There is no pain like heartbreak. It’s awe-inspiring, really, how perfect is the somatic metaphor of heartbreak. Our hearts, of course, do not break, not really, unless we have a heart attack, or some medical thing like it. And yet, when we lose the person we love, we feel it in our chests, there, just there, beneath our solar plexus.
It feels as if a metal fist squeezes our heart in its relentless grip. It feels as if the heart has fractured, as if it has been rent in two, as if it has been impaled. Or it feels as if it has just been ripped out of our chest cavities and what remains is a bloody, pulsating, echoing absence.
We can’t breathe. We can’t think. We curl fetal and sob loss inchoate into and from our bellies. We mourn and we pine. When we lose that person we love, we feel that pain beyond pain, that loss beyond loss, that emptiness beyond words.
We have all felt it, most likely, this loss, this break. And yet, as with real physical pain, we have a hard time recollecting it in all its exquisite sensation once we’ve healed. So each time it happens, it catches us somehow unawares; we and our delicate organ that symbolically beat beat beats the tattoo of our love live in willful denial of the pain until it’s undeniably there: There is the loss and in its place there is the pain.
Which means that as much as we can’t remember what it’s like to feel this loss, we also can’t fully remember how to cope with it. To this end, this dealing with the pain, I give to you a reminder of things to do when you’ve lost your lover.
Tick Tick Tick, Time is on Your Side: My parents almost divorced when I was in my early twenties. My mom confessed to cheating on my father and he left her. I remember he told me that he’d gone to his therapist; “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I’m in pain. How long will this last?” he asked his therapist in anguish, and my dad told me that he’d expected an answer along the lines of “as long as it needs to” or “until you nurture the loved one within,” or some other ooh-wah response.
“Eighteen months,” the therapist told him matter-of-factly. Studies show that in general it takes us eighteen months to cope with loss. Get a calendar. Mark the days. Eighteen months, and you’ll be OK. Really.
Go Ahead, Get Fetal: Which doesn’t mean that in the meantime you have to be stoic. You don’t win any points for shoving your pain to the side and pretending it doesn’t exist. You want to cry? Go ahead. Want to curl up and sniff your lover’s last dirty t-shirt until you can smell no more? Knock yourself out. Want to revisit every place you’ve been, touch the panes of glass of that French restaurant, this dive-bar’s bathroom stall, those toes of the public statue? Fine. It’s your heartache and you can be just as self-indulgent as you need to be.
No Man (or Woman) is an Island: One thing that women do when we hurt: we talk. We talk and we talk and we talk. We’ll talk to anyone who will listen until they tell us to shut up and have a Cosmo, already. We talk to friends; we talk to strangers; we talk to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen.
This is one thing men should learn. Men, heterosexual men at least, tend to not talk. This is bad. Not talking leads to festering. Heterosexual men tend not to talk much because the person who they are most used to expressing their feelings to is the very person they have lost. Therefore, the loss becomes compounded. There is the loss of the person, the loss of the person to whom they would confess all of this emotional stuff, and the loss of the release of saying the emotional stuff. You men who don’t talk: talk. Just find someone and start talking. It will help unpack that complex bricolage of loss.
Music Really does Soothe the Savage Beast: I’m a big proponent of musical therapy when it comes to heartbreak. Sometimes I just listen to one disc compulsively—the Tom Tom Club’s disc with “Man with the 4-Way Hips” got me through a bitchin’ heart-ache in the early ‘80s. Sometimes I’ll make a playlist of extreme Emo songs and listen to them until I can’t stand it anymore (Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” is the crown jewel of this weepy genre). Sometimes I’ll make a playlist of angry songs, or empowering songs, or vindictive songs and listen to that compulsively (Cake’s version of “I Will Survive” is particularly good. So is any AC/DC). Figure out what emotional notes you need and then make the songlist that will fill in that void.
The Movies Rule: I definitely use popular culture to heal my heart, and you can too. The first rule about movie-watching is there should be no romance. When I’m feeling heartbroken I watch films that fall into one of two categories: Films in which Things Get Blown Up, and Films in which Dudes are Friends. The incomparable Fight Club clearly falls into both categories, and, yeah, there is the questionable romance between Tyler Durden and Marla Singer, but really the real love story is between a boy and his rage.
The second rule about movie-watching is watching them goes on as long as it needs to. You are in pain; you are therefore mildly to moderately insane. If it makes you feel more functioning to watch Papillion or Saving Private Ryan on infinite repeat, do it.
The third rule about movie-watching…oh, there is no third rule. Popcorn is optional.
The Cup Just Might Be Half Full: There is good in singlehood. Once you can see beyond the obfuscation of your pain, you can begin to enjoy the things you couldn’t when you were with your Other. She didn’t like your impromptu poker parties? Have one. He wasn’t so into your slutty clothing? Trot out the hot pants, mama. The Other mandated that holidays were spent with the families? Enjoy your Thanksgiving at a strip club. The Other didn’t support your love of ferrets? Get yourself one of the furry rodential motherfuckers. In other words, reëxperience the wonder, the power, the glory of your own interests. Revel in them. Find out who you are on your own gritty terms.
Get the Hell out of Yourself: take the time to wallow in your pain, but also know when to say when. Get physical and exercise—it’s good for you inside and out. Volunteer to help someone do something you can do and they can’t. Do something outside your head and your house; it will make you feel something other than pathetisad.
Let There Be Light (Eventually): at some point, you need to learn what this relationship said/did/responded to about you. But this epiphanic process is many, many months down the road. Don’t hurry it. At some point, you will need to reflect, but the time isn’t Now until you’ve felt the pain you need to feel. Starting asking what did I do wrong oh god oh god early on in this heart-healing process is a form of punishment. Don’t punish yourself. Maybe you did do wrong—you probably did—but punishment doesn’t really lead to understanding or change. Usually it leads to binge drinking. And that is a fine coping mechanism for most of us in extreme moderation, but in the long run, it’s expensive, painful, sick-making, and unhealthy. Don’t punish. In time, you’ll have the presence of mind to learn stuff about you.
Have Some Fucking Fun: This advice comes in two parts, as it were. The first part is this: If you’re not ready to be with someone else for a while, be with yourself. Relearn how to fuck yourself. Get some toys. Get some videos. Get to experiment. As my mother said, it’s ok to touch yourself as long as your hands are clean. Have at it with yourself until you can have at it with someone else.
The second part is this: Sex does not have to be wound up in love and marriage and white picket fences and monogamy. At some point, do some dating. Kiss someone. Be fingered. Fuck, if you want to. I don’t advocate relationship surfing—riding the crest of one Other to the next without a break—and I don’t advocate immediate sex after a really wrenching break-up, but I do advocate recognizing that at some point you need to embrace your needs. Moreover, you’re going to have to learn what it’s like to get naughty-sweaty with another body. There are other people in the same exact predicament you are in—newly single, frisky and fearful. Find another honest person—or two or three—and have some safe, physical fun.
Everyone Makes Mistakes: Finally, my last piece of advice is this: recognize that you’re going to fuck up in taking care of yourself. You have made mistakes; you will make mistakes again. Don’t beat up on yourself for them. Learn from them and move on. At the end of the day, the only person we will be with every moment from the cradle to the grave is ourselves. Treat yourself with the love you want to be treated with and you will know love, inside and out.
Take care, you of the healy hearts. And if any of you readers have words to add, please do. We are none of us alone, even when we feel we are.
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