Get your heart broken
It's good for you
My first big break-up was public in a way that subsequent ones have not been. My parents were faced with my exhausting analysis of perhaps the first challenge they faced which they definitely couldn’t solve.
At some point during the postmortem, my Dad remarked that he’d never had his heart broken.
As I walked upstairs, I heard my Mum explaining it to him.
‘It hurts – it hurts like hell!’
It does make a certain amount of sense that my Dad hadn’t; he married young, which marriage he made the decision to leave in his early 20s, before meeting my Mum in his mid-30s, and I’m not sure he wanted for female company much in the period in-between. Sometimes he speaks to me in rapturous tones of the years he would live in London and eat lamb chops on Sunday nights; he was always a man well-stocked with affection.
But he’s still missed out – you should get your heart broken. It’s an essential experience in life.
My own first heartbreak came at the age of 20, just before I turned 21; indeed, my girlfriend of the time left me on my 21st birthday. It was a rough, though certainly indicative, introduction to adult life.
To be clear, I had it coming; I behaved appallingly in that relationship, and have apologized both to the person in question and will again now. As I often said at the time, I would have left me too.
Yet the experience of that heartbreak proved shaping in a way not much else could have been or has been since. It was profound and visceral and the pain, whether merited or not, felt vast. And of course it was all the worse because the separation was introducing me to the very concept of heartbreak in the first place; I had never experienced a break-up before, so had no idea what one’s healing process looked like; nobody dies of a heartbreak, but at that stage I had no direct confirmation of that. Perhaps I would be the first.
‘I thought,’ I remember saying to a friend as I visited her in Bournemouth round then, one of the many kind friends who offered a patient ear to my young self, ‘that I was unleavable.’
And of course that is the main thing you have to learn – no-one is unleavable. You have to learn that the emotional affiliation of others is out our your control, that your own intense adherence to a extinct romantic proposition can’t single-handedly keep it alive.
In the next years, it was a lesson I learnt over and over again, in break-ups at airports and train stations, though mainly airports. I learnt it many times across age 21-34, I enjoyed a full sporting career of heartbreak. With each romantic disappointment you are learning the limits of the will; you are learning that you cannot control others, and you must finally accept what they decide.
I’d probably already internalized these teachings by 22 – but then the separations happened again and again; I even ended a couple of relationships myself which is, I have to say, not comparable in its difficulty as an experience.
Sometimes even very small break-ups, things which had only lasted a few weeks, felt like the painful demise of small possible worlds. I never had a break-up, no matter how short the relationship, which didn’t hurt in some way.
Yet these days I’m grateful to all of it, every single split, not least because without all that amorous drama my life might have looked very plain indeed. And, given that I had a big, overconfident, ‘top university’ ego, it was always going to take a good few romantic cold showers to cut me down to size.
Not to mention the beauty of the individual aesthetic moments of heartbreak; last kisses at airports and watching a movie together for the final time. Once, a lover very elegantly removed and left by my bed a ring I had given her. You never forget those last hours together when everything feels weighty and you both prepare to resume your new lives.
Heartbreak does also add a certain grandeur to your life. I’ve broken up with women from Russia and the United States and Germany; as my friend joked, for a while I seemed to be putting together a Great Powers dating set. Many of my break-ups as such had the slight air of collapsing international relations, with very few subsequent diplomatic thaws.
Still, it shows that even unhappy memories can be precious ones. Particularly if you meet the right person and can recollect them all in tranquility. It’s nice that, meeting the right person, but it brings its own challenges and it’s often remarked that they’re less interesting to write about than the flushes of erotic love. I just think they’re more complex.
If we want to tie a bow on it, in a real sense all your romantic failures lead you to that settled place; they give you the experience not to make bad decisions or at least not to make the same bad decisions. They allow you to be ready to truly empathize with others, empathy in part generated by finding out how many others have also been through the romantic wringer. It’s not so much the learning as the experiencing which has this profound deepening effect – and those who never experience heartbreak remain virgins in some strange way.
Looking back at that constellation of Dad, Mum and I back in 2003, it’s much less my 21-year-old self I feel sorry for.
It’s my Dad, yet to lose his heartbreak virginity at the age of 62.
‘You’re missing out mate,’ I want to say to him. ‘There’s not much more real in life than this – to love someone and lose them for good.’
A spot of housekeeping.
Tickets for my first Interintellect salon on Friday March 9th are here.
My novel ‘Midlands’ is available here.
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