Breakups are hard

Breakups are hard.

I know, I might as well have just typed “the sky is blue”. But what makes that sentence so real and raw and revolutionary is not the statement of fact but the fact in the statement. Because, you see, words always say more than they say.

Words are limited. Some things cannot be expressed using the letters of the alphabet. They need to be felt. Take, for instance, the sentence "I hate him." We could go to the dictionary and mine the definition of hate, and we could find out who "him" is. But let us not kid ourselves that we understand the true depth and breadth and height of that statement.

The phrase "I hate him" relies heavily on what "him" did to deserve that hate. It calls to surface and to question all sorts of experiential factors that cannot be contained in the mere combination of words I-hate-him.

Back to the point of my post today. Breakups. They are hard.

Here again, a dictionary doesn't help us much. The most it can tell us is that a breakup is "the end of a relationship, typically a marriage." That's it. There's nothing about how the other person cheated and how the one cheated on caught their partner in the act. The word breakup does not describe the deep pain that the person felt when he or she had to say goodbye. It does not capture the tears, the fears, the confusion and disillusionment. The word does not begin to describe that sharp pain in the chest, the one located just where the heart is.

Breakups are hard because they are more than just the end of a relationship. A breakup is the end of a dream. It changes the future. That house or home that you had dreamt of buying and spending the rest of your life in, only made sense with this person in it.

Your vision of that house or home factored, and was even inspired by this person. It was not just an abstract house, one in which you can live with person A just as easily as with person B. It was a customized house, a house formed in the shape of the one with whom you would spend your life there.

Breakups are also hard, not just because the future you had envisioned has radically changed, but also because the past you knew has been shattered. Depending on the reason for the break-up, your understanding of the past is deeply affected.

Let's say the person cheated on you, or simply got tired of you. This affects the memories you have of them. Were they always planning this? Was she thinking of him when we went on that trip? Did he know this was coming all along? Was she lying to me when she told me about her dreams for the future? What else have I been wrong about?

Breakups change the past.

And they also change the present. Radically.

Now you have to re-imagine your life. There are these instincts and habits that you had developed and mastered and you now have to unlearn them. Like calling the person "babe" or "honey" or "sweetheart". You now have to re-orient to a new go-to person when you are feeling down or when you have some good news to share. Breakups change the places you used to go together. Favorite hangout joints become anathema -- at least for a while. Mutual friends, some of them, become enemies. The present is never the same.

Finally, breakups change you.

They open your eyes to the many things that being "in love" had blinded you to. You become more realistic about life and people. You manage your expectations. You are more reluctant to trust and you think thrice before you jump. Breakups melt that cloud nine and send you hurtling back down to the earth. Breakups can feel like the carpet has just been swept from under your feet. But they also have a way of grounding you.

You see, breakups have a way of evoking declarations and resolutions from us. "I will never fall in love so easily again," "I will never ignore the signs", "I will always communicate". And depending on which half of the glass you prefer, many a brokenhearted soul has vowed, "I will never love again."

But when it comes down to the bare-knuckled facts of it, breakups are hard because life is hard.

You see, even though breakups are hard, they are not harder than giving up on relationships altogether because someone hurt you and left you. As that famous quote by Tennyson says, "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

But C.S. Lewis wraps it up much better than I ever could in his classic, The Four Loves:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

But breakups are not the end of life. In fact, they have been known to be just the opposite.

Cornell