Coping With Heartbreak

Some breakups are not forever, not even till next Tuesday. Some of them are just negotiating points, ways of dramatizing a fight, stations in the dance of courtship, temporary setbacks in the process of learning someone else and accepting the ways in which they change your world.

I'm also not talking about dissolutions of marriage involving children. In those cases it is usually best if the parties can maintain a civil or even friendly connection. What I am talking about is the stage of life where you are still trying to find your way to the major, lifelong relationship that you want, and you fall in love, and it goes bad and you get your heart broken. How do you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get ready to find a better love?

when somebody breaks your heart:
• Stay away from him. Don't reopen the wound. Don't invite him to be the good guy while also being the bad guy. Don't turn for comfort to the person who broke up with you. Don't even turn to him for help, unless you absolutely have to.

• Meditate on the fact that this loss is primarily about you, not about him. Your pain isn't about your
concern for him. Get perspective from that.

• If you are sad, enjoy the sadness. Realize that sadness is actually a valuable human state, a valid place. Read some sad poems, listen to some sad love songs. Own it, let yourself feel it, don't try to
pretend you're not hurting.

• Find a friend you can talk to about it. Someone you can be honest and vent with; or call a counseling line and talk to someone. Don't let this be a secret, private hole to crawl into.

• Again, don't do it alone. Once you feel a bit better, seek out good friends, make new ones if you have to, draw on whatever spiritual and emotional resources you have; get involved in the lives of others and do something for them. All this will shore up yourself-esteem and put your own life in perspective.

• When somebody breaks up with you, it's actually their way of telling you that they're not the right person for you. The fact that they left you—they lost interest and didn't want to hang on to you—means they weren't for you. They have given you valuable information that could have taken years to discover. Don't shoot the messenger.

• If there was mistreatment involved, then you're definitely better off.

• If the relationship itself had become miserable, then the breakup is a mercy. There were probably advance signs that all was not well. So realize that if those clues existed, then this may not have been such a miscarriage of justice after all. If he hadn't done the deed, you might have been forced to do it down the line. Maybe you were already thinking of ending it . . . if so, don't worry too much that he beat you to the punch— the outcome would have been the same. Instead, be amused by the following lines, written by a talented poet I know. In it a woman imagines time stopping just before her boyfriend can break up with her.

If time stood still when you break my heart
I could stop and think before you start
I could laugh and say, “Now I've got to go, This love of yours makes me sink too low.”

If time stood still, I could dance around, Kick some dirt and do the town,
And then I'd see on the way back home
That it's time for you to be left alone.

And now if you’ll indulge me in an English 101 moment, we’ll get a payoff that helps lift the ignominy of being the one who was left. The speaker in this poem is saying, in a wonderfully vivid way, that she who is about to be left has just as much right to break it off as her jilting partner has. He just gets there first; he's quicker on the draw. But if time were to stop at the split second before he rejects her, and she knew what was coming, she would be able to clearly see that he is bad news in her life, that he brings her down, and that she should leave him.

If time stood still—for him. The speaker gleefully imagines that her boyfriend is frozen in time—parked in place—while she is launched into a happy celebration of her emancipation from the one who has in fact kept her from being free. She dances, does the town, kicks up her heels and rollicks. Then, on her way back to the place they share, she sees clearly that the boyfriend is the one who needs to be left.

So realize that his leaving you was just a quirk of time, a trick of sequence designed to make you feel like the victim. But really it could have been the other way.

• You may feel anger, a desire for revenge, a desire not to let the other person get away with it.
That's not your heart, that's your ego talking. Resist the temptation to let him know how you're feeling and what he has done. If that's a demand for justice, it's misplaced. The problem is, you won't get justice from him, and you will keep the wound open and maybe cause more strife.

• Use your love for the person as a way of accepting what has happened.
Remind yourself that if you really love him, then you want him to get what he wants. Use the unselfish part of your feelings as a balm for the other part.


• Don't force the other person to tell you why.
You can figure it out for yourself, and your own answers will help you more.

• Don't threaten the other person.

• Make a clean break.
Get gone. He will have to deal with a world that doesn't have you in it, that he is responsible for. And (if this matters) that is the only way he will ever “get” the enormity of what he has done. Then he may come crawling back. Even if you are tempted to reconcile—especially if you are tempted—don't make it easy.

• Don't pick up the phone when he calls. Don't do it. The time to talk was before he broke up. If he had asked to talk about things back then, without threatening to leave, that would have been fine.

• If he makes a concerted appeal to come back to you, don't say yes unless:

∙ He explains why he left, in a way that you believe, and then explains why those reasons don't apply anymore.

∙ You've thought over the whole thing and learned the lessons of the relationship , and you still think he's the right guy and you want to pursue it, and

∙ He wants to come all the way back. (If he wants to be just friends, wish him well and show him the door. Tell him you'll consider his idea in a year and then close the door behind him.)

.Special pleadings: when false information was involved
There is an exception to the foregoing advice about making a clean break.
That is when you feel that part of the reason for your broken heart—part of what hurts so bad—is that the breakup was avoidable. It should never have happened be-

>You can't deal with losing this person because of a mistake.

>because it was based on false information. You could deal with the breakup if it had been on valid grounds, but you can't deal with losing this person be-

>because of a mistake. So you want at least to set the record straight, before you retreat into silence. And you hope (even if you don't admit it) that just maybe, this correction might heal the rift and bring your lover back. And I say, go for it. Communicate the relevant information to your other half.
However, there's a danger that this exception could, if interpreted too loosely, become the crack through which all the earlier good advice drains away. So I want to make it clear before going on, what I'm not saying here.

I am not saying:

• that if you disagree with the breakup and think it is a mistake, you should contact your ex and argue about it. Most people who are on the receiving end of a breakup disagree with it!

• that if you feel bad about things you did that may have pushed your partner away, you should bombard him with apologies.

• that if you feel what happened wasn't deserved, you should plead that case. Again, most broken-hearted people feel that way.

What I am saying is that if you honestly think that either you or some- one else conveyed false information to your partner that caused him to break off the relationship, there is no reason why you shouldn't let him know the truth.

So this is my advice, when the breakup was caused by the conveying of false information. (It applies whether you were the source, and miscommunicated or were misinterpreted by your lover; or a third party was the source, as in our story.The right thing to do is correct the information, without asking your lover to return.

Convey the true facts to your ex, but don't pressure him to take you back.  Try and write an old-fashioned letter, and make it calm, objective, and fair-minded. Don't ask for anything. Just give the needed information.