NOTE: This is something I wrote a few years ago after my first real breakup. It was the first adult relationship I’d ever had and it taught me a ton about myself: Namely, how flawed I am. My purpose in writing this, at the time, was to navigate a “rational” thought process for getting over someone. My approach to these sorts of things has now changed. But, I still think it’s cool to look back and see the workings of your old brain. I hope you enjoy!
It happened. After all the beauty, turmoil, doubt, love, pain, laughter, anger, fear, conversation and soul-searching that made up our almost 2-year relationship, we broke it off. And not like the other time where we tried just not speaking for a month to see how we felt, before I frantically pulled her back in with the promise of going to therapy — this time it’s really over.
This is, apparently, the “heartbreak” I’ve heard so much about. Whoever coined the term really hit the nail on the head. It feels like my heart is suffering the fate of the bad terminator in T2.
The hardest part, initially, is the doubt.There’s still a part of me that feels like I could get her back if I gave it my all. If I devoted my life to changing enough, we could be together again pushing through like we always did. But the part of myself that tells me that’s not my battle to face -- that there’s someone more right for the both of us out there -- is just large enough to keep me from taking that path. So instead, I let her go. And it feels like I have to do that over and over again on a daily basis.
The first week, I feel fine. In fact, I’m … good? Like a desperate explorer wandering out onto a frozen lake, I tentatively test the surface wondering if I could come out of this unscathed. I aggressively embrace my newfound freedom and move fast, downloading every dating app in existence to find whoever’s next so I can capture this exciting new frontier that has opened itself before me.
But there’s a problem. None of them are her. Everyone else is perilously average, and she’s anything but. I soberly recall the time I had to put in to find her in the first place. Now she’s just out there, floating along for someone else to scoop her up.
How could this be possible? That she’s only a few miles away just doing her own thing and I can’t talk to her? What alternate plane of reality have I slid into? This person, who occupied 90% of my mental real estate is now uncontactable. 500-something days of constant texting, updating, joking and postulating fall under the guillotine, into an irreversible silence of infinite depth.
It starts to really hit me when I’m alone in my apartment. Remnants of her linger in every corner of my immediate vision. The apartment is more ours than mine. She placed pictures and plants, built the bookshelf with me and set up every book. I’m like a squatter now. I find I don’t care for the place much anymore. I express my lack of care by piling up to-go boxes and evenly distributing dirty clothes throughout it. I begin to resent the space.
That resentment slowly begins to permeate my existence as I realize I’m “not ok.” I resent having to wake up every day and go into my job. I resent being unable to enjoy food, media or anything for more than 30 seconds before I’m hit with another memory. I resent the fact that life still presses on despite my intense longing for it to take a break.
Something gives way inside me and I now have the ability to cry on-command. It happens, unexpectedly, in the in-between moments.
Granted, this intense woe sometimes rotates inward on itself in a sort of resigned amusement. At times, I find it funny how sad I am and am able to proceed through my days with a grinning numbness. But it doesn’t last. The joke eventually grows sour and I remember that no, this actually just stucks.
I hit rock bottom.
As it turns out, the bottom I’ve struck is a booby trap. False turf gives way to a newer, deeper breed of morbid self-reflection and apathy. A vapid meaninglessness crushes my chest with death-defying pressure.
Depression is a familiar presence. But it’s never led to thoughts of suicide. This experience leads me to an understanding of the concept. And that’s because this type of depression is different. It’s of the mutant variety, imbued with the extra strength and potency of a full-on chemical addiction that I’ve quit cold-turkey. They say the brain experiences breakups and deaths in a similar fashion.
My biology betrays me and I’m thrust into a crazed mania of separation anxiety and girlfriend withdrawal. I wonder if they make hand-sized straight jackets to prevent separated lovers from texting one another. As I lay in my bed physically squirming with oppressive anguish of an unquenchable voracity, there is a natural impulse to make all the noise stop.
In the face of this hideous depression monster, the self-help doctrine I’ve ravenously downloaded into my brain’s hard drive over the past three years withers and dies like a time-lapsed flower. The notions within these sacred texts sound silly and hollow. Hope is obscured in a thick fog that makes me question if I’m capable of ever experiencing happiness again.
The mind is an incredible piece of fleshy hardware. It is capable of generating images, memories, fears and scenarios with such vividity that the self gets lost in them, becomes them. It grows increasingly difficult to separate myself from these experiences the more frequently they intrude.
The memories are sticky and pull me down like quicksand. Struggling against them makes it worse. They come back stronger and spawn other memories with similar themes. The brain is sending me a clear message: “I need to wallow.”
In order to purge the sadness, I feel I must swim in it, submerge, and inhale deeply. You’ll hear this truth echoed in plenty of breakup articles and books: “Let yourself be sad”
Eventually, I give in. I get sad, sad as shit. My day-to-day interactions with people don’t look too different than normal. But there’s a deep current of sorrow flowing beneath the surface that I give full reign as soon as I’m alone.
It brings a strange sort of contentment. I feel invincible, like I could get mugged and produce a rye chuckle as my face is bashed in by a tire iron.
This warm cocoon of sadness is treacherous.
The sad cocoon provides comfort but it is not a lasting solution. Prolonged exposure to it hardens the heart and dampens vulnerability, damaging chances at future healthy relationships. It’s also hard to do much in the sad cocoon. You’re comfy and somewhat at peace. But humans weren’t meant to be at peace. We’re not meant to roll over and submit to life’s orneriness. Do people do that? Definitely. I think some people experience something painful, and enter the sad cocoon for the rest of their lives.
I feel that tragic pull, but even in my weakened state, sense that I must put it behind me.
The question is how? And the answer to that question is evasive. Being the over-sharer that I am, I reach out to about every friend, family member and acquaintance I can to get the answer.
This is a dangerous game. Particularly when your search for feedback is open-ended. I make the mistake of asking people if we did the “right thing.” This leads to heavy pontification by people like my parents, boss, best friends, and co-workers that serves primarily to muddy the waters in my brain.
That’s because a question like this typically leads to people asking you a bunch of questions that you’ve already worked through in your mind a century ago.
Others: “Well, did you communicate enough with each other? Did you tell her you felt that way?”
Me: “Yes, ALL THE TIME”
It’s regressive, and it leads to people reaffirming your deepest fears.
Others: “Man, if you still love her, I just don’t get why you can’t make it work.”
Me: “yeah...same” *spirals back down into the depths
What is one to do with this heterogenous onslaught of advice?
The Compass
Eventually, I decide to let myself find solace in the scraps of advice that genuinely give me hope, and disregard the rest. Because deep down, I feel I’m subconsciously searching for a certain response from people when I ask these questions. There is something I’m wanting to hear. Otherwise, why would some words make me feel good, and others make me feel worse?
I decide to use the little piece of flint that ignites in my chest when my friend says the “right thing” as a compass for the direction I want to move in.
It doesn’t mean I’m being delusional about my lot. Only that I should allow myself a sense of hope when it’s presented to me, and hope that that hope can be a guide to healthy, rational thinking about the situation.
Troubling Encouragement
Shortly after my breakup, one of my best friends from college texts me out of the blue as if sensing sensed an energetic distress signal in the force.
She wants to know how my life is going. My mouth waters at the chance to share my woes with another patient person — particularly her.
After I take her through my ex and I’s numerous conversations, struggles and attempts to change for the other person, her response is simple:
“If you could have tried harder, you would have. If it was supposed to work, it would have.”
Essentially, what she’s saying is that it couldn’t have happened any other way — that this is the right thing for my life. As these words hit my eardrum, I experience a wave of peace. But then I wonder: Can I really buy that?
Could relationships actually be that simple? For the last two years, I’d come to see relationships as a somewhat inevitable grind. I’d always heard that they were “hard work.” I imagined that the slew of tribulations I was enduring was par for the course. My last relationship felt like I’d been trying to solve a rubix cube for the past year-and-a-half. Every time it seemed like we were getting close to solving it, we actually weren’t. It felt like a failure
Dealing with “What Could Have Been”
The thing that bothers me about my friend’s advice is that it seems to assume a heaping dose of cosmic intervention. And even though I’m not opposed to the idea of a higher power making moves in my life, I’m not keen on the idea of relinquishing consequences from my actions or giving up my free will.
I wonder if there’s another way to find solace in these words without leaning on divine tampering so heavily. Of course, I’d prefer to believe the advice because it’s comforting: “Your life’s story is written in stone. And even though you can’t see it right now, this pain is leading you to a better place” is a savory sentiment. But is it true?
Selfish as it sounds, much of my angst feels wrapped up in the question of whether I’ve made a mistake or done something that irreparably made my life worse. Because of the current separation agony, my body and brain seem to be saying that’s exactly what I’ve done. How could something this painful not be worse for me?
To answer that, I had to realize an obvious and important truth: No one can ever know whether experiences will be good or bad for their lives long-term. There are simply too many variables to life and we cannot look into the future. Just ask one of those lottery winners whose lives were mangled after being handed millions of dollars.
Or, take a moment and listen to the way people talk about their trials in life. Most of the people I’ve met who have dealt with difficult times, would not change those difficult times in hindsight. How weird is that? People can talk about how shitty a period of their lives were, and in the next breath be thankful for it. Tough experiences are often the most valuable learning experiences in our lives. They make us more resilient, experienced, compassionate and interesting. Maybe that knife driven into the soul is carving out more depth.
In terms of my breakup, there was — at one point — the potential for a variety of different outcomes. So, my friend’s advice (“If it was supposed to work, it would have”) isn’t exactly correct on that front. Things could have happened another way — good or bad. At the time, there were infinite possibilities in front of us.
But, as we all know: None of those other things happened. What happened, happened. Us humans only get to experience one plain of reality and each choice we make drives us down that reality path.
However, if you look back at the events that have transpired, an element of my friend’s advice still rings true. We just need to change the tense of her advice from “couldn’t have” to “can’t have happened any other way.” It can’t have happened any other way because we’re not time travelers. And at the end of the day, who says “couldn’t have happened” and “can’t have happened any other way” shouldn’t provide the same level of comfort?
To put it far more simply: Hyperfocusing on whether or not the breakup should have happened only creates more pain, as I am no longer in a position to do anything about it. From one perspective, this thought can be saddening. But from another, I’m kind of off the hook. That time of struggle and indecision as to whether or not I was in the right relationship is over.
Lenses
As time marches on in the wake of this separation, I’m reminded of the power of personal narrative. The stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us dictate our ability to navigate life with sanity and potency.
When we’re in the midst of pain, finding that perspective and learning to tell ourselves the right story can feel impossible. Positivity rings hollow. But it’s absolutely vital that we don’t stop trying, that we keep questioning the negative, maximizing narratives that flow unbidden through our brains. When the bad thoughts come, we must ask ourselves: Is this story any more true than its sunny-dispositioned counterpart?
With time, the positive narrative gains some weight and evens the scale. It starts to feel more plausible.
The Afterlife
Months begin to pass and life rolls mercilessly onward. I slowly acclimate to my new situation. Once again, I’m an untethered single male navigating life’s winding path. At first, I was a fish thrust out of the water that was my relationship. Now I’m reaching the next stage of evolution. Legs have sprouted and I’m some kind of slithery creature who looks back on his time as a fish with wonder and curiosity.
Oftentimes, I remember how nice it was being a fish, and I miss it. I miss my old activities and comforts. It’s hard figuring out how to fill my time in new ways. It’s hard remembering all the great things about her that I miss. It’s hard being alone. There’s a whole new world to figure out up here and it’s daunting.
In the rearview, my past relationship sometimes feels more and more like a blip on the radar. But how could that be? How could something so intense, all-encompassing and pivotal shrink like that? The thought saddens me. But the sadness brings with it a profound beauty and truth about life that I’ve never experienced so poignantly before: This too shall pass.
This loss hit me hard and something within me feels permanently fractured. But love is seeping out of the cracks of whatever that is, love for everything and everyone. Love for the “human condition,” for the fact that we can feel anything this piercingly at all, for the miracle of connection and empathy that lies within all of us if we’re bold enough to let it out.
Underneath it all is a profound sense of hope.
Then, I find out she’s with someone new. I’m crushed, tossed carelessly back into the sad cocoon. Negative thoughts toward her solidify in my mind and I valiantly fight them off. In two weeks I’ve emerged again, ready to take another crack at it.
Then, I find someone new and am excited. Maybe I am ready. It turns out she’s not into it. Someone new finds me, but I’m not into it. Then, I find a great girl in a situation similar to mine, but somehow neither one of us are that into it. And so life’s wheel spins on, each new experience adding a new context and depth to those that came before, while simultaneously bringing new perspectives on what’s to come.
I realize that “getting over” someone doesn’t mean what I thought. Even though we don’t talk, she’ll always be present somewhere within me. The impact of our relationship will have an effect on every other relationship I have throughout my entire life. That realization is intense, but I think it’s okay.
I choose to view this fact with gratitude. We shared a special time together, we tried, we stretched ourselves, and I believe we came out better from it.