Why does heartbreak feel like the end of the world to some people and a speed bump to others? Below I share my thoughts.
Screen captures from LeoThreads were edited with MS Paint.
TL;DR
- Background
- About Heartbreak
- Love Is a Muscle: Growth through Pain and Loss
- Relationships as Opportunities To Grow THE Love Muscle (and not that one!)
- Love As a Numbers Game: Making the Numbers Work in Our Favor
+ If we have 0-- ZERO-- opportunities to experience love...
+ Only 1 opportunity...
+ A small number of opportunities...
+ A large number of opportunities...
- Observation:
- For the Readers Who Can't Identify with This Post
- Just My Two Sats
- Acknowledgements
Background
There's a thread posted by @phyna on 2023-December-6 at LeoThreads at InLeo which I liked so much that I reblogged it as a post and re-threaded it at LeoThreads.
@sammyhive replied to the re-thread early on this way:
it's better than heartbreak
When I replied to @sammyhive, I didn't expect the conversation the 3 of us would have regarding heartbreak and love.
It was at this point when @phyna and I exchanged thread replies on this topic at the re-thread.
Heartbreak tends to hurt more for people less experienced with love than it does to people who treat love and heartbreak as a cyclical process-- as much a cycle as the boom and bust cycles of an economy dominated by central banks.
It was at this point that I thought I had an answer to @phyna's question, but it would have taken too many threads to reply properly. Yes, I could have done my reply as a threadstorm, but in moments like that I get into a zone and just write. For that reason, I went back to a habit I had in the days before LeoThreads: I turned a comment-- thread-- into a long form post.
It's been a while since I wrote a post of that nature, so let's see how this one turns out.
About Heartbreak
Heartbreak isn't fun for anyone. It's not fun for the person who causes it (even on purpose). It's definitely not fun for the person whose heart was broken. The only good thing we can say about heartbreak is that the time will come when we stop letting heartbreak dominate our lives. When that time arrives is up to each of us.
To feel heartbreak, we have to feel love. This can be the love a child has for a parent, or the love a patriot has for one's nation, or the love between two people in a romantic relationship. The heartbreak comes when we discover deception, or disappointment, or betrayal (or any combination, or even all three at the same time).
We can only minimize the heartbreak we experience; we can never eliminate it. How we respond to heartbreak is totally within our control; if we don't choose wisely, we end up giving ourselves unnecessary grief, and life is too short for that.
There is one sure way to avoid heartbreak: never fall in love in the first place. To fall in love is to risk the eventual arrival of heartbreak, and then the topsy-turvy period where we put ourselves in a position to love again-- or not.
On one hand, no one wants to endure heartbreak of any kind. On the other hand, the choice to never fall in love is a choice made out of fear, and we cannot let fear dominate our lives. It's bad enough to have the fear caused by living in a war zone, a crime-ridden neighborhood, or even microbes we can't see. Fear of going through heartbreak cannot be-- must not be-- more powerful than the desire to experience love.
Love Is a Muscle: Growth through Pain and Loss
Some of us are paragons of physical fitness (ballet dancers, martial artists, aerobics instructors, marathon runners, bodybuilders, Olympians, ...). Some of us are couch potatoes gaming the night away or binge-watching the Marvel Movie Marathon on cable TV or overdosing on comfort food while watching Hitch or Happy Gilmore of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle for the 42nd time. Some of us may even be bed-ridden due to failing health (however the situation came to be).
Regardless of how we classify ourselves in terms of the three groups noted above, we know why we feel sore after a good exercise workout. Whether we're out of shape or we make Arnold Schwarzenegger feel fat, that soreness is due to existing muscle fibers breaking down in order to be replaced by newer-- and stronger-- muscle fibers. Even after we've rebuilt our bodies in this way, we still feel soreness; it's just not the soreness of pain but rather the soreness of growth and renewal.
Love works the same way. The more opportunities we have to experience love, the more opportunities we have to grow from that love. It also means there are more opportunities for heartbreak-- love's version of physical breakdown of muscle fibers.
The first few exercise periods will be painful because we aren't used to the exercise. After a while, we find ways to deal with that pain until we either tolerate it or even welcome it. Love is very similar to muscle tissue in this regard.
Relationships as Opportunities To Grow THE Love Muscle (and not that one!)
Some of us have had many relationships, and in some cases they led to matrimony and parenthood. For those people, they have a wealth of experience on which to draw for dealing with the pits and pitfalls of love and relationships. When mistakes happen, they can act in time to fix them.
Some of us had numerous short-term relationships. In some cases, that's exactly what was needed. In some cases, they were rewarding relationships which ended prematurely. In other cases, we couldn't end those relationships fast enough. For people in this group, they know enough about short-term situations, but they need help in dealing with a relationship which has the potential to reach the next level. Then when those fail they experience a greater-than-expected heartbreak and aren't sure what to do to get past it.
Some of us have even had enough relationships to be counted on four fingers and the thumb. Whether someone in this group is there due to being a workaholic, a misanthrope, a late bloomer, or someone with little access to people, the few times love is experienced are intense. This makes the heartbreak they feel even more painful and just as intense.
The pain of heartbreak is always there; it can't ever be removed or made to disappear. However, our ability to handle it can be perfected and strengthened.
Just as exercise builds (or rebuilds) our bodies, opportunities for love build our ability to handle adversity (which includes the eventual heartbreaks).
Love As a Numbers Game: Making the Numbers Work in Our Favor
If we have 0-- ZERO-- opportunities to experience love...
... then we will never experience heartbreak. But that comes at the expense of never experiencing love. This much is as true in love as it is in physical fitness: no pain, no gain.
Only 1 opportunity...
... then we won't ever want it to end. When it ends, we won't know how to handle that heartbreak. That first heartbreak is harsh, and it sucks. It feels as if the world ended, that's how intense the pain of heartbreak is.
(It's no wonder there are people who never want to fall in love in the first place. We can't really blame those people for feeling that way.)
A small number of opportunities...
... then we know enough about the heartbreaks which will follow to be able to deal with them and get past them. Heartbreaks still suck, but we know they are not world-ending experiences.
A large number of opportunities...
... then we know that heartbreaks can be treated as speed bumps on the road to a more rewarding relationship. Speed bumps are present to slow us down, but they aren't there to stop our movement forward.
| Observation: |
|---|
| The best way for us to deal with heartbreak is not to avoid love, but rather to experience love as often as we can, in as many ways as we can. |
For the Readers Who Can't Identify with This Post
Some people (mainly guys; but some women, too) aren't wired for romantic love; that's just a fact.
However, they may have been practicing some form or hero worship for as long as anyone can remember: Moses, King Arthur, Superman, Captain America, Tiger Woods, name an actor or politician.
If we live long enough, then sooner or later we will live to see our heroes disappoint us. That's as true as the sun is hot. In every case, they disappointed us. In a few of those cases, we felt heartbreak.
No one escapes heartbreak. The best we can do it get over it as quickly as we can so that we can keep moving forward. Maybe there's even another figure who replaces the tarnished ones for us.
Just My Two Sats
The only way to never experience heartbreak is to never fall in love in the first place. Sadly, if we do this, then we give in to fear. While fear is a useful emotion-- it aids in our survival-- we cannot let fear rule over us. Living in fear is no way to live life; it only ensures existence and survival. Each of us deserves more from life than survival and mere existence.
No one wants to experience heartbreak, but we can't escape it. It's part of experiencing love, and love needs to be treated as a muscle: the more we exercise the muscle, the more it grows and the stronger it becomes. The more we experience love, the less intense the pain of heartbreak is.
To a child, an hour can feel like eternity. To recent college graduate, an hour feels like an hour. To a person 90 years old or older, an hour feels like the blink of an eye. Just as 1 BTC equals 1 BTC, 1 hour equals 1 hour. What changes is the fraction: 1 hour out of X time. The larger X is, the smaller 1/X becomes. Heartbreak and love have a similar relationship with each other.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the following people by name:
- @phyna and @sammyhive for prompting me to write this post thanks to the conversation we had in the thread I noted earlier;
- @thorkellnft for the off-chain tool LeoFlow which lets us copy and paste terms and links from @leoglossary; and
- @ahmadmanga for the signature graphic he made for me.
Thanks to all who took time to read this post. Give the post an upvote or a reblog if you liked it. If I left out some points, or if I'm in error on a point I made, let me know in the Comments.
Love and peace from
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
Well done🎉.
I love the way you try to relate love to the physical things we are really used to.
Relationships are surely a good way of getting used to heartbreaks, because at some point one would see it as an opportunity to grow and learn from the previous mistakes.
We all have a role to play in relationships, for me, it is a game of give and take. But first, we need to love ourselves so we can love others properly.
Thank you!
Part of dealing with heartbreak is having the proper mindset and the right attitude. Having both allows us to deal what what happened and then to move on in life to the next opportunity. Even if we know this intellectually (whether it's by reading or by learning from the experiences of others), emotionally we react as if we don't know that.
It's OK to feel the pain of heartbreak for some initial period of time; that's only natural. Beyond that period, feeling the pain of heartbreak is a choice we make, and it's a counterproductive choice: we're choosing to be miserable, and why should any of us do that to ourselves? Some of us learn this sooner than others, but the expectation is that we learn this lesson sooner or later.
The end of a relationship is also an opportunity to be in another one. When relationships go well, we take them as far as we can for as long as we can. When relationships go seriously wrong, where we know it's going to end like a car being driven into a ditch or a train getting derailed, we need to end those relationships as quickly as possible.
When it comes to family, it's a bit different since we are family for life. In that case, we need to find ways to forgive family for any wrong done to us and then we start over with family.
We're not going to get another self, so we have to love ourselves. Even then, we still need to be critical just enough to know that we did wrong and need to do right, that we have a flaw which needs fixing or supervision. We tend to be our own worse critics, and that can harm us in the long run. We know what we need to do, and when we deviate from the path we make course corrections to return to the path. We need to do that when it comes to loving ourselves.