The Rules according to Heartbreak.
I often find myself stuck to find the words that describe the true pain of heartbreak. Societally, we don’t give breakups the same kind of understanding that’s given to death or divorce. And although you are heartbroken in both of those scenarios, what about all the other relationships that aren’t family or legally binding that go unnoticed.
We now live in a world where commitment is rare and the muddiness of situationships cloud our better judgment. Most of us are walking around with unanswered questions and heavy hearts. But, for some reason, we’re expected to be immune to the loss. Heartbreak can be over feeling like you lost something you never had, death of hope, the loss of a life un-lived, and most of us are left with grief that goes unacknowledged because we deny ourselves the right to feel heartbroken in the first place.
There’s an expectation that without an official title on your relationship or a socially acceptable ‘time period’, your heartbreak is irrelevant, or you should be able to get over it within a matter of weeks. But Heartbreak knows no time or titles, it doesn’t follow time-sensitive rules and it doesn’t occur only if a piece of paper was signed.
I write this off the back of a recent heartbreak of my own. It was the kind of heartbreak that felt like it had crawled inside my body and was shaking me from the inside out. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love so quickly, none of it made any sense, and before I could make sense of it, the relationship was over and I was left second guessing where my life was going to go after this. Trying to date in the aftermath only made me realise just how much I didn’t want anyone else, and all the usual break-up pep talks from friends couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. Something in me had shifted, I got a glimpse of a relationship I didn’t know I wanted but realised I needed and I just missed him, ALL …THE …TIME.
But that was nothing compared to the inner conflict I was fighting. I felt like our relationship hadn’t earned the right to leave me feeling so broken, so I didn’t dare to show outwardly just how broken I was feeling. I didn’t need others to tell me, we weren’t even “official”, we weren’t “together long enough”, I was telling myself that. But there I was, feeling broken anyway.
I was up at 3 am typing in “symptoms heartbreak” into the google search bar like some zombified insomniac desperate for answers. I did find psychologists say that coming down off of a ‘Love High’ is the same as coming down off a drug as strong as heroin! WHO KNEW?! That could explain the disassociation, body aches, fatigue, and daily nausea I was experiencing.
So there I was feeling physically sick, hopeless, and lost, without a socially acceptable title of what our relationship was. So what did it even matter? Who are those rules for? Who made them up? And why do we exclude so many relationships in order to live by them?
Well, I’ve since realised those rules are bullshit and mean nothing.
There are so many relationship myths that we live our lives by, and we need to get better and deciphering what is true and what’s a part of the fairy tale, that we’re only allowed to experience deep heartbreak under society’s terms and conditions.
The feeling of loss and grief can creep into your life at any point and under any circumstance in which you feel like you’ve lost something important to you.
You have to be gentle with yourself when others weren’t, you have to give yourself the understanding that though it may be small to some it’s big to you. Sometimes the only thing to pass the time is accepting that you will love them forever until you get a small glimmer of hope that you will definitely be able to love someone else again.
So as downright disgusting as heartbreak feels, I’ve heard it’s a reflection of our heart’s capacity for how deeply we are able to love. How brave you are to allow yourself to love someone without the security of titles. So in my eyes, that means you can never be broken.
Written by Tara-Emily