On Love and Heartbreak

Perhaps the most universal experience we share as humans is love, and it’s unavoidable partner, heartbreak. We’ve all been there- felt the singing highs of mutual affection, felt the brutal shattering of rejection and loss. And yet the thing about love and heartbreak is that they are somehow simultaneously universal and completely unique. No two hearts look or feel the same. And so when we feel love, or it’s absence, we can sometimes feel very alone, very misunderstood. 

I want to share my story with you in hopes that maybe parts of it will resonate with you, make you feel a little less alone and a little more misunderstood. But to be honest, this is more for me than for you. You see, I have made a habit of speaking and writing my experiences into the world in an effort to stay healthy and sane. Sharing my writing, putting my thoughts on paper, stops them from pinballing around my brain and lets me finally have a moment of peace. People often tell me that it’s “courageous” or “brave” to share my personal highs and lows online, but in actuality, I’m far from brave- I’m really just selfish. My blogging and poetry are my release, my medicine, my therapy.

And so that brings us to the last couple months of my life. As many of my friends and family may have noticed, I have not exactly been my best self lately.  I’ve been a bit distant, a bit absent, a bit shut down, distracted. I’ve been lethargic, detached, unmotivated. I’ve isolated, I’ve been neglecting calls and texts, cancelling plans, making it out and bailing an hour in. I’ve been a bit crumbled and broken down lately, and so I haven’t been the support that so many of you have needed. And for all of that, let me say that I am truly and genuinely so sorry if I’ve let you down lately. Once I get a little better I’m gonna work really hard to be a good friend again.

But for now, finally, let me explain.

I all started about six or seven months ago. I remember that it was sometime in late August, and I was cooking dinner with the back porch door open, letting the breeze and city sounds drift in, and talking to my sister-friend Rivka on the phone. I told her I was thinking about giving dating another shot. You see, I had gone through some pretty hurtful, disappointing, and downright ugly experiences with dating that winter into spring, and had taken a detox from men, spending the summer loving on myself instead. I remember having a really defining moment with her and tearing up on the phone as I told her “Riv, I actually feel really good about myself right now. I think I’m finally ready to meet someone who deserves me.” I was feeling at peace and proud of myself for the first time in a long time, and it was a beautiful feeling.

Three days later, I went on a breakfast date with a guy I had met on Tinder. When he walked in and smiled at me, I felt sick. He was way too beautiful, and I was overwhelmed. When he reached across the table as I ate my meat lover’s omelette and tried to hold my hand, I immediately pulled back. It was so sweet, but I just wasn’t ready yet. After breakfast he walked me home, and when he hugged me goodbye, I think he tried to kiss me, but I gave him cheek. Trust me, the first thought I had when I saw his gorgeous face was how much I wanted to kiss it. But I was terrified. I have a habit of moving too quickly and falling for caricatures of real men, only to be let down. I was not gonna be fooled this time!

And so when he went to kiss me, I gave him cheek because I wanted to get to know his flaws before falling in love with his dimples, his high pitched laugh, and the way he refused to walk out of a door before I did.

And so we went on another date, and then another and another. He kept at it, showering me with affection and attention, lending me his ear when I needed to vent or wanted to boast, offering his chest when the weight of the day made my head feel too heavy and I needed a place to rest.  And yet, I kept at it too- the resisting. I fought back and tried to shut him out, interrogating him every step along the way, looking for chinks in his armor.

He took my demands and questions in stride. He answered all of my totally not appropropriate or PC date conversations with grace, and his responses eased my tensions. His heart had a similar stretch of empathy, a twist of optimism and faith, just like mine. His beautiful smile never wavered as he held me and told me he would always be patient with me, that these things were important to him, too, that he was looking for something real. He told me he wanted a relationship centered upon supporting each others’ dreams. I swooned.

Weeks later, when we were out to dinner and ordering, I remember seeing how the waiter looked at us, how he recognized us as a couple, and how ridiculously giddy that made me. This time when he reached across the table to hold my hand, I kept it there, beaming with pride that out of all of the hands in the world, he was choosing mine to hold.

Soon the days began to blend together, and my life was full of him and his endearing quirks. He would do the dishes when I wasn’t looking, leave love notes on the dresser, make me homemade arepas after my late shift (and then get overdramatically upset when I had already eaten dinner and didn’t have room for them). He would hype me up when I walked out in kicks and a snapback as if I was wearing a ballgown and heels, he would wake me up in the middle of the night just to say hi and pull me closer. Words of affirmation is my love language, and he would drown me in compliments every time he saw me. Dressed in my professional clothes for work? Baby, you’re beautiful. Wearing sweats and a messy bun? Baby, you’re beautiful. Just out of the shower, face blotchy and makeup free? Baby, you’re beautiful. But he didn’t just call me beautiful- he called me smart, and kind, and thoughtful, and caring, with the same frequency and importance. The thing he repeated most was that he loved my heart. He said that it was the most beautiful thing about me. I agree.

One day a few weeks in we went grocery shopping together, and I had a freak out moment and stopped him in the middle of the store and told him I was feeling overwhelmed. I told him that grocery shopping with someone is really casual, and yet felt so intimate. That it was what couples who have been together much longer than us do. He laughed at me and said, “so you don’t want me to buy you food?” Then he kissed me in the aisle, and all of the sudden I was that girl, being kissed in the middle of a grocery store. I felt ridiculous, like someone I would have made fun of before. And yet I also felt invincible, weightless.

All this is to say that I fell in love. I fell so in love, guys- real, genuine, healthy, full, beautiful, rich, total and complete love. With the most amazing man. He walked into my life at a time where I was already feeling great, and yet he made the joy multiply, made it glow in every color, spread out in every direction. He made my world feel so much bigger, boundless, never ending, and yet so intimate and comforting at the same time.

I’ve never been in love before, and I always thought it would feel like a roller coaster ride, this crazy, passionate, unpredictable, topsy-turvy kinda thing. But it wasn’t like that at all- it was the opposite. I realized that I loved him when I noticed that since he had entered my life, I had felt an overwhelming sense of tranquility, calm, and stability. I felt steady. I felt sturdy. I was happy, but more importantly, I had come to expect happiness. I had reached a place where I expected that it was mine to have, and with this expectation came a feeling of worthiness. I deserved this man’s time, affection, and care. Because I had beautiful, meaningful, important love to share with him in return. After a couple of months together, he felt like home, like he had always been there. Loving him was the most beautiful routine.

I’ve been waiting so long to say this. I wish I could have shared this love with all of you. Trust me, all I wanted to do was scream it in the streets, parade him around, showing everyone how lucky I was to have found my person. Everytime someone would casually say “How are you?” in passing, I just wanted to answer, “I’M IN LOVE! How are you?”

But I never really got to feel the joy of being public with my love, because just as we fell in love, our world shifted, and then cracked. Life and timing can be so cruel sometimes. Just days after I felt, for the first time in my life, the bliss of genuinely exchanging the words “I love you” with someone, crisis hit. Something serious and scary happened in my boyfriend’s life and he had to leave, immediately. He came over and cried tears into my arms, and I spent the next night crying tears into my pillow because he was already gone, just like that. Nights turned into weeks. On top of the pain of separation, what was happening in his life was something that made communication near impossible. I spent weeks at a time waiting to hear from him, hoping he was safe, praying he was happy, that life had not stolen that beautiful smile from his face. We spoke sporadically, and he reminded me he loved me, and we talked about a future together and how this would someday be a long forgotten part of our past. The brief interactions gave me a rush and an assurance, but I would soon fall back into darkness and uncertainty. I took a huge dive in my mental health. It just happened to align perfectly with the holiday season, and so Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years felt like punch after punch in the gut. I did not respond well. I struggled with a bout of depression that was pervasive and debilitating and spent as many hours as I could in my bed.

On top of all this, I was dealing with the fact that his situation was not something we were in the position to share. I loved him, and so I honored and respected his privacy and kept it all to myself. I knew people would ask about him, and so I created a story to tell them that was as close to the truth as I could get. But the thing is, I’m a terrible liar, and lying makes me feel awful. I started to harbor a lot of guilt about this, about not being truthful. I still feel pretty terrible about it. And so rather than deal with those feelings, I decided to avoid all of my friends. They couldn’t ask if I never hung out with them, right? I began to avoid everything and everyone. I woke up, cried, went to work, cried on the way home, and crawled into bed. Work kept me busy and distracted, so I stayed late most nights. Home sucked, and weekends were the worst. I isolated and shut down. I hated not being able to be open and share what was going on with people. I didn’t feel like myself.  I didn’t feel like anyone would understand even if I could tell them what was going on. I felt pretty alone.

And so in a few short months, I went from the perhaps the greatest and most at peace I had ever felt, to the most unstable and unhealthy I had ever felt. I was spending each day falling more in love, and yet my heart was beginning to break at the same exact time. What a strange place to live in.

Life sometimes does this twisted, miraculous thing where it hands you extreme joy and extreme pain at the same exact time. They sit in your heart and they don’t blend or mix, one does not negate or balance out the other, they just simply cohabitate. And so from moment to moment, and sometimes even in the exact same second, your heart swells with bliss, and then deflates with despair. It’s wild and difficult and chaotic, and yet so beautifully human.

We spent about three month living in the dark together. My love for him grew stronger and more sure. His for me did the same- until it didn’t anymore. One day, something shifted. I felt it coming. We spoke and he was distant, detached. It felt like I was talking to a stranger. He ended things, plainly, quickly. He left me with a mouthful of questions and a broken heart.

Well, to be honest, my heart is still breaking. Like love, real heartbreak is something that’s new to me. And so I never knew that it is not an all-at-once kind of experience. Unfortunately, heartbreak is a drawn out thing, a slow chipping away, a steady disfiguring. And healing isn’t the least bit linear. Heartbreak is kind of like going through a death, but it’s like you’re the only one that knew them. Something big is missing, and yet there’s no one to mourn with, no one that can understand the loss in the way you do. And like death, you grieve in the most chaotic way. One minute I am in denial, waiting for him to show up at my door. The next I feel a bit relieved, ready to refocus my world on myself and myself only. And then all of the sudden, I am an absolute cliche, curled in the fetal position, listening to “Someone like you” by Adele, sobbing into my comforter. I haven’t gotten to the anger part yet, as much as I want to feel that emotion. My friends are definitely feeling plenty of it for me LOL, but I just don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

I won’t lie- the “what ifs” still eat away at me. I wonder what if I had met him earlier? What if this terrible thing had not happened in his life? What if he comes back? What if we get another chance?  What if he was the one? What if one moment was just a little bit different- could this outcome have been avoided? In another time and another place I think ours could have been one of the most beautiful love stories ever told. And yet another what if that I just can’t stop thinking about, perhaps the most difficult one, is what if I was wrong? What if he had ulterior motives, what if he never even truly loved me? What if it was a lie? The messiness that ensues after a breakup has a way of stealing the joyful moments, making you look back on them with doubt. But I refuse to let the ugly end ruin the lovely beginning. Maybe it’s ignorant bliss, but I think he really did love me at one point, however fleeting it was. 

But the thing is that I can’t keep living in the “what ifs”- I have to learn to accept and appreciate the “what is.”

What is, is that our relationship is over. What is, is that my heart is broken and it is going to be a long and arduous process to heal it. What is, is that I may never get closure, or understand what happened and why he acted like he did. What is, is that he will be my reference point for love for a long time to come, that everyone will be compared to him, and that it will be confusing and difficult to untangle him from my limbs.

But what also is, is that I was truly in love. What also is, is that even if just for a brief moment, I had someone who made me feel totally and completely cherished and cared for, and that I am worthy of no less than that in every relationship moving forward. What is, is that I now know the caliber of man I deserve, the caliber of love I deserve. What is, is that as painful as these past couple months have been, I think, I hope, that they are setting me up and preparing me for something even greater.

I was talking to my cousin/ soul sister Erin about the whole ordeal, and she offered me these words of encouragement:

“You’re stronger than this. This won’t break you. It feels like it did, and I guess in many ways it did. But not the type of broken you can’t come back from. Muscle fibers need to tear in order to grow. That’s what working out is- it’s breaking the muscles so that the body can repair them to become stronger. Through training/stress, we become our best selves. The best writer, lovers, counselors, and human beings tend to be ones that have gone through hell- but made it out the other side. Albeit broken at times, but that’s what made them stronger. Sorry for the cliches love, but they’re the truths.”

And she is so right. I am far from damaged beyond repair. It will take time to heal, but I will get to the other side of this. I was joking with my mom on the phone the other day, and told her, “Well, if all I get from this relationship is a broken heart, improved spanish skills (he spoke spanish btw), and a few good poems, at least I got something out of it!” But all jokes aside, this short and poignant period of my life has already given me so much. As much as it sucks, I do feel like my heart’s a bit larger now, and my mind’s a bit clearer. I do feel more hesitant, but I don’t feel completely jaded. I still have so much love to give.

So, here’s to love and to heartbreak. As awful as heartbreak is, it means that you truly loved something, and wow- what a privilege. What a rare and wonderful thing. And yet I have a sneaking feeling that this is not last time that I will feel the joy of love and the hurt of heartpain. May we all be so lucky.