The Sunday News
NO-ONE begins dating someone hoping to break it off someday. The wiring in most of us has us longing for the wedding day. We are looking, sometimes it feels crazily, for love, for affection and security and companionship and commitment and intimacy and help. When we are left alone and feeling abandoned, it is really hard to believe anyone knows what we are going through. That may even be true of the good-intentioned people around you. Falling in love makes one fantasise about the next step although this does not mean every dating relationship should end in marriage, but it does mean breakups will hurt.
When you lose the love of your life, you lose a piece of yourself, the piece that holds you together. You lose the piece of you that makes you the good person you are because when one suffers heartache they lose themselves and some want vengeance. Breakups generally make you lose the piece of that which allows you to be you.
So when your heart gets broken, you, too, in a sense, break. There are different depths to love, so that is why I believe there are different depths to heartbreak.
We will never have our hearts broken in exactly the same manner, as we have lost the innocence that allowed for such vulnerability in the first place but it only makes sense that the shallowest of loves leaves the shallowest of cracks.
While the deepest of loves causes our hearts to undergo a sort of shattering and deep heartbreak that at times can only be understood by self. I can so relate to a heartbreak and I have noticed that the brain creates love to get what it wants. What it wants is the object of affection, so it manufactures love to motivate you to deliver its desire and this tends to make one give their all when they are in love.
Breakups are painful. It can feel like the pain resides in our heads, our hearts and in our bones. Sometimes it feels like a faint ache, like a sore muscle. Other times, it is a full-on throbbing, a raw wound.
This week our Hearts on Fire is on a woman that got a heart-breaking call from an ex weeks before his wedding.
I risked my heart, I shared my life, I bought him gifts, made memories, and dreamed our dreams together and it all fell apart. Just when I was back at square one in the quest for healing, and I was feeling lonelier than ever and further from the altar because the one person I wanted to meet at the altar had left me, I got news that he was getting married. I had a near death heartache and the heartbreak I am speaking of today is of the deepest kind the kind that only really happens once in a lifetime hopefully because I can never go through what I am going through right now.
Well, I say only once in a lifetime because once we experience such heartbreak, we are never again the same and I see it in me everyday. I have become a different person, I can safely say I am scarred and nerve-damaged I have become scared of everything in my life. Ever since my break-up I have looked at life and love through a different shade of glass and I do not think I can ever be normal.
A couple of years ago I completely gave my heart over to someone I gave them my body and soul and years on the relationship did not work out, but that was only the beginning of my heartbreaks as the next deepest and what I term the climax of my heartache was when he married someone only after a few months of dating.
Hearing that your old love is about to tie the knot can unleash a range of complex and confusing emotions. After all, it is one thing for you to move on and fall in love again but quite another for him to move on after breaking my heart for no apparent reason and then decide to tie the knot a couple of months into a new relationship.
I was completely knocked out when I heard my ex- boyfriend, was getting married. I had a mixed bag of feelings and even till now I can not point out at exactly how I felt when I heard he was getting married but I am sure at some point I lost my mind.
I felt jealous, deeply upset and suddenly could not stop thinking about the good times we had together and whether we should have tried harder to work things out.
I was planning and plotting in my head because I was still foolishly hoping we would rekindle our love because I had not processed our breakup and I was not over him so how could he be getting married when I still loved him? A part of me could not believe it so I wanted to go and be a witness at their wedding and I had already made plans to get to the wedding and probably stop them from getting married. I had been devastated over our breakup. I had cried my eyes out, and thought I was going to die when “my love” left me.
I was hurt because I am the one that got him to think, talk and picture marriage because when we started dating he said he did not want to get married. He had his own theories about marriage and years later into our relationship he got comfortable and got used to talking about marriage and he would constantly remind me that I was the reason he was now planning to get married.
We were madly in love and each time we spoke of our wedding day we wrote things down, argued about certain things and would then agree and note what we had agreed on. We planned our “big day” and even shared our expectations with friends.
Weeks before his wedding , I got a call from an ex that is the man I truly believed I would one day see in a tux smiling at me from the end of a church aisle. I knew he had been dating the same girl since we broke up six months before, and the crushing words that came out of his mouth were ones I had secretly prayed I would never hear: “I am getting married in a few weeks and I am sending you an invite with a friend.”
I did not have much to say because my mouth got so dry and I was tongue tied but I tried to hold on till the end of the conversation and when I hung up the phone I quickly burst into tears. See, was not the first time I have been the girlfriend before the girlfriend who becomes the wife but with the other situations I was over the guy and was totally happy when I found out they were getting married.
In most cases I was relieved that I had escaped unmarried. However, this time around I was still hoping and praying for reconciliation and seeing his number on my phone had given me hope. I was so angry because I felt like the four years we spent together I was prepping him for marriage to someone else.
I was hurt beyond being hurt I cried myself to sleep that night and what hurt me even more was that he had given me hope of reconciliation and yet he is the one that calls me to tell me of his wedding.
I did not know what to do next. I wanted to go and cause drama at his wedding but my friends talked me out of it because I was only going to embarrass myself even more. I still can not believe he married someone he had been with for a couple of months and I am still licking my wounds not sure of what my love life holds.
Getting through a breakup is as much a physical process as an emotional one. Remember that, and know that it will get easier. Keep going. You will get there someday and in the mean time continue to share your heartbreaking stories with us email [email protected]
