The Monday after her four-year relationship ended, Tomiwa shipped a campaign deck right on time.
Nobody clapped. Nobody knew. The deck was fine—clients signed off by Wednesday afternoon—but she’d finished the last three slides at 3:00 AM, her phone lying face-up beside the laptop in case a message came that she already knew was never going to come. She cried in the office bathroom before the 10:00 AM standup, ran the tap to cool her eyes, patted her face down with tissue, walked into the conference room, and said, “Morning, everyone—so where are we on the Q3 numbers?”
That’s the part nobody warns you about. Not the crying. The functioning. The weird, deeply exhausting work of being completely reliable at your job while everything underneath the surface is on fire.
We came across one of the most startling conversations on the Nigerian Twitter space that said:
By afternoon, the quote-tweets and replies were thousands deep, all circling the same wound from different angles. So, we thought, how does this all go hand-in-hand with the 9-to-5 life? We asked Nigerians to share their stories and learned that every single one of them, the morning after their world fell apart, still got up, ironed their clothes, and went to work.
Nobody gives you leave for this
You can get bereavement leave if you lose a relative. A lot of places now offer mental health days, which is a great start. Some companies will give you paid time off to get married. But there is absolutely no policy on the books for the ending of a thing you didn't get to marry.
“What was I supposed to say?” Emeka asks. He’s thirty-four, works in operations at a fast-growing fintech, and his engagement fell apart two months before the wedding. “Walk up to HR and say, 'Please, I need three days off because my babe left me'? They’ll laugh. I’d laugh. So you carry it to your desk instead. You carry it into the sprint planning. You carry it to the after-work drinks where everyone is gisting, and you’re laughing at jokes you didn't actually hear.”
Heartbreak is supposed to be a private, after-hours event. Something for your bedroom or a late-night WhatsApp voice note to your group chat. But you spend more of your waking life at work than anywhere else, so it refuses to stay at home. It sits right next to your keyboard. It shows up on the Zoom call. And the work always has a number attached to it—a deadline, a target, a performance review—and that number has no idea you didn't sleep. It’s not being cruel. It just doesn't know.
“For about two months I was running at maybe forty percent,” Emeka says. “But I made sure the forty that was left went entirely to things people could visually track. Deadlines. Deliverables. Clear updates in the Slack channel. The rest of me—the creative ideas, the patience with my team, the actual deep thinking—that was just completely gone. And nobody clocked it, because I was protecting the parts that show up in a weekly report. That’s the thing nobody tells you. You learn to triage yourself.”
The autopilot roster
Everyone figures out their own version of that survival math. You look at your to-do list, decide which tasks can run on pure muscle memory, and give those to the world while the human part of you quietly breaks down in the background.
Consider Tunde, a lead product designer at a digital agency. When his long-distance relationship of three years collapsed over a brief, cold 10-minute phone call, his entire world felt hollow. "Designing needs empathy and emotional energy," Tunde says. "You have to think like the user. But I had nothing left to give users. So for three weeks, I just copied old design systems. I changed the hex codes, moved a few buttons around, and shipped identical layouts. To the account managers, it looked like high output. To me, it was just survival. I was plagiarizing my own past work because my brain couldn't process anything new."
Ada, who works in high-pressure client servicing, calls it "putting the face on in the lift." She was commuting about forty minutes to the office every morning. “By the time I stepped off the bus, I’d already rehearsed it. I knew exactly what level of energy I needed to walk through the front door with. Then I'd do eight hours of that—warm, sharp, laughing at the right times—and the moment I got back on the bus home, I’d literally turn it off. By the time I reached my house, I couldn't speak. I’d used up my entire daily quota of talking just pretending to be fine.”
There’s a term for the deep exhaustion that comes from managing your facial expressions and feelings all day as part of your employment: emotional labor. A breakup essentially turns a normal eight-hour workday into a mandatory double shift of it. You’re doing the job you get paid for, and you’re doing the second, unwritten job of hiding the fact that you can barely breathe. Nobody bills for that second shift, but everyone pays for it eventually.
And that weight drops even heavier on women, who are socially expected to walk in pleasant, smooth over awkward workplace friction, remember whose birthday it is, and check the room's temperature—all while their own chest is caving in. “A man goes quiet at his desk, and people assume he’s locked in, he's focusing,” Ada points out. “If it’s a woman, someone asks if she’s okay, but the tone sounds less like empathy and more like they’re asking you to fix your face. So you fix your face.”
The math that doesn't love you back
Sometimes the pain isn't even from a massive fight or a sudden betrayal. Some of the hardest breakups are the ones you choose yourself, where the choosing doesn't make the tearing apart hurt any less.
Take Chidi, whose relationship ended over a silent, unavoidable reality. "We were looking at moving abroad together, planning a life," he shares. "But when we finally sat down to look at our long-term financial realities, family obligations, and where our respective careers were anchored, the math just didn't work. We loved each other completely, but we were pulling in two entirely different directions. Breaking up felt like making a logical corporate decision about your own heart, and it was agonizing."
Bisi ended his relationship after nearly five years for a similarly heavy reason. It wasn’t one explosive argument; it was a slow pile-up of anxiety, and underneath it all, a quiet genomic reality they couldn't compromise on: they had run their genotype tests, and the science simply didn't love them back.
“You can be so in love and still be doing arithmetic about AS and SS genotypes for your unborn children in your head at 2:00 AM,” he says. “At some point, I just knew we had to stop. And knowing it was the right decision didn’t help at all, because I still had to be the one to actually walk away.”
It all came down in December. Terrible timing—the whole country was lit up, everyone on Instagram was posting their partners, love was falling out of the sky like it was cheap, and there he was. He spent most of the Christmas break at his parents' house, back in his childhood bedroom with the door shut. “I gained so much weight mehn. I'd just find myself crying in the same room I cried in as a teenager. I hated every single carol. I hated the whole holiday.”
Then he went back to the office in January, and nobody had the faintest idea. “At the end-of-quarter review, I actually won an award for operational excellence,” he says with a tired laugh. “I stood up there on stage, everyone clapping, and I remember looking at the trophy and thinking—omo, you people have absolutely no clue what it took for me to just stand up straight today. None.”
Bisi has spent the months since then leading his team and keeping everything steady for everyone else while quietly processing the grief. “That’s the part that gets me. As a manager, you’re holding the whole thing together at work—steadying the ship, checking on your people, making sure nobody else is drowning—but no one is checking on the person doing the steadying. You don't get to fall apart. There’s sprint planning on Monday and a retro on Friday regardless.”
The office kitchen sanctuary
Sometimes, though, the office isn't just the place where you hide the pain. If you're lucky, it becomes the one place where you can finally put the weight down for a second.
“My work-bestie carried me, honestly,” Tomiwa says, laughing now that she's a few months out on the other side. “There’s a small corner of the office kitchen right behind the water dispenser where I did all my worst crying. She’d just materialize out of nowhere with a mug of tea. Half the time she didn't even say anything; she just stood there as a shield so I wasn't crying all by myself next to the office microwave.”
That’s the beautiful, unmeasured variable that happens in workplaces: colleagues can quietly turn into the emergency contacts of your actual heart—the ones who notice your voice cracking on a conference call and seamlessly step in to finish your sentence for you.
But small industries also have teeth. Nigerian professional circles are incredibly tight. Your ex doesn't just vanish into a massive, anonymous city; sometimes the worst part of the nightmare is that they share your exact sector. They’re at the same tech mixer. They’re tagged in the same LinkedIn industry announcement. And one day, inevitably, you find yourself in the exact same room, pitching for the same business or up for the same award.
“Lagos is just a giant village pretending to be a city,” Emeka says. “You will see them again, professionally. So you always have to keep a backup face ready for that, too.”
The random Tuesday
So how do you actually get over it? Sometimes, you really do just get over it on a plain, unremarkable Tuesday.
Not on the big calendar day you’d circled in red. Not on the anniversary you’d spent weeks bracing for. Just some ordinary, boring Tuesday months later, you’ll be halfway through an Excel spreadsheet and suddenly realize you haven't thought about them once all morning. It’ll feel strange at first—almost like a little betrayal—and then it’ll just feel like breathing out.
“Mine happened right in the middle of a client brainstorm,” Ada recalls. “Somebody made a ridiculous joke, and I laughed—like properly, from my belly, the way I used to. I stopped mid-laugh and thought, Oh. I'm laughing. I'm actually back.”
What it costs. And who needs to hear it
If you’ve done the bathroom cry, the rehearsed lift-face, or the copied design layouts this year, remember this: the fact that you kept working isn't proof that you were totally fine. It’s proof that you are resilient, but resilience carries a heavy bill, and it always comes due later—in sudden burnout, in the creative ideas that quietly stopped coming, or in the patience your team slowly stopped receiving. Be as gentle with your human self as you were with your targets. Guard the whole person, not just the visible output.
And if you’re someone who manages people; a founder, a team lead, an HR director—sit with this reality before your next team sync: on any given Monday, a percentage of your team is running on forty percent capacity, and they are aiming every single drop of that surviving forty percent at the metrics you can visually track.
You’ll never know exactly which of them it is.
You can't fix a team member's broken heart, and you shouldn't try to. But you can build a workplace culture where an employee doesn't have to invent a fake stomach bug just to get a single day to fall apart. You can build a space where saying, “I’m dealing with something heavy personal-wise, I just need a little grace on my turnarounds this week,” is a sentence a person can say without fear of judgment.
Compassion isn't a soft corporate cost. Presenteeism—having bodies at desks while minds are three postcodes away—is one of the most expensive, unmeasured leaks on any company's balance sheet. Heartbreak already has a corporate KPI, and you are already paying for it. The only real choice is whether you pay for it in kindness, or in the talent that eventually walks out your door.
Bisi still keeps that Q4 trophy on a prominent shelf in his home. Not because of the corporate win, but because of what it cost him to stand on that stage, and what he only understood much later he had allowed it to cost. He keeps it to remind himself of what he wishes someone had told him back in that childhood bedroom with the door shut: that he was fully allowed to let it hurt.
Have you ever had to keep your head down and work through a massive heartbreak? If you've been there, hit reply and tell us your story. It will be kept completely anonymous.
