This post has been in the works forever. I’ve written about other hard stuff — rejection, loneliness, and ambiguous loss — but not enough about heartbreak.
I have to admit that before I experienced heartbreak, it seemed mysterious and romantic to me: imagine having had a relationship that was “real” enough to matter when it ended. Then I experienced heartbreak myself, and after weeks and months and years of processing and growth (grief doesn’t have a specific endpoint, things come up that bring up feelings that need to be processed), I know more than I did.
- I say this with such gentleness and love, but don’t let this relationship define you. Talk to 1-2 close friends about it, and your therapist, but don’t rehash it with every new person who mentions dating. Don’t turn it into a legend. This is hard to resist.
- Look through the windshield, not the rearview mirror. Experience the grief process, but remember (on some level) that your thoughts may reveal hindsight bias, confirmation bias, and counterfactual thinking.
- It is normal to wish for something magical to happen to bring the relationship back together, or to look for evidence in other people’s stories that that will happen. Find your way to abundance mindset when you can. There is more in the future. You will meet someone new. This is not the end of the story, but the beginning of a new chapter.
- You can be heartbroken about a relationship you chose to end even if that was clearly the right choice. You can feel all the grief and sadness. You can still long for someone you wouldn’t marry, for their qualities that you liked, admired, and miss.
- You can be heartbroken about potential for a relationship that never had the chance to develop. Even if the relationship was brief, if you thought it might go somewhere, the grief is real.
- During the period of acute grief, in the first few weeks, focus on hashgacha pratis and feeling Hashem with you. Let yourself feel loved and held like a small child.
- Take it very slow and be very, very nice to yourself. You don’t have to date right away to “get back in the saddle.”
- Grief has a physical component — fatigue, loss of appetite, sleep difficulties — that is normal and expected.
- Grief is slow and doesn’t have a specific endpoint. It is like the ball-in-the-box analogy. Over time, the grief is still there but it doesn’t touch your pain points as often.
- There is no experience like heartbreak. It truly is a grief that changes you. When you haven’t experienced it, you don’t really get it, and when you have, the rest of the world feels like an alien place while you are going through it. You learn a lot about yourself and about patience and about coping.
- When you are able, look for meaning in your experience. What did it give you? How did it change you? How did it affect your relationships with other people, with Hashem, with being alive? I felt that my experience of life became deeper in a special way after I experienced heartbreak. I also learned that I have amazingly loving friends.
- Post-traumatic growth can be a tremendous gift of grief. When you recognize it in yourself, it is an amazing feeling.
If you are going through hard stuff, I’m holding onto the hope for you that it will get better. You can do this, one little step at a time.
