HEARTBREAK
Broken hearts have been around since mankind first walked out of the primordial slump. But for all the long and painful history of heartbreaks, there is still no tried and tested formula for navigating something that is so deeply individual for every one of us. This is my very personal journey of walking through two heartbreaks simultaneously.
It is six weeks today since the love of my life disappeared in a heartbeat. Just five months after our love exploded into a glorious abundance of deliciousness and five years after I had fallen in love. It is almost four weeks ago that I ended my 34-year-old marriage. The two journeys are both very painful but also extraordinarily different.
The ending of any relationship is highly emotional
But every one is also highly individual. I have drawn some pretty pictures to illustrate the difference between my two heartbreaks.
This is my marriage to the man I fell in love with in 1990. It was a slow cautious love that grew on me over time as we slipped into a very comfortable, safe, caring love for 12 beautiful years before the inevitability of familiarity crept in. Then slowly over time, things dropped off. As they do in all relationships. But our drop-off in the past decade has been significant and the past few years have been very difficult and painful.
Our love faded slowly, to the point that romantic love has been gone a very long time now. I will always love my husband, but not in the intimate way that a wife is meant to. He is now like an old friend who I can trust to fix my car and keep me company when I watch television at night. The heights of our romance disappeared a decade ago and we worked hard to make things improve, which they did from time to time, but not enough to save a marriage. We have a lifetime of memories and beautiful children and grandchildren who will always keep us connected. I am grateful for that. We are hoping to be a success story when it comes to being separated and living under one roof. But we are no longer marriage material. I feel that deep in my bones.
I have mourned the loss of my marriage for nearly a decade
It has been a difficult journey but a slow one. The ending became a moment in time that was deeply sorrowful for both of us but the month that followed has quickly become a new normal we are adjusting to as we separate all the aspects of life that we have shared together for more than three decades. The pain of the loss has been gentle and slow over such a long period of time that the definitive ending did not break my heart in the way my new love did.
Five years ago I fell in love
But I did not know at the time how I was in love. Mother? Sister? Daughter? Friend? Or something completely different? It turned out it was something completely different and in April this year, different turned into a glorious love affair – that my husband knew all about and accepted.
This is what our graph looks like.
I didn’t know love like this even existed. I have come to realise what the poets write about. Song lyrics now haunt me. I have never in my life, been loved like this before. It is intoxicating. I felt deep in my bones that we were destined to be together. I still feel that way. So the abrupt and mysterious ending has completely broken my heart.
I’m not sure it is something I will ever get over
For five glorious months we were deeply and madly in love. I pictured a gentle life in front of us where our graph would slowly even out and settle into a beautiful everyday that would last us decades. But in a heartbeat it all disappeared. With almost no explanation she is gone and all contact has been severed. There is no gentle ending. And where once my heart beat with excitement, now it just has a continual heavy ache. There is a cloak of sorrow wrapped around my shoulders, day and night.
There is something deeply painful about rejection
My husband and I both knew where our marriage had come to so the ending did not feel like rejection. It just felt inevitable. But the mysterious ending to my beautiful romance leaves so many unanswered questions that I am left querying my worth. There is no closure. I run around and around in circles asking myself questions and then I just invent answers. Because there is nothing else to do. My journal is getting a workout. And of course google, because there is somehow comfort in knowing that other people have gone through the same thing and that inevitably with time, the pain is absorbed into us and stops feeling so acute.
Heartbreak is grief and all the the things that go with it. The constant thoughts. The questioning what-ifs. The physical sickness. A real sense of heaviness. Concentration is very difficult. Sleep is elusive while fatigue is continuous. I obsess by constantly looking through photographs and listening to “our” music. And of course my tried and true method of untangling thoughts is to write, write, write. I find talking very difficult so to some extent I’m trying to isolate. My words always appear best on paper.
Unexpected heartbreak brings unpleasant emotions
As catastrophising is one of my special talents I endlessly ask myself difficult and pitiful questions. What did I do wrong? Am I inherently unlovable? Did I read everything wrong? Was it a one-sided affair? Does she despise me now? Will we ever connect again? Is all hope gone? How can I ever trust anyone again?
When truly, madly and deeply in love, we usually feel safe and trusting and prepared to be vulnerable. And when it all evaporates in an instant with so many unanswered questions, that sense of safety and trust is shattered. How can that be rebuilt? I do not know.
I am very early on in the heartbreak journey
Naturally I have googled how long heartbreak takes and the answer is the same as grief – nobody knows. I recovered from the ending of my marriage very quickly because I knew it was coming and I had grieved for many years already. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from my lost love affair. I will learn to live with it because there is no other option. But the pain that is still a gushing wound will eventually in time become a scar that sits on my heart. It will sit right next to the other scar when I lost her the first time. The difference being, I knew exactly how and why I lost her the first time. And it was all my fault. This time I don’t know what happened and the pain feels so much worse.
We all experience love differently
These graphs represent my love – not my husband’s experience of love. Not my girlfriend’s experience of love. Just mine. Their graphs may look completely different. Their graphs might look more abrupt or more gentle. Have higher highs or lower lows. I don’t know. I can only express my experience of our love.
My love for my husband was long and enduring, safe and familiar. And then it slowly eroded. My love for my girlfriend burst into brilliance in a heartbeat but evaporated in such a short time. Both loves will stay with me for a lifetime. Both loves have changed who I am as a person. And both losses will be with me forever, nestled in my heart with all the other sorrow that I have collected in my lifetime.
While heartbreak and grief have no end dates, they will fade and eventually peace and happiness will start to lift the cloak of sorrow that is wrapped around me right now. But for the time being, I am allowing myself the time to grieve my two loves, the longest love of my life and the greatest love of my life. I will always be grateful for them both. And always sorrowful that in the end, I lost.
