The Pain of A Broken Heart: I Just Had To Endure It

My first severe breakup – there had been others before it but none quite so painful or resonant – happened under false pretenses, and was executed by a woman I may now – in retrospect – recognize as having been the most unstable and irrational woman I’ve ever known. And yet, I loved her. I was a junior in college at the time, and had at that point been through innumerable breakups of no real consequence, and so had subsequently never been confronted with the issue of truly coping with a break up, of healing a broken heart that – at the time – seemed tattered and beaten beyond recognition and recovery.

So this is what happened: we met early in the fall, sharing (fortuitously) a class on abnormal psychology. It was platonic at first, but after a few study dates we became intimate, and in a couple of weeks we were dating. Things went well for five months: I met her parents and she met mine, we enjoyed the company of each other’s friends, and probably went no longer than five minutes without touching when in each other’s company.

It was halfway through the fourth month that she started acting strangely, spitting our spontaneous and irrational demands (when the power went out in a thunderstorm: “Fix it!”; over dinner on my 20th birthday: “I’m not even joking, you need a vasectomy.”) and speaking in fond reminiscence of ex-boyfriends, regaling me with clearly malicious intent of her best sexual experiences (of which I was featured in none but for those I suggested).
Shortly thereafter, she ended it, and I was left wondering: How do I mend my broken heart? How do I overcome this?

Well, there are techniques: spending a lots of time with friends (particularly those whose company you enjoy and with whom there’s never a pause in conversation). Fill your schedule for a few days or weeks with things you know you’ll enjoy: parties, gallery events, a new movie, a lecture; go see a sporting event or a play or a stand-up comedian. The goal is to keep yourself occupied, keep yourself distracted from the pain, and to make sure that, with a packed schedule, as soon as one thing ends you have something else to look forward to.

Each of these is a remedy for a heart that is broken, I promise. But the inescapable fact is that they won’t numb the pain, and nothing will. Heartbreak must simply be endured, I’m sorry to say it, and it has to be endured patiently, the sufferer knowing – with 100% certainty – that the love of another is waiting for them around the corner.