Brokenhearted

Happy Almost Valentine's Day! In talking/thinking about love, the unavoidable topic of heartbreak must come up. People like to say that everything happens for a reason, and never is that perhaps truer than in the arena of heartbreak. There's always a reason for heartbreak, and responsibility for it is shared, like so much else in love. Either you loved the wrong person, or loved for the wrong reasons, or you didn't see something that you should have about the other person. When a heart is broken, there is clearly a reason for it. Heartbreak doesn't just happen. Maybe you really did love someone more than they ever loved you, and so, for them, stomping on your heart was as inconsequential to them as getting a cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe they didn't respect you, or respect themselves, or were too stupid to recognize a good thing when they had it. Maybe they were just a rotten person. Maybe all of the above.

The weird or cruel aspect to it is that if you don't love deeply, or lack the capacity to love, you'll never feel heartbreak. Which, sadly, gives an edge to folks like that in relationships -- if love makes you vulnerable and at the same time prevents you from thinking solely of yourself, you're toast if you're up against someone who lacks the capacity to love you in kind. You'll end up emotionally defrauded, or flat-out devastated. And the person who broke your heart? They'll just dust themselves off and be fine at the end of the day.

I've known true heartbreak only a couple of times, but it was real agony. The closest calculus for me was reacting to a death -- just that deep, full-body ache and gusty sobs. It's horribly painful. Just as the infinite promise of true love is intoxicating and delightful, so the desolate reality of a shattered, broken love can be horrendous. Some folks respond with thinking that they'll never love again, will never trust their heart to someone else. Others perhaps just pine. There are any number of ways of responding to heartbreak. I know my own heartbreak scarred me.

The cold consolation of it is that you can't make someone love you. You can't fake that. Either they love you, or they don't. And if they don't love you, you're just going to humiliate yourself if you fawn and brood over them -- you'll earn only their contempt, and if they're unprincipled, they'll use that to roast you alive.

You have to accept that if they broke your heart to begin with, then you're better off without them. There may have been any number of reasons for why a love might die, and there's probably some shared responsibility for it, but there's usually someone who pulled the trigger first, someone who gave up on the love, who broke someone's heart to begin with. Once that's done, there's no way to salvage it. Just bury it, leave some flowers, and move on. Otherwise, the ghost of that lost love will haunt you, and you don't want that. Ghosts will pull you down with them into oblivion. Ghosts always win, if you let them into your world, or worse, into your heart.

But it's hard, if you really love someone, because part of you believes you could have made it work, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking -- If only I'd done this, if only I'd done that. The simple truth of it is that if they loved you at all, you wouldn't have had to do those things -- if they'd loved you truly, they'd never have broken your heart.