On Heartbreak

Lessons from love and loss

Hi! Thanks for reading On the Pursuit of Happiness! I work hard on these posts which sometime let you in on vulnerable and embarrassing tidbits of my life sprinkled with a lot of helpful mental health and emotional wellness and how to be a human stuff. By supporting my work, you’re helping me help other humans also. Maybe it’s time to upgrade to a paid subscription? It’s only $5/month. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you 🙏

artwork by Kaethe Butcher Illustrations

I’m pretty familiar with breakups, having been through six (?) over the past 30 years of relationshipping. But the heartbreak, even if familiar by now, never gets any less devastating.

Older age has brought more wisdom though, and so now I’m able to take something away from a breakup aside from the heartache: the lessons, the reinventing yourself, the realization that just because something ends doesn’t mean it was a failure. Sometimes a relationship just runs its course.

My high school boyfriend, my first relationship, broke up with me over the phone, quoting Led Zeppelin. He said he needed to “ramble on.” (barf) It was a visceral pain I’d never felt. I decided to throw myself more into horses, my very serious extracurricular at that time, in order to numb the pain. We’d break up again several more times throughout the course of the rest of high school, getting back together each time to relieve the void and inability to navigate the pain of tumultuous young love.

My most recent breakup was a couple years ago and involved selling the house we’d remodeled together, sharing custody of our dogs, splitting up belongings, feelings left unresolved. Though I was ready for the relationship to end, I mourned the loss of the dream life I’d always wanted and the realization that I’d placed the wrong person into it. It was hard not to look at that as a failure, a series of poor decisions.

I think heartbreak can feel more painful than a death. And it is a death of sorts, only you both go your separate ways and life goes on. The hard part is the shock of going from being in each other’s daily lives, the throughout the day texting and daily “what do you want from the store” to going no contact. It’s the grieving someone who’s still alive. It’s the feeling of being completely out of control and unable to change an outcome that was never part of the plan. The life you wanted to build with someone, now gone.

One of the worst breakup microlapses in time is that moment when you wake up, a whole new day ahead of you, your mind clear, and then all of a sudden it all comes flooding back: Your relationship ended. You’re single now. A single person. That little 5 second moment when everything is still ok, but then you remember it all, and your world crashes again. Then you have to drag your tired body out of bed and navigate the world like you’re not dying inside.

Here are a few things I’ve learned navigating relationships and breakups over the past 30ish years.

Above all, vulnerability. This is when the magic happens, when you can let your guard down and truly let someone in. I didn’t even know this was a thing until I was on boyfriend five (I think?) in my 30s. I’m a very defensive person, and even though I considered myself all in, there was a part of me that was pretty fiercely guarded. I fought at face value instead of realizing that most times arguments aren’t even about the actual issue but some other deeper issue lurking underneath, usually fear. Learning to go beneath my anger and see that it was usually fear creating it and being able to have conversations from that place rather than a defensive place was a game changer.

Learning that relationships take work, and that love is a choice you make every day. Once the honeymoon period is done and the dopamine high wears off, there you are, finally able to see the other person’s flaws. What was once endearing is suddenly annoying. Learning that every day you work at it, and the real work begins after the high wears off. There’s no Disney effortless happily ever after, a lie I bought for the majority of my life.

Learning that some people just aren’t capable of love. I used to think it was because they couldn’t love themselves, and maybe that’s part of it, but some of us are so deeply wounded that the trauma prevents us from connection. These people build walls, so afraid of letting someone in who can break their heart even further. Everyone deserves love, and these are the people who need therapy, the work. They’re also often the most deeply sensitive or the biggest stonewallers.

Learning it’s important to find someone whose crazy matches your crazy. Someone you have fun with. Someone with whom you’re truly compatible. I spent a relationship with someone where I forgot how to just sit around and be silly and have fun. When I got that back in the next relationship, it was such a relief and a breath of fresh air.

Realizing that picking a life partner is one of the most important decisions we’ll ever make, yet some of us put less thought into it than what to have for dinner. No one teaches us how to be in relationships or how to pick suitable partners. Do it with deliberation. It’s always astonishing when I hear people say they never discussed whether they wanted children or some other life-altering decision before they got married. Ask the hard questions. Walking away from someone you love because you ultimately don’t want the same things, or because they’re not ultimately choosing you, is one of the hardest ways to actually choose yourself.

Learning that you cannot build a relationship with someone on chemistry alone. It’s why relationships fizzle so quickly. After the honeymoon period comes the trust building stage, showing up for someone to build trust and commitment. Knowing someone is always willing to put in the work, both on themselves and the relationship. Knowing it’s so important to have your own life, interests, identity, and you are your own responsibility. It’s not your partner’s job to make you happy, and it’s your job to keep your identity and not lose yourself in someone else.

Learning that relationships rarely end because people no longer love one another; they end due to a lack of connection. You start to feel alone, misunderstood, unseen, unappreciated, taken for granted. A death by a million tiny cuts. The resentment that grows, the contempt that builds. And so few of us are taught skills to resolve conflicts and the emotional tools we need to make relationships work.

ALL relationships will have conflict, but it’s how you work through it together that matters, without defensiveness. Or else shit builds up and suddenly one day you’re smothered and don’t know how to breathe anymore.

Some of us may have had securely attached parents who modeled healthy relationship and conflict resolution (that must have been nice). But the majority (I’m guessing) did not and we have to learn this for ourselves, understanding we’re bringing in our childhood trauma and the pain of heartbreaks past into a new relationship, hoping it will go differently this time if we can learn to break these deeply ingrained unhealthy patterns.

I also learned we tend to pick partners who feel familiar to us, for better or worse. If you grew up in a house of chaos, you’ll pick the same type of person, as this is your comfort zone. You often unconsciously work through old childhood wounds in relationships. It’s only until you consciously recognize that and break that pattern that your relationships will improve.

Learning that using other people as distractions while you’re blindly brokenhearted is a terrible idea. This notion of a situationship, a friends with benefits, a fuck buddy, whatever you want to call it, is just the desperate need for intimacy to soothe the loneliness. Understanding that there’s no relief in that, only more anxiety that comes with triggering an already anxious attachment.

Learning that understanding important parts of a person and how they navigate the world is necessary before you commit to doing life with them. I want to know your childhood wounds, what your parents were like, your love language, your attachment style, if you’ve been to therapy, what triggers you, why your other relationships ended, if you would let me get a king size bed and an espresso machine (legit 2 things I was denied in my last relationship), if you’re good with dogs. Those kinds of things.

Learning that the worst pain is healing from someone you thought you’d heal with. Learning that love is healing. That you don’t need to be fully healed before a new relationship (one of the most common clichés).

Learning that maybe you’ll feel lost, lonely, and like something’s missing when you’re single, and that’s fine. Humans are wired for connection. When that goes away, it hurts.

Heartbreak and loss are a part of life. Truly only time helps. It’s like a drug withdrawal, suddenly something you had every day has been ripped from you cold turkey. But just because it ended doesn’t mean it’s a failure.

Relationships truly are our greatest teachers.

This:

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.(seen on https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/)

Parts of this post were inspired by posts I read from relationship expert Jillian Turecki I highly recommend her work. Find it here.