There is nothing in life that will make your stronger or screw you up more than a heartbreak. I have only had my heart broken by one person in my life – and it was more than enough.
Falling in love isn’t only falling in love with someone you find incredible, it is a person you find to be the greatest person in the world. It is also falling in love with the person you become when you’re with the one you love. Sometimes, the person we love makes us want to be a person who isn’t always especially great. But when your connection makes you want to be a better person altogether, what the two of you share has a real shot at lasting the test of time.
Yet, there is still more to it than just that. Falling in love is also falling in love with what you believe to be your future. Most often, losing this sight of future is what hurts the most. When the love of your life takes a different path, you lose yourself – the piece that holds you together. You lose the piece that make you feel good about the person you’ve become. So when your heart gets broken, you, too, in a sense, break.
As there are difference depths to love, I believe that there are different depths to heartbreak. Shallow loves leave shallow cracks, whereas the deepest, most passionate of loves will cause our hearts to undergo a sort of shattering.
The heartbreak I’m speaking of in particular is of the deepest kind — the kind that only really happens once in a lifetime. I say one once in a lifetime because once we experience such heartbreak, we never are the same afterwards. We become different people, scarred and with guards set high. We are beyond repair, damaged. We start to look at life and love through a different shade of glass. We will never have our hearts broken in exactly the same manner, as we have lost the innocence that allowed for such vulnerability in the first place.
When you completely give your heart over to someone — body and soul — and the relationship doesn’t work out, you lose that heart. It doesn’t matter if things didn’t work out because of them or because you yourself screwed up. It doesn’t even matter if there’s no one to blame.
If you were certain that you would spend your lives together and have to face the reality that the future you have been looking forward to for so long has just been taken away from you, it’s going to hurt. A lot. Someone is going to need to take the pieces of you lying sprawled out across the ground, and put you back together. The question is: Who?
You cannot ever go back to that person. The person who broke you will almost never be the person who’ll fix you. Things always have a reason for not working out. Even if the reason is poor timing or lack of maturity, you are still carrying around a whole lot of baggage from the last time you two were together. Once the relationship ends, it will fail every consecutive time. When you break someone’s heart, you lose their trust. If you don’t believe trust is the most important part of any relationship then you know absolutely nothing about relationships. Is trust re-gainable? Sometimes, I’m sure it is. Depending on the circumstance, you may be able to get past all the broken promises, all the painful memories, all the unpleasant emotions that arise every so often almost out of the blue. But in other cases — most, even — the trust is gone for good.
Maybe the person who broke your heart can be the one to fix it… but the odds aren’t in your favor. Nothing is impossible, but going after the incredibly unlikely isn’t always in our best interest. Sometimes you have to accept that you will never feel safe in his or her arms again, and let him or her go.
Statistically speaking, it’s almost impossible for there not to be another suitable match for you. Keep searching, be patient and you will find that person one day. Until that day comes, work on fixing yourself.
Love does as much damage as it does because we allow ourselves to wallow in that misery. We wait to be fixed and by doing so gradually become more and more broken. You may be able to find someone to piece you back together, but there is only one person in the world who is guaranteed to do the job right. Only you can fix yourself the way you need to be fixed. Finding another lover can help, but it isn’t necessary.
Waiting to find someone new to love or waiting to get back with that one that got away is dumb. Maybe you will meet someone new one day.
Maybe you’ll get back together with the one who made you simultaneously happier and more miserable than you have ever been in your life. You can’t wait for someone else to motivate you to get your life straight.
Remember, one of the main reasons we’re capable of loving another person as much as we are, is how he or she makes us want to improve ourselves and the lives we lead. Other people never really fix you.
They only help you fix yourself. Be smart and fix yourself before you fall in love again. The better the person you are, the more likely you are to find your happily ever after.
And when you do find that happily ever after-- all of the pain will be long worth it.
