The first time I experienced a broken heart, I was 18 and I felt like the world was ending. I didn’t know why it had all gone wrong, I only knew that I would never, ever get over him.
I spent days in bed, softly crying and waiting for him to text me until my mum forced me into the car to head to my grandma’s house in the countryside for a little R&R.
I remember feeling like nobody could understand my pain – that I was the only person in the world to have nursed this specific hurt. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.
My only comfort came from sitting in the kitchen with my grandma and listening to heady, romantic stories about men who chased after her back in the 50s and 60s. Men she didn’t end up with, but who fell head over heels for her.
My teenage brain was amazed that you could fall in and out of love, like changing socks or football teams. And then I thought of my grandpa, who she had lost when she was a young mother, still raising children.
“Does it get easier?” I asked her. But of course it didn’t for her; not really.
For me, one day it hurt and then the next, it didn’t. Not with a splutter but a whimper, I was over him.
Breakups are often dramatised in movies to the point that they feel void of substance – a montage of ice-cream tubs, puffy eyes and drunken evenings with girlfriends. There is little to turn to culturally that expresses the specific personal anguish of them.
My most recent breakup happened in the front of my sharehouse on a sunny Sunday morning. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked if he wanted to get a coffee. But the line was too long, and we realised it was weird. When he left, my dog stood in the street, watching him leave, whimpering. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
I am older now, but no wiser. And the older you are, the higher the stakes.
In the film Mistress America, Brooke, a 30-something-year-old woman falling in and out of passions and purpose, tells her teenage friend: “You can’t really know what it is to want things until you’re at least 30. And then with each passing year, it gets bigger … because the want is more, and the possibility is less.
“Like how each passing year of your life seems faster because it’s a smaller portion of your total life. Like that. But in reverse. Everything becomes pure want.”
This time, I wasn’t 18. I was a woman in her late 20s – alone, in a city of couples moving in together and buying shared furniture, who had realised her life partner was better as a friend. The more people became engaged, the more I felt like a failure. The more carefree toddlers I saw in the park, the more anxious I felt about my biological clock rendering me childless.
It’s embarrassing to be this walking cliche. To be a feminist Googling the ages of celebrities to comfort myself that it was normal not to find the one and have a child until I was 35.
I became the person who listens to podcasts called Heal your Heartbreak and buys self-help books. I got into bouldering.
“An intimate relationship can be one of the strongest bonds you may have with another person in your life, so when this deep connection is severed, there can be significant psychological and physical implications,” says the president of the Australian Psychological Society, Catriona Davis-McCabe.
“A break-up is not just the loss of the relationship but also the plans, dreams and hopes you shared with your partner.”
McCabe says a breakup can feel like an abandonment, triggering painful feelings of loss akin to grief. At its most rare extreme, breakups can lead to depression or Broken Heart Syndrome, which has symptoms similar to a heart attack.
“While break-ups can be extremely intense and hard to navigate … you’re experiencing a normal set of emotions and will be able to progress through this process of grief,” she says.
Guy Winch, a psychologist of heartbreak (literally), has researched why so many of us flounder when we’re trying to get over an ex-partner – why it feels akin to recovering from addiction. “When your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on will time and again lead you down the wrong path,” he said in a 2017 Ted talk that I listened to on meandering walks for several weeks.
“Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids. This is what makes heartbreak so difficult to heal.
“Addicts know they’re addicted. They know when they’re shooting up. But heartbroken people do not.”
Maybe that’s why it is easier to romanticise the past than admit something was wrong. There is a freedom in letting go – but also a loneliness.
Joan Didion wrote in The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live … we live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
I couldn’t live with what I had lost, until I was forced to face it.
I tell myself a different story, now: of a picket fence, a couple of kids and an unhappy marriage. Of myself, standing in the doorway, wondering what might have been.
