When your heart gets broken

Sometimes you get your heart broken. When someone you love so much, who you give your all to, hurts you. And it feels like your world gets a little darker. Your shoulders become a little more tense, bracing for this new reality. You curl up in a ball, hide under the sheets, and lose the will to be or do to anything. It’s just a feeling, and you know it’ll pass, but it is here nonetheless. And it’s not nothing. Like you lost a favorite toy, or a favorite actor died.

What is this feeling, I wonder? Why do we feel such intense loss when someone we love hurts us? Surely, they are human and can err, as do we, as does anyone. Then why is this mistake so devastating? Perhaps it has to do with the human tendency to focus on what’s wrong over what’s right. If we built a brick wall of 1,000 bricks, and two of them were crooked, we’d focus on the two bricks and ignore the 998 perfect bricks, as Ajahn Brahm’s parable goes. We’d easily demolish this wall over those two bricks. Perhaps our loved ones make two mistakes, and we suddenly forget the 998 perfect things they’ve done for us.

That explains why we focus on the mistake.

But why the darker world? Surely we make mistakes everyday, but our world hasn’t completely gone black.

Yet, one big mistake from who we love and everything drops a shade?

Maybe the fall was too great. Maybe we put our significant other on a pedestal too high for them to uphold forever. And when they inevitably fail, our perfect image of them is shattered. And with it, our last hope for good in this God-forsaken world.

Then, it was our unfairly high expectations of our other half that destroyed us, not what they did.

Why must we make them the savior of our world / the anti-evil, the last hope? They must feel like a submarine being crushed like a soda can at 20,000 leagues under the sea!

It may be because we feel lost, alone, and sad within. That would then explain why we place so much hope and expectation on our significant other. It’s our last ditch effort, is it not, for a good life? For love? For trust, and hope?

Well that’s a problem within, not a problem with them. They gave their life for us too.

Then perhaps, we try to remember the 998 perfect bricks. We remember they are human and will fail often. And that they aren’t meant to save us, just meant to be loved and enjoyed.

Then we may be able to see that that broken heart can begin to mend. For this isn’t the end. Just another blip on the journey you two signed up for. Like when Gandalf died in Lord of the Rings 1. You never know, he might come back in Lord of the Rings 2, stronger and better than ever.

So keep on. Forgive. Let go. Allow some error. She will never be perfect, but maybe that’s a good thing. Because I don’t think anyone ever found everlasting happiness fucking a statue.