In general one should try to avoid knocking other people’s needs or the strange ways they navigate the choppy waters of life – but an article in this week’s
Times magazine (see below) about a man with the improbable name of Harry Hardisty had my jaw dropping to my navel.
How can a sane individual say that he’s had his heart broken 30 times? It’s an absurdity, and renders the – admittedly somewhat amorphous – concept of “heartbreak” meaningless.
Would you want to be counselled by someone who is clearly in such desperate need of psychological help himself?
And then there’s the utterly emetic name of his website:
External Link/Members Only ...
“Dad Hugs for the Soul!” God help us.
It wouldn’t be true to say that words fail me, because they never do. But I had trouble keeping my breakfast down.
By the way, you can buy a 30-day pack, such as “Healing Anxious Attachment”, from Hardisty for £24-99. Another pack, “Reclaim”, costs £99 and is for women post-divorce. Then there’s membership of the site for £37 a month, which gets you a weekly Zoom with the great man.
Anyway, here are the opening few paragraphs of the article, which has the heading, “The 53-year-old divorcee women turn to for relationship advice” and the sub-heading, “A year ago Harry Hardisty, a tech consultant from Newcastle, turned his own heartbreak into a business. Now he has millions of views a month, even though he is not a therapist.”
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Asked how many times he has had his heart broken, Harry Hardisty replies easily: “Properly once, after leaving my marriage, but also about 30 other times.”
A year ago, Hardisty, 53, turned his own extensive experience of heartbreak into an online business. He woke one morning with the urge to post a video about heartbreak on TikTok. His most recent serious relationship had ended two years earlier and, although he had only four followers at the time, by the end of the day he scored 1,000 likes.
A friend told him to be careful as he wasn’t qualified to give emotional advice, but Hardisty’s response was: he wasn’t pretending to be. He was simply speaking from the heart.
Buoyed by the response to that first video, Hardisty began posting his thoughts about overcoming the pain so familiar to him. He speaks directly to camera, from his kitchen, say, or on a walk. The style is almost stream of consciousness, talking about how, for example, someone who is anxiously attached (mainly women, but also a few men, not least himself) may stop trying to appease “avoidants” and succeed in detaching from them.
