By the time I turned twenty, I had already seen more breakups than romantic beginnings. It wasn’t just my own failures, though I had a few. It was the quiet unraveling of friends’ love stories, the sudden departures of uncles, aunts, cousins—their weddings once immortalized in VHS tapes, their separations whispered at family gatherings.
When the Apple TV show Severance arrived with its sci-fi premise—slicing consciousness into work and home selves—I didn’t just see corporate satire. In the show, employees undergo a procedure that splits their memory in two: an “innie” who exists only at work, and an “outie” who lives everywhere else, neither aware of the other’s life. I saw love stories. Or more precisely, I saw betrayals. Because Severance poses a haunting question: What if the one who cheats isn’t the one who loved? What if betrayal is committed by a different self altogether?
There’s a moment in Severance when Helly R.–– the innie, the self who woke up in this job without ever choosing it—tries again and again to escape. She writes pleas for help, attempts suicide, rebels at every turn. Meanwhile, her outie calmly, even coldly, keeps sending her back. The pain of one self is disregarded by another. And yet, within the severed floor, something resembling intimacy blooms. Helly’s innie forms a fragile, aching bond with Mark S., another severed worker whose own outie is grieving the death of his wife—unaware that his innie is falling in love with Helly R., and unaware, too, that his wife is not dead at all but now lives beside him at work as Ms. Casey, a wellness counselor who barely registers emotion.
This pattern—of love existing only within one half of a severed life—continues with Irving and Burt, two older employees who, within the walls of Lumon, the corporation that severs them, share a tender and tentative love—a love expressed through gestures, glances, hand-holding, and quiet longing. But when Irving’s outie searches for Burt in the outside world, he finds that Burt is already in a long-term relationship. The romance that once bloomed between them exists only in half a consciousness.
Then there’s Dylan, fiercely loyal to his innie comrades, quick-witted and defiant, willing to sacrifice everything in a moment of crisis. When he’s shown images of his outie’s child as part of a manipulative ploy, he’s visibly shaken—but not out of love or recognition. It’s closer to astonishment, as if he’s glimpsing a life that belongs to someone else. Later, when his outie’s wife appears briefly on the “Severance Floor” during a security breach, his innie sees her but doesn’t flinch, doesn’t soften, doesn’t know her at all. The emotional current doesn’t carry across the divide. The marriage, the child, the entire private life of Dylan’s outie exists beyond the reach of the man inside the office. One self fights with passion and loyalty for his Lumon companions, while the other raises a family on the outside. Neither knows whom the other loves —nor even possesses the memories that would make knowing possible.
Watching all this, I thought of a friend from my undergrad years in Tehran. We were philosophy students—me, a wary youngest child from a home full of quarrels; he, a hopeful preacher of love. Let’s call him M. He’d fallen for a fellow student and declared love the answer to everything. He quoted Rumi like scripture, carried books of Osho, and drew admirers like moths to a candle. I often challenged him. “Love weakens,” I told him. “People change.”
“No,” he said. “Love expands. It deepens. You’ll see.”
Fifteen years later, I did see, just not what he’d hoped. M and his wife were living apart, their once-sunny marriage reduced to shared custody and logistical texts. When I met him again, I didn’t recognize him. Not metaphorically—literally. He’d become someone else. The man who spun philosophies of devotion and soul connection was gone. In his place stood a tired father navigating burnout, deadlines, and a fog of unmet needs. I kept thinking: the man who left—was he really the same man who loved?
Like many of us, I’ve watched love stories rise with grandeur only to unravel quietly, like thread pulled from an old sweater. The people I’ve seen love—fiercely, sincerely—are sometimes the same ones I’ve seen betray, withdraw, or disappear. But what if they’re not the same people at all? What if love and betrayal don’t belong to the same self?
Severance helped me frame this unsettling idea in a new way. Watching it, I began to wonder: maybe we’re all like this, in less literal ways. Maybe we shift across time—so much that the self who once loved is not the one who eventually cheats. If that’s true, how do we blame? How do we forgive?
Splitting the Self
Philosophers have long wrestled with the idea of a split self. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, one of the first to question the self’s permanence, denied the existence of a stable self entirely. To him, humans are merely a bundle of perceptions, constantly shifting, without any enduring core. Derek Parfit, author of Reasons and Persons, offered a softer version: identity is not what matters; psychological continuity is. We are connected to our past selves, yes—but not identical. And sometimes those connections wear thin.
This fraying of continuity is what Severance dramatizes. Innies and outies are legally and physically the same person, but live entirely separate lives. One can fall in love, the other can betray. The parallel romances that unfold inside Lumon Industries echo this: a love that exists in one world has no bearing in the other. Severed selves make severed promises.
Watching the show, I wondered: are our real-world selves really so different? Maybe we don’t need a brain chip to create separate people. Maybe time and trauma do it already. We live different emotional lives in different contexts. We love differently at work than at home, laugh differently with old friends than with new ones. We don’t always notice the drift until we feel like strangers to ourselves.
Parfit argued that survival doesn’t require identity—only continuity. In other words, we don’t need to remain the same person to still be “us,” but something must carry through. So what happens when that thread begins to fray? When continuity fades? When your thoughts no longer recognize your past decisions? When the emotional logic that once drew you to someone now feels foreign? The connection isn’t just thin—it’s unraveling. You remember your younger self’s devotion the way you remember a book you once loved: vivid, moving, but no longer yours.
I wonder if Severance isn’t just science fiction but something closer to autobiography. We split slowly, imperceptibly. Not with scalpels or chips, but through the accumulation of choices, seasons, pains. Through coping mechanisms that calcify into personality changes. Through everyday forgettings. The one who loved you in your twenties was real. So is the one who walks away in your forties. But they’re not the same person—and maybe never were. That’s not a defense. It’s not even an excuse. It’s just a way of seeing clearly.
We long for a self that is whole, but maybe wholeness is just a comforting illusion—a retrospective narrative we impose to make sense of the breaks. Maybe betrayal isn’t always a failure of will or morals. Maybe it’s a failure of continuity. A sign that the story you thought you were living has already been rewritten, somewhere deep inside the same skin.
Memory and Moral Judgments
Memory is the glue we use to call ourselves whole. John Locke believed memory is what binds the self together: I am me because I remember being me. But what if memory erodes? What if it fragments, like a corrupted file?
So many betrayals make more sense when you imagine memory failing. If the person who cheats could fully remember the warmth of the early days—the way you brushed lint from their shoulder, the way they felt after that one joke you told at a party—maybe they wouldn’t have betrayed at all. But memory doesn’t seem to work like that. It isn’t a museum. It’s a river. It shapes itself to the needs of the present. It carries some things forward, deposits others on distant shores. Whole parts of ourselves are lost downstream without our noticing.
In Severance, the innie has no access to the outie’s love life. The outie, meanwhile, has no clue that their innie is falling in love with someone else. Neither self is lying. Neither is faithful. They simply don’t know. The breach isn’t one of morality, exactly—it’s epistemological. How can you stay loyal to a life you don’t remember?
This is the heartbreak and the mercy of being human: we change. We grow apart from the people we once loved—and even from the people we once were. That emotional distance raises a deeper question: if we no longer feel like the same person, are we still responsible for that person’s choices? Locke would say yes.
Locke’s theory sounds neat in theory—continuity through remembered experience—but in practice, memory is spotty, partial, and prone to editing. And sometimes, we remember everything but it doesn’t help. You can recall the precise moment someone made you feel seen, or the exact words you whispered into their neck. But the memory doesn’t anchor you anymore. It’s inert. It has no moral gravity. It’s a story you used to believe.
I think of couples where one partner cheats and later says, “I don’t know what came over me.” They mean it. They’re not lying. They were, in some meaningful way, someone else—lonelier, angrier, more desperate, or more entitled. The person who once whispered love in the dark has been replaced. Not suddenly, not maliciously, but through the slow erosion that comes with time, circumstance, and unmet needs. A self can quietly decay before our eyes.
This is why betrayal cuts so deep. It’s not just the act. It’s the violation of continuity. You look into the eyes of your beloved and find someone unrecognizable. Someone who doesn’t remember the promises the way you do. Or worse, someone who remembers but no longer believes in them.
Maybe this is why forgiveness feels so impossible. We’re not forgiving a single person. We’re trying to forgive a moving target. We’re trying to reconcile ourselves to a past that no longer exists in the other person. The one who betrayed you might not even feel guilty—not because they’re heartless, but because the internal architecture that once made guilt possible has collapsed. We say, “You knew what you were doing.” But what if they didn’t? Or what if they did, but they were no longer the person who cared?
Severance takes this to its logical extreme: the innie cannot access the memories that would make guilt possible; the outie doesn’t know there’s anything to feel guilty about. Neither is lying. Neither is faithful. They simply don’t share a conscience.
There’s no justice in that. Just grief. And that grief, I’m beginning to think, is the thing Severance is really about—not the severing itself, but what the severing leaves behind.
Attachment, Trauma, and Change
My friend M, from my undergraduate days, had fallen hard for a fellow student, and in the aftermath of that falling, he began to speak about love as if he had discovered a new logic. We were all studying philosophy, so love wasn’t just a feeling—it was a text. M would quote lines from Rumi or Osho, and those lines could seem more convincing than any lived experience. He talked about love as if it could transfigure a person—and in a way, I believed him.
But I didn’t feel what he felt. I was skeptical, even cynical. The youngest of ten children, I had been born into a house that had already burned through its love. My parents, married in the desperation of wartime, used to gather stray wheat from the fields to grind their own bread. I was told that in those early years, my father would carry heavy pails of milk to my mother’s house as a gesture of devotion. Your father’s love echoed through the alleyways, relatives used to say.
But by the time I was born, that love had curdled. I only knew the aftermath—fights, silences, sharp glances across long dinner tables. The myth of their early romance felt like someone else’s story. So when M talked about love’s permanence, I felt uneasy. I told him that love would decay, that people would change. He smiled, full of belief. “Real love only grows,” he said.
But love, like belief, depends on memory. And memory is shaped by emotion. If you grow up in an atmosphere where affection is withheld, where tenderness is rationed or weaponized, your nervous system learns to expect rupture. Psychologists call it attachment style. I didn’t have the words for it back then, but I had the instincts. I distrusted intensity. I felt safest when love stayed small.
M, on the other hand, was raised with different stories. Maybe more affection. More trust. When he fell in love, he built a worldview around it. Love, for him, was a source of coherence. A moral compass. He believed in it the way some people believe in grace. But even his certainty crumbled under the weight of time.
This is the heartbreak of adulthood: realizing that love isn’t just about emotion, but architecture. And architectures weaken. Hormones fade. Life demands change. And with change, people diverge—even from themselves. What M called “real love” may well exist, but it’s not a single, permanent flame. It’s a structure under renovation. Some people reinforce it, others abandon it. Sometimes the person you built the house with doesn’t want to live there anymore. Or maybe they don’t recognize the house at all. I used to think my doubt made me broken. Now I think it made me honest. Not all of us are born into stories where love lasts. Some of us learn to read its endings first.
Dr. Jekyll, Madame Bovary, and the Rest of Us
I’ve been writing about M, about Dylan, about Helly—as if I’m only a witness to this fracturing. But the truth is closer. There are people I loved once—or thought I loved—whose faces now feel like photographs from someone else’s life. I can remember that I loved them, but I can’t feel it. The emotional current doesn’t carry. I am no more continuous than the characters in Severance. I am the river Heraclitus described, and the self who loved them has already flowed downstream. I didn’t choose this. I didn’t betray them. But neither can I return to the person who once whispered their name in the dark.
Literature, it turns out, has been telling this story all along.
Dr. Jekyll tries to contain his darkness, only to be undone by Mr. Hyde. Emma Bovary is a dutiful wife by day, a dreamer by night. In both of these characters, we see the seeds of Severance: people compartmentalizing themselves, trying to be multiple things at once.
Jekyll doesn’t become Hyde by accident—he creates him. Not just as an escape, but as a release. A way to indulge the parts of himself that Victorian society would never permit. The tragedy isn’t only that Hyde exists, but that Jekyll thinks he can fence him off. That he can have both lives without consequence. This is the illusion of compartmentalization: that one self can act without staining the other.
Emma Bovary is more subtle, but just as divided. She longs for a life of romantic passion, of beauty, of consequence. “She wanted to die,” Flaubert writes, “and she wanted to live in Paris.” But her daily reality is a provincial marriage full of boredom and small compromises. Her betrayals don’t emerge from malice—they emerge from hunger. A hunger for a self she never got to live. Her affairs are less about pleasure than about escape, an attempt to inhabit the dream world she’s constructed.
These aren’t just characters—they’re mirrors. We all live with competing selves: the one who craves stability and the one who aches for chaos, the one who makes promises and the one who wonders what it would be like to break them.
Is betrayal always a moral failure? Or is it the surfacing of a hidden self? A self we ignored, denied, or thought we had buried? Sometimes betrayal doesn’t begin with a decision. It begins with a flicker—an old longing, a familiar ache, a version of yourself you thought you’d outgrown. Maybe you never really betrayed the person you loved. Maybe you betrayed the person you were when you loved them. This doesn’t make it right. But it makes it human.
Perhaps literature gives us these fractured characters not to judge them, but to recognize ourselves. We want to believe in singular identity because it makes love simpler: you betrayed me. But what if the truth is harder? What if the one who betrayed you is not the same as the one who loved you? What if, as in Severance, they share a body but not a mind?
Letting Go of Substance
If there is no fixed self—if, as Hume argued, we are just flickering phenomena—then maybe our judgments should change too. Maybe we shouldn’t ask, “How could you do this to me?” but instead, “Who were you when this happened?” And maybe that’s not an escape from responsibility but a deeper encounter with the truth. We want to hold people accountable. But who exactly are we holding? I don’t mean to excuse betrayal. I mean to understand it. To map its terrain. To see that love and betrayal are not always opposites, but neighbors—sometimes even roommates in the same mind.
Letting go of a fixed self doesn’t mean letting go of moral judgment, but it does mean softening its edges. When someone we love changes, or becomes a stranger, we are not just mourning the betrayal—we’re mourning a version of the person who no longer exists. That grief is real. But it’s not necessarily a moral indictment. It’s an existential one.
We say people “change overnight,” but change is often subterranean; slow and imperceptible. One day, the words don’t land the same. The laughter feels rehearsed. You realize you’re speaking to someone who no longer carries your shared history with the same weight.
If we believed in fluid selves—selves that flicker, evolve, rupture—we might approach pain differently. We might still feel anger, still demand accountability. But we might also allow room for grief. Not just for the betrayal, but for the version of the person we once loved—and for the self we were, back when we believed they wouldn’t change.
Toward a Gentler Judgment
When we see change as inevitable, we begin to grieve differently. We can still mourn what’s lost—but we don’t have to make monsters of those who leave us. We can understand that their love was real, once. That the betrayal wasn’t a lie to that love but a sign that a different self had arrived. This doesn’t make the pain easier. But it makes it less personal. Less cosmic. Less damning. Maybe forgiveness isn’t about absolution. Maybe it’s about recognizing multiplicity. About seeing that everyone contains many selves—and sometimes, those selves break promises the others meant to keep.
In Severance, the selves are so cleanly divided that one can die without the other knowing. It’s tragic. But maybe it is also liberating. It shows us what we do in real life, only fuzzier: we become different people over time. We sever from who we were. Sometimes love lives in that severed space. Sometimes betrayal does. What matters is not locking people into identities they no longer inhabit. What matters is acknowledging that the human self is porous, fragile, and always unfinished.
How hard it is to forgive someone when the person you want to forgive no longer exists. What happened to the old comfortable connection? Who betrayed whom? Did anyone? Someone left, someone stayed—or maybe both left, just in different directions. The reasons dissolve before they can be named. The stories we tell might not give us a clear answer. We long for stable selves so we can anchor our judgments. But if identity is slippery—if it drifts, evolves, duplicates—then morality becomes less about punishment and more about grief. We mourn the person we loved, even if they’re still walking around. The deeper truth might be this: no one betrays you. They just stop being the person who didn’t. And if that’s true, forgiveness is less about letting someone off the hook and more about letting go of someone who’s already gone.
We might still feel anger, still demand accountability. But we might also allow room for grief. Not just for the betrayal, but for the version of the person we once knew—and the version of ourselves who loved them. Grief, in this light, becomes a quiet reckoning: not with what was done, but with the vanishing of coherence. Like the innies in Severance, we awaken inside a story that no longer feels like ours, surrounded by echoes we can’t trace. The thread is broken. What’s left isn’t closure, but the hollow space where continuity used to live.
