THE WORDS OF A BROKEN HEART

I can’t believe you’ve left me, you’ve spurned me
I can’t live without you (I won’t live without you . . .)
Please take me back
I love you so much, you have to love me
My heart is aching, I can’t breathe, I can’t walk, the sadness is crushing me
I am so alone
Life can’t be this cruel and unfair
See my misery and make things right
You are all that matters, you are beautiful, you are the one
The one you’ve lost can still be seen, roaming the earth and maybe in the company of someone else.
I am nothing without you
Only you can make me happy

And the song goes on.
The pain of lost love is a terrible thing; it’s devastating and it can have lasting consequences. But if you look at the lyric, is there a whole lot in it that concerns the well-being of the other person? Not really. It seems to be all about the “me”, not the “you”. The you may in fact be doing alright, may not be suffering much, but that isn’t the me’s concern here.


When you think about it, falling in love isn’t all about the joy of giving.
There’s quite a bit of getting going on.
Winning a great new partner carries a lot of benefits, many of them very satisfying
to the receiver. Benefits like: the other person’s attention, their admiration, the feeling of being important to someone, of being exciting, of being wanted sexually, the sense of being a scintillating member of society’s crème. These are boons to the ego, every one, even though they’re accompanied by a delight in giving to the other person. And there are other blessings that come with new love: the feeling of coming home, of being supported, the sense of having a plan, having a future, having hope; the sudden immunity from loneliness. It isn’t surprising that losing all these things would crush one’s spirit.

Unless one is the perp. The one who chooses to lose all these things. Then it might not hurt as much.
Now there’s an odd turn of events. Why would someone choose to throw all this bounty away, breaking the other person’s heart in the process? Let’s ask the guy sitting a couple of stools down at the bar, the one who has a way of bringing things down to simple terms, like who gains and who loses. He has wavy blond hair, tired eyes, and a rumpled blue windbreaker. He’s whiling away an hour with some peanuts and a beer; he doesn’t act like he’s paying attention but he is. “Bar Guy, why would a person, let’s say a dude, throw away all the advantages and pleasures of . . . ” “I heard you the first time,” Bar Guy says. “Look at it this way.
Maybe the dude wasn’t getting all these goodies anymore. The heartbreaker no longer had so much to lose; in fact, he felt he had a raw deal, or not the deal he wanted.”

That’s a good point, friend. The guy was still the expediter of his lover’s dreams, but his own dreams weren’t coming true anymore. When love is in balance, when it’s win-win, all is well. There’s a level playing field, power is evenly distributed, and both people feel like they are benefiting—like they are lucky to have the other. But that can change and things can get out of whack.

And here I have to say: Bar Guy, you didn’t get it exactly right. What happens is not that the future heartbreaker (let’s call him HB) isn’t getting goodies anymore—not exactly. It’s more that HB is starting
to withhold goodies like admiration and attention, and that makes his partner (call her V) want them even more. Why is he withholding them? Because he has too much power in the relationship. V has slipped, either because HB seized too much power—he wanted it and he took it—or because his waning interest gave him an accidental advantage, not one he was purposely seeking. Or she slipped because she gave him too much power, by not standing up to him or, sadly, by admiring him too much.
“Yeah, but he still isn’t getting the goodies he used to,” Bar Guy says, cracking a peanut shell. “Now that she demoted herself, he doesn’t want her admiration anymore.”

Okay, that’s true too. When a person stops valuing their partner as highly, they stop wanting that partner’s gifts, and they start withholding their own, and that just makes the partner more desperate to get what used to be forthcoming. That creates neediness, which feeds on itself until the deprived partner starts to lose her self-sufficiency.

So HB begins to perceive V as a losing proposition.
So HB breaks up the relationship and V gets a broken heart.
Exactly this happened to me some years ago. I was the victim, I lost my footing and became needy and unsure, and I got my heart broken. I walked the city and howled at the moon, and thought if only she could see my misery, she would take me back. At one point I considered leaping out of the back seat of a moving car. I even started writing love songs.

And while I still thought I had a chance to get her back, my misery was unabated. It just wouldn’t let go.
I walked past her house, thinking she would see me in the night and relent. I called her. I showed up at
places where I knew she went. I was the star of my own huge drama and I did get to be with her a few more times and came tantalizingly close to being restored. Or so it seemed: really I think she just didn’t
know what to do with me.

“Misery is a choice,” Bar Guy says. “Look at the toddler who starts screaming when his mother comes into the room. He was fine a minute ago but now he needs to manipulate her. Or look at my ex-wife and me. We’re all upset and can’t even speak to each other—then the phone rings and we’re normal with whoever is calling.”

Sorry, I won’t agree that I chose that misery, that heartache. But I will admit one thing. Once I accepted for sure that I could never win her back, my personal drama did ratchet down a few notches. When I could no longer imagine her as my audience, I turned off the stage lights and left the theater, went back to the everyday world.

I went back. But I wasn’t the same. And it wasn’t till years later that I realized what the true damage had been. My broken heart eventually passed, it got better. But I had other problems, and they were big. They were set to affect my attempts at romance for years to come. Later in Part One I will explore those kinds of longer-term problems, how to recognize them and vanquish them in order to get to a real love.
But first a practical question demands some answers. When you first find yourself with a broken heart, how do you deal with it? My long-term answer will be found in Part Two of this book, on “Unlocking The Lessons of the Relationship.” When you learn the lessons of a failed relationship, that helps you more than anything else to get over it and trade hurt for understanding. That is what will lead you towards a better relationship and thereby restore your optimism.

Which still leaves the immediate wall of pain that seems to be collapsing upon you. It’s time for those first-aid measures I mentioned before.