Frankly Put: Learning to Love after Heartbreak
Love is not all beautiful. It really isn’t. Maybe bits and pieces of it are but holistically love is not all through beautiful… and I think that makes it all the more worthwhile.
It really can be hard to see the rosy parts of love when your heart is broken. Then again, it is difficult to see through a broken windshield when driving. Heartbreak can be like that sometimes, blinded on this journey called life but you are still expected to just keep driving. The worst part about it is that when you are on the road, it is difficult to explain to someone not in the car with you exactly what you are going through even if they might have been there, just with a different kind of cracked windshield.
In such times, we develop a need for a sort of navigation system through this whole life thing and I suppose that is where the support structure comes in clutch. An automated voice that tells you, “In the next 300 metres, take the next exit from this situationship” or “Red flag up ahead, take the next U-turn.” The more I learnt to look at it that way the more I came to understand if heartbreak was a shattered windshield then love is the actual windshield and something we cannot run from is the need to have a clear vision.
At this point, I think it serves the whole premise better to specify that I am referring to romantic love. To lose a significant other is honestly an odd experience to go through and I think majorly, it is because of how much the person becomes an extension of you. Cheers to the healthy relationships that offer autonomy, you are not safe from it either. Even in that independence, you are offered something that becomes a hole when it is taken away. Yes, I choose violence!
A conversation I once had with someone touch briefly on something that I had to sit and digest afterwards for a bit. In the conversation, there was the mention of serial dating, which roughly describes the concept of jumping from relationship to relationship in quick succession. The people who do this are usually not single very long and have a long line of suitors waiting on the small window of their singleness. Admittedly, these tend to be women or maybe it comes to them easier and more often.
Now, seeing as it wasn’t something I thought too much about (or hadn’t in a very very long time) I was curious to scroll down the list of people who I know of the same mentality. Although thinning, there is a number and I was almost pushed to the point of reaching out and asking how they do it. How do you find it so easy to move from one relationship to the next? Do people not need a short servicing break for maintenance and what not before another long journey?
There is the common ideology that ladies tend to have checked out of the relationship way before the relationship ends and have, in that time, moved to close the deal on another, hence the short gaps between the relationships. The guys, although not completely similar, do this thing where they were not as invested in the relationship and after getting what they wanted, bid their time until when the breakup seems justifiable. Quite a terrifying reality for the hopeless romantic and old souls.
I wonder, how one has the ability to switch off and switch on loyalties and affection to different people. I used to see it as toxic but after spending some time ruminating on it I realized maybe I have adopted the annoying habit of calling anything and everything toxic. On the real though, there is no one way to really go about this whole transition between relationships and they are valid just as say I am, in the way I move.
The journey to loving after a break-up is an uphill climb from the depths that the actual separation can take you. Even in cases where one parts with their significant other on good terms, there is still this gap within. Many tend to try to force things in it that don’t quite fit. It is like the little toys that we give children that teach them to put the right shape in the right hole.
If a shape does not fit in the hole and we try to force them in, we run the risk of either distorting the shape or making the hole bigger and misshapen( definitely not an innuendo). This only serves to make the shoe a bit harder to fit in for the next foot. I used to pose this question, “When was the last time you were single single? Not talking to anyone, not fooling around, not actively looking. How did it feel?”
I wonder in such cases if all you have ever known is having someone by your side, do you get to know what relationship you have with yourself? Perhaps, I could get thoughts about this. My mother once told me she didn’t like to have babies using walkers because they don’t condition the legs of babies to be strong enough to stand up on their own. I attribute the sense of self to the same.
Just as falling teaches you more about balance I believe heartbreak teaches you more about love. To be willing to stretch your hand out and grab the lessons is the thing we just fail to do. See why love is not beautiful, it won’t put those lessons in your hands, it will just hover them above you until heartbreak smacks you silly.
Do the holes left by those who walk out of our lives have to be quickly patched up? I don’t think so. A landscape is beautiful because it has valleys too. You truly enjoy the summit when you trek from the valleys so I like to encourage people to hike a bit. Learn how well your lungs handle the air thinning. Learn how well your limbs stay intact after pulling and pushing yourself up. Learn how much willpower you need to expect out of someone who will try to love you because of the amount you put in.
There is no rush to love. They say to love someone who has been single long is difficult because you have to convince them that you are reason enough to make them want to be otherwise.
It is only in learning yourself that you learn to love after heartbreak, to put it Frankly.
