JOIN USHearts are breakable, we know that. Only the most dull, unimaginative member of the human race goes through life without crushing, infatuating, pining, wanting, yearning, lusting or loving at least once. Here we are all smitten at some point in time by someone or the other, and there we are rolling on the floor crying our eyes out because... because... oh, need you ask?
There is only one acceptable response to ‘I love you’ and it is ‘ditto’. Anything else is heartbreak. A loves B, but B loves C and C probably loves A but definitely not B, so that we have on our hands three heartbreaks at the same time. This is a fact of life, these zigzag arrows of Cupid.
For any thinking, living, feeling person, heartbreak is a natural state of being. What defines us is the way we exit dead-end, going-nowhere unions when we’ve already gotten our marching orders. Heartbreak is more than boo-hoo-hoo; it is not just about how we fall, but how we stand up after that. It begins with a bang — ‘no one can love you more than me, no one!’ — and ends without even a whimper as you exit stage left. So, yes, hearts have been breaking for the longest time and, thank God, hearts have been mending too for the longest time.
Healing from heartbreak
When her marriage to Jesse James ended in 2010, actor Sandra Bullock said: “I’ve been on the floor and I’ve been heartbroken. I didn’t know how I was going to stand up. But I just gave it time. You don’t think it will pass when you’re in the middle of it, but it does.”
Of course, in an overpopulated country like ours, heartbreak hardly makes sense, because you can always find many, many others to replace the one that got away. And who can heed traditional wisdom on the subject: never love someone more than he/she loves you? As if feelings are a maths equation where you can subtract and add at will.
You sit up nights berating yourself for what you said and what you did and how you’d say it all and do it all differently given a second chance, if only — if only! — you could get that second chance. And how resistant you are to the voice of reason, when friends and family tell you that you will get over it, and you think, ‘not me, never me’, in a high-pitched voice inside your head.
Heartbreaks have gone hi-tech. Where earlier in Hindi films the dumped hero sang bitter and profound stuff staring into sunsets, the heartbreak of today involves less poetry and more of pressing ‘send’ without a second thought. If romantic helloes are via a text, so is ‘I am not feeling it, dude’. People spend entire lifetimes, especially their courtships, working their cell phones. There’s not so much hand-holding as cell-holding! While hearts go through their fair share of breakage, fingers — from all that texting — go through their own quota of damage too.
A student at the University of Chester recently claimed to have gotten into a relationship with a woman whom she had thought to be a man. And this was possible because their intimacy mainly involved mobiles and social media. Now they stand face to face in court without texting or emailing, but it’s too little too late.
Junot Diaz in his short story ‘This Is How You Lose Her’ says: ‘You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It’s just a matter of willpower: The day you decide it’s over, it’s over.’
Every morning you wake up and your heart breaks all over again as you remember your almighty offer of love and the spectacular rejection of it. You spend hours and days talking to ‘him/her’ directly inside your head, till it is a fulltime job. When someone is so important, so all-consuming to you, then the ‘no’ feels like a wholesale rejection of you, and you forget happily that a middle finger from someone is only that person’s middle finger.
You are ready to beg and plead, promise anything and everything, and words pour out of your mouth with a will of their own. Unloved, unwanted... you are the life and soul of your own pity party. No pill or powder will do, mood swings are the order of the day and nights are for insomnia and listening to sad songs.
You think that all you want is clarity on the situation, you want to know where you stand, that the concerned person should say it to your face that he/she does not want you. But think about it, how can any person say it is off? There are many examples of how to declare love but hardly any advice on how to declare non-love. He will only hem and haw and shuffle his feet, for he is only human. He is not looking forward to breaking your heart. But in the end, that is what he must do, unless, of course, he is a dangler and wants to see you dangle. And you will both make a perfect match if all you want to do is dangle.
At the root of it...
Scientists say that a broken heart involves actual physical pain, that the left side of your chest will feel like a truck tyre is crushing it for a feasible period of time. But remember that trucks have places to go and goods to deliver, so eventually one day you will wake up and, hey, no truck on your chest.
Heartbreaks go on as long as hope does. After all, when is one ready to say, this is it, I am ready to move on and let go? How can one cast a backward eye and say, well, that much love will do, that much happiness is enough? Even on our deathbeds we’d be thinking, this is not the end, that person will call back and, hell, what will I wear when we go out.
Heartbreak only begins to make sense when you think of the other party, the party brave enough to leave when things got pointless from their point of view. He may be your main dish, but you will only ever be his side dish, the salad he orders but will only pick at. The arguments are tediously and tiresomely the same: he will never find someone who loves him more than I do, my feelings are pure, I have never felt this way before... Please, he’s heard it all before. And from you.
Listen to Marilyn Monroe, though she’s been dead for some time, and some say from heartbreak: ‘As for lovers, well, they’ll come and go too. And, baby, I hate to say it, most of them — actually pretty much all of them — are going to break your heart, but you can’t give up because if you give up, you’ll never find your soul-mate.’
Nothing can mend a broken heart; you are bleeding to death, the object of your desire has spurned you, so, what next? Walk away. Slowly. Don’t look back. As we reluctantly drag our feet in the opposite direction, we know it is for the best. And that there is someone/something better waiting for us around the corner.
Illicit, forbidden, dangerous love will always beckon us. We all want to feel that love, where we can die for someone, jump off the terrace, love that drives us wild, mad and singing in the rain. And if the price for feeling this way is to be unequivocally rejected, we are ready to pick up the tab.
Unrequited love is Mother Nature’s bitchy resting face. No one wants to hear, ‘I love you, but not that way’, when one is in the throes of Grand Passion. Rest assured, however, that this is just a rite of passage, a leveller like death and taxes, a must in the list of things to do before we die — fall for the wrong person.
Someone has to break your heart, so it better be someone who is worth ruining your mascara over. Someone you can say to, as Gus Waters says to Hazel Grace in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, “It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
The bright side of blues
Okay, let’s get practical. Must one kill oneself if dumped? This is the ultimate attention-gaining gimmick, no way can your ex-beloved not notice you after this. A suicide note to boot will only clinch matters, name him and shame him. But there’s a drawback. You won’t be around to gloat! And that sneaking suspicion you have that the other party might shrug and whistle on may just be right. So there you’ll be all dressed up in your pyre and there he’ll be partying up a storm in the opposite end of town. If at all he comes, make sure your little sis misses the funeral, or else — you’ve heard the song ‘Oh my darling, Clementine’, haven’t you, where he kisses the sister in a not-so-bereaved fashion?
To help you combat break-up blues, here are some words from the wise:
“Love lasts about seven years. That’s how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.”
— Francois Sagan
French playwright, novelist & screenwriter
“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy — and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.”
Anne Enright, Irish author
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
— Neil Gaiman
English author
“And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.”
Ian McEwan
English novelist & screenwriter
“There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream — whatever that dream might be.”
— Pearl S Buck
American writer & novelist
“If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the marketplace!”
— Thomas Hardy
English novelist & poet
“Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.”
— Julian Barnes
English writer