Why a broken heart ain't so bad

The unique gifts of having your heart put through a blender

I knew a girl in her early thirties who lost her father and then, within a year, her long-term partner broke up with her without explanation. She said the pain was worse losing her boyfriend because she had to question whether he ever loved her at all. When her boyfriend moved out of their shared home she asked herself, for the first time in her life, the terrible questions that heartbreak precipitates: am I unlovable? and will I always be alone?

Can something that, for some, feels worse than death have any redeeming features? I argue in the affirmative.

Before my husband, I never had any really serious, long-term loves (which hopefully gives my fellow romantically challenged friends out there some hope). Rather, I had a series of boyfriends over two decades (age fourteen to thirty-four), some of whom I loved and wanted, more than anything, to stay (spoiler alert: they did not), and some from whom I ran, for reasons that are both simple and complicated.

But in every new relationship (or situationship), I would lament the idea that I might “never fall in love again.” I was so addicted to romance that I was scared of coming down during the high. The idea that long-term love could offer even a fraction of the first flush of love was laughable to me. Safety isn’t sexy! Drama is horny! End of story.

Suffice it to say (and luckily for my husband) I’ve worked through that little peccadillo of mine. I now see that I get to fall in love with the same person (again and again) for a lifetime. I understand that watching our baby smile is falling in love with my husband, our child, and our relationship all at once. And I get to feel that feeling every single day. It’s schmultzy, but it’s true.

Being, finally, at a place where I’m not in and out of love on a semi-regular basis, I don’t exactly miss the chemical imbalance of heartbreak, but I can see exactly what it gave me. I detest the narrative that long-term love is the happy ending in life, because heartbreak gave me a lot. I’m truly not sorry that I had my fair share of it.

It gave me a reason to leave.

More than once, I travelled to the other side of the world to try and cure my broken heart. Even if a new location didn’t mend me totally, it gave me the life affirming gift of adventure. Of memories. Of the sensation that my life belonged to me, in perpetuity. I was reminded that I could go anywhere and do anything all by myself. Even move to Mexico. Learn a new language. Heal my nervous system. Make best friends in my thirties. I was reminded that with those new friends I could hike mountains, swim under waterfalls, and get lost in new cities. I also came to learn that I could find myself in my solitude. Turns out she’s not so bad! I like her!

If I hadn’t been hurting so much, I wouldn’t have searched for so many answers. I wouldn’t have left. I discovered that sometimes leaving everything can give you everything (and then some).

It gave me something to write about

In 2021, in an attempt to cure myself of a broken heart, I started writing little vignettes every morning. My first real attempts at writing prose. I discovered I liked it. I started taking writing classes. I wrote some more. And then some more. Those vignettes are now the beginning of a 70,000 word memoir. I don’t know if I’ll ever try and publish it but hot damn! I wrote a book! Maybe my kids will read it one day. Maybe that will be enough.

I also squeezed quite a few poems out of heartbreak, one of which you can read below.

I may not be W.H Auden but the fact that these poems exist, gives me great comfort. I made something where there was nothing but a bruised heart. I think that’s kinda cool, so I don’t want them to collect dust for all eternity.

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This sadness is a kind of inversion 

An empty envelope hand folded

Tucked into its own corners

I want to lick my seal

And send myself to Europe

Or just stay in the top drawer

With a paperweight anchoring me.

Anyway, it’s dark in here, I can’t see.

Wake me

When it’s over,

Wake me

When the mail is here.

It gave me a particular kind of female friendship

I am going to share another poem with you all (bear with me guys, I know poems are niche and borderline embarrassing, but we’ve come this far!) – it sums up this point better than anything else I could write under this heading.

I think about shared history all the time

How there’s nothing like it, no substitute

For the sacredness of climbing trees

Of thrashing about in childhood swimming pools

Or the wild expanse of the sea

Tiny bodies negotiating extremities

Or the divine and excruciating ecstasy

Of first loves witnessed not by the lover

But by the friend who knows you still,

Recovered from your heart that was broken

And mended over and over again

Sitting in dank share house living rooms

Holding your head as you cried

Thinking the world might end

And then creating the world again and again

Together, in different ways, as you travel

To far away places

Sleeping in 12 bed dorms in Barcelona

Cheap hotels on Khao San Road and tiny rooms in Tokyo

You’ll reminisce on the time you used a paper map to navigate all of Ireland

You’ll laugh about the silent disco in Palolem and the the weird men

You made out with in Istanbul that one night

How it was all so funny and perfect and wrong and right

You’ll recall it all over a glass of wine

Dressed in court shoes, suits and ties

Remarking how time flies and that it kind of feels

Like we’re playing dress ups when we go to work, we will say

How funny that people pay us to do things! What idiots are they!

And then one day it’s not funny anymore

Because we’re real adults in a way we weren’t before

There are babies on the way, some live alone

We buy art, placemats, tape measures, linen sheets, sensible hats

We call each other for long meandering chats

While we hang out washing or make coffee in the morning

But the heartbreaks, they still come – and they go

The troops aren’t called in though, with vodka and music

To tell you he’s a dickhead while you get sloppy drunk and cry

But there is something gentler and more dignified

It’s the message or the call that says: I’m here

I know the fortitude of your heart, you will not die.

So, if you’re suffering from a broken heart right now and it feels like you might just die from it, remember that pain is the shadow of joy. Feeling deeply doesn’t make you weak, it makes you brilliantly alive. And there’s plenty to live for, even when it hurts.