what this is? The clue is rather in the name, isn’t it! This is a museum dedicated to something almost everyone can relate to. And it doesn’t just stick to the personal. It is an ode to the end of all sorts of things: jobs, friendships, homes, ways of life. It opened in the heart of Hollywood in early June, a replica of sorts of the original in Zagreb, Croatia, which opened in 2010 and has travelled the world via pop-up gallery shows.

Broken relationships, though. Sounds depressing. Surprisingly not. A stroll around the exhibits iscaptivating. And it feels appropriate that the modern, light-filled, split-level 3,500-sq-ft space used to be home to the saucy Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie store.

How do you showcase the end of a relation­ship? In lots of ways. There are 103 exhibits, chosen from about 2,000 in a collec­tion owned by both museums and sent in by people from all over the world. Each piece is accompanied by a written note from its donor explaining its provenance. There’s a boot-shaped beer mug from a man baffled as to why his girlfriend had given it to him, and a framed mirror from a woman whose Hollywood aspirations amounted to nothing while her beau became a successful screenwriter. A stuffed Peter Pan doll came from a man who felt he’d outgrown it. And, heartbreakingly, a lottery ticket donated by a Spanish man in his 60s who’d discovered his best friends had been buying tickets togeth­er, behind his back, for four decades. Every­thing is displayed anonymously, though.

So, the FULL scope of human emotion under one roof? More or less. The curators look for anything that speaks of the human experience – relation­ships that are sad, short or long ago, signify­ing closure, or not. Interestingly, the exhibits are not about the big sweeping gesture, unless you count the wedding dress in a pickle jar sent in by a jilted wife. (Explain­ing the unusual container, she writes: “Mostly for space reasons but any sort of appropri­ate pickle metaphors can be invoked.”)