The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale: Finding a Formula for the Cost of Love

Can we turn sentimental value into cold, hard cash?

A couple of years ago, Haley McGee was 10,000 in debt. I'm going sell some things, she thought. I'm gonna have a yard sale. But when she looked around her apartment, the only things she owned that had any financial value had all been given to her by her ex-boyfriends. Eight objects from eight different exes: a bicycle, a guitar, a vintage typewriter, a sapphire necklace, a Hershel backpack, a Bialetti espresso pot, a mix CD and a t-shirt.

As she began to pack up these objects to sell, she started to wonder what they were really worth, given everything she'd invested--time, emotion, money--in the relationships they came from. How could she possibly determine a price for these objects, and for the love they once represented?

She didn't know, but she became obsessed with figuring it out. She did market research online, she interviewed her exes, she met with a world-renowned physicist who studies how sentimentality affects the economy, she talked to a psychotherapist. And she spent days locked in a room with a mathematician--and together, they created a mathematical formula that takes into account the 52 variables (from market value to how much Haley laughed versus how much she fought in each relationship), and spits out a genuine price for the material things we're left with when a romance dies. A formula for the cost of love. So we can know if it was worth it.

Using the creation of this formula as its frame, The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale is one woman's raw, irreverent and intimate exploration into her past loves and losses, and into how and why she (and we) ascribe value to things, relationships and ourselves.