Relationships • Breaking Up & Heartbreak
The Pains of Heartbreak
For all the songs and poems and novels written in its honour, the sickness of heartbreak is unlikely to strike most of us more than a few times in our lives – at least in its most severe form. It’s therefore a disease that is both enormously consequential and which we’re unlikely to be properly prepared for in terms of grasping its duration, effects and likely trajectory. We would do well to equip ourselves as if for some extremely potent and near-fatal viral affliction.
The first and central ingredient of the most calamitous heartbreaks is – of course – a deeply lovely person. Monsters, cads, reprobates and double-dealers may naturally graze our hearts, but the only ones who can truly pulverise them are, by definition, the extreme sweeties. The ones who nearly kill us are the very same ones who, months or years before, gave us a tender and shy first kiss, who lent us adorable nicknames, remembered our quirks, were endeared by our flaws, forgave us our anxieties, solved our problems and held us closely through nights of pain and alarm, reassuring us that they would never, ever leave us. These are the ones who – without us having any clue at the time – were preparing us for one of the most severe blows of our lives.
The next essential ingredient for agony is a very slow, ambiguous and delicately phrased departure. Not for these sweeties the generosity of the brutal lover who will say (with immense underlying kindness): ‘I’ve had enough, you bore me and I’ve met someone else.’ These unwitting tormentors continue to profess love, they say they miss us even when they have departed, they may be giving us birthday presents and coming around months after they first hesitantly explained that ‘in some ways’ they might ‘perhaps’ ‘in a way’ need ‘a little space’. Eventually, in the very worst of cases, we may have to end the relationship for them because they are simply too sensitive to do it themselves.
Thereafter, we’re left with the 3 a.m. questions: what’s wrong with us? When did they first start to plan this? What does another lover have that we don’t? Where did we go wrong? These are going to be among the worst speculations of our lives – and if we can recognise them as such, our pain does not need to feel quite so persecutory. Needless to say, we can’t and shouldn’t ever try to answer; such questions belong among the great mysteries. We don’t fully know why love begins; and shouldn’t ever probe too much as to why it has ended.
The bore is that it all has to take up so much time. There can’t be any quick escapes from our devotion. It takes an age to stop believing in someone. We have to go over every single memory multiple times. We have to convert what would initially have seemed like a freak eventuality of fate into a non-negotiable necessity. We have to establish that this month had to be our last, that we wouldn’t travel abroad together, that they would go to that party and meet someone else, that contingency was – after all – a wholehearted necessity.
In wise cultures, bereaved people are directed to wear special clothing and given licence to wail openly. No one expects them to be balanced for a very long time. Much the same should be permitted of the heartbroken. Someone has died here too; a version of ourselves that was the sweetheart’s little bean, that wrapped up their presents and stayed up late to support them with their projects, that believed them when they said they wanted it to be forever and had never felt this way about anyone else before. This poor version of ourselves has been knifed and must be laid to rest, flowers laid at their grave and a team of mourners sent to sing hymns to their memory.
We should not try to be brave. This has to count among the greatest griefs of our lives. We should lose our confidence entirely, we should yearn to call them up and beg limitlessly, we should lose our dignity over them, we should be certain that we’ll never overcome this, we should hate them and love them simultaneously, we should check our phones a hundred times for signs of life from them, we should bore our best friends senseless with our repetitive agonies.
Only thereby can we give the love we had for them proper stature – and begin to let it go. We might need six months to process five good years. Miraculous though this now seems, one day we’ll be able to say their name and feel next to nothing besides a little boredom. One day we’ll be of the view that they were the ones who made a mistake. One day we’ll be firmly on our own side – and we’ll be free.
