Heartbreak Harm Reduction

You are in love, and The Person you love has turned you away. I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry. You do not want to hear “sorry”—not from The Person, not from your friends. “I’m sorry you’re going through this”; “I’m sorry you’re in pain.” People mean these things, they care about us, and what else can they say? (A few thoughts on what not to say further down.) 

There must be some mistake, but there isn’t. They are gone; you are you; this is the situation. You probably have a job, responsibilities, people who depend on you, motions to go through. You have a need for money, a body that requires tending. But the bulk of your energy is for now tied up in this ambitious project that reality has foisted upon you, the project of tolerating an unacceptable loss.

I’m sure that, as your relationship with The Person ended, you behaved impeccably. You never, for example, lobbed an angry “goodbye forever” at The Person and stormed away with a great flourish, expecting to be followed, and then, when you were not followed, went back to talk in circles some more. I’m sure you never pretended to be carefree and “over it” and “fun” and “easy” and ready to be pals just so you could see The Person and maybe stand near them. You kept your dignity intact, always remained true to yourself, never apologized for or felt ashamed of your needs, never twisted your soul into stiff, unnatural, unflattering shapes trying to guess which contortion might possibly render you lovable to The Person. It goes without saying that you fully respected The Person’s boundaries, right up to the end, never calling them in the middle of the night, never showing up at their door in tears, and certainly never physically hanging onto them when they were gently trying to disengage from an embrace. 

Haha! Not you!

Now you have finally given up. You have stopped trying to “make The Person see.” If you are still trying, I will not attempt to rush you; you must follow your lights, but I intend these prescriptions primarily for those of you who, though your hope may quietly flare at times, have entered the phase of no longer acting upon it. You may be waiting for hope to die. 

While it dies its torturously slow death, here are a few pain management techniques I have found useful. Perhaps such things are nontransferable, but I share them in case not.

Jump into cold water. 

Maybe you are physically brave on a regular basis, as part of your job or by inclination, but if not, I recommend ritualizing some act that requires you to brace your body and push it across a threshold. I recommend, for example, going to the nearest creek, lake, river, or ocean on a day that is sunny but not warm and jumping or running into the water. (Not with rocks in your pockets; safely.) You can hop out in a few seconds, but first, fully immerse. Do this as often as you can. Bring a hot drink in a thermos, a fuzzy robe, a warm hat, and a blanket. 

The function of this prescription is not to “snap you out of” your suffering or get you onto some health kick, nor do I advance it in any “toughen up” spirit. You are already exhibiting uncommon levels of toughness every day: you continue to exist despite it being very uncomfortable to do so. It’s a good bet that you are being braver than you have ever been before. You probably don’t feel your bravery, though, and if you jump into cold water, you will. Your body will not be able to help feeling it, and the impression of that bravery will stay with you, resolving itself into knowledge over time. 

In the moments after you emerge from the water, it will likely occur to you that The Person is not there to partake of your exhilaration or to witness you being capable of exhilaration without them. This will be painful, but the pain will be more like peroxide on a wound than a dull ache, and it’s good to switch things up, quality-of-pain-wise.

“Read” (listen to) Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.

I once met a woman who asked me how I was, and I told her. “I’m going to send you an article,” she said. “I think you might find it helpful.” The article, written in the 1990s, told the story of a fatal accident. Out of nowhere, on a calm day, in a clear sky, a commercial aircraft had nosedived, smashing to the ground in a wooded area outside Pittsburgh at a speed of three hundred miles an hour. Human flesh hung from the trees. 

How had the woman known that this story, which centered on investigators’ search for the cause of the crash, would soothe me? Maybe she expected it to jostle my sense of proportion (here is real calamity, real consequence, real suffering), a reasonable expectation, though I think the soothing effect had more to do with the article’s focus on mechanical engineering, its rendering of unspeakable human tragedy through painstaking analysis of anti-tragic forces—lateral suspension, dihedral tilt, an encounter between wake vortex and angle of yaw, a misalignment of metal a fraction of the thickness of a human hair. 

I will not pretend to understand exactly why any of this would salve a romantic wound—when it comes to pain management, who cares “why”?—and by the same token I will not cross-examine my own confidence in recommending that, during your direst stretch of withdrawal from The Person, you immerse yourself in a biography of the man who conceived and oversaw the building of the Triboro Bridge. 

Also the Westside Highway, the BQE, the Battery Tunnel, Jones Beach, Riis Park, and more. Robert Moses got a lot done; in many ways he created New York City as we know it. He did it by virtue of stunning ingenuity, dishonesty, corruption, and cruelty. All of which, in Caro’s hands, makes for a very entertaining story, and one that tenderly mocks the tortured hypotheticals of a lovesick mind. Hey, you. You are in physical space. People keep laying new materials over old materials, and you keep carting your little dramas to and fro across the layers, speeding around on top of history like you are now speeding down Moses’s Belt Parkway on the way to the ocean for your immersion (good call), car windows down, sob-singing along to a soul ballad. But just pause the ballad for now—you can return to it later—and start listening to this book. It’s only sixty-six hours long. 

(You could also read the physical thing, but it’s almost five pounds, and I’m betting sustained focus isn’t your forte right now.) 

Hang out with strangers.

Avoid the friend who disparages The Person. “They’re a dick”; “they’re a loser”; “you’re too good for them.” You may wish you didn’t love The Person, but you do. The love, if not The Person, is yours; do not allow others to disrespect it. 

Avoid the friend who refuses to put hope out of its misery, who says things like, “maybe someday” or “I’m sure they love you; they’re just not ready to commit yet.” 

Avoid, for now, the friend who commiserates, who knows just what it’s like and who feels your pain. You may think you crave commiseration, but it can do nothing for you. 

In fact, you know what? Avoid your friends. It’s infuriating, how continuously every single one of them fails to be The Person. 

Strangers also fail in this regard, but their failure doesn’t feel as personal. Befriend strangers. Do not be too particular about who they are. People are all around you, all the time, many of them decent and friendly. Find someone and obligate yourself to them. Yes, you’re free. Yes, you will be there at that time.

The more you throw yourself together with people you don’t know, the less you will know yourself. This is good. A stranger takes it as a given that this present version of you is sufficient unto itself; entertain this possibility. Cultivate a stranger’s disinterest in your pain: Who cares? Remember charm, decorum, lightness, basic social graces that you have been neglecting in favor of so much authentic anguish. Perform. Keep your tragic mess backstage—or, if you roll it out, play it for laughs.

Take up guitar. Or some instrument. 

If you already know how to play an instrument, even rudimentarily, you are lucky. I recommend you play it a lot during this period. If you don’t play anything, now is the time to learn. It doesn’t matter how old you are (I was forty-one when I started). Get a guitar. A small one. Get it used, get it as cheap as you need to. The guitar, with its long shaft and resonant hole, is your new lover. Unlike The Person, it will never resist your advances, and it will treat you better as time goes on. 

Once you have acquired a tiny bit of skill, choose a heartbreak song that is made of simple chords. Learn it. I’m so lonesome I could cry. Strange, how you stopped loving me. Baby, where did our love go? These arms of mine, they are yearning. If you ever change your mind… Realize that the kind of hurt you are experiencing right now has created the greatest music in history. 

Once you have acquired a tiny bit more skill, try making up a song. It can be so simple; it can be two chords. Say in your lyrics what you would like to say to The Person. Suspend self-consciousness; just put it away, goodbye. It makes no difference if the song is any good. During this time when most everything feels wrong to you, it will feel right and good to make your own sound about your own loss. 

Play ping pong.

You’ve forgotten how fun it is. Halfway through the first game you will yank off your sweater, panting a little. You will snarl when you lose a point and squeal when you win one and hop around and spur your pulse to a trot and work up a sweat, all while completely eschewing the “self-improving” moral stink of exercise. 

Keep a polite distance from common wisdoms.

People are going to say, “It gets better.” They shouldn’t say this, because they don’t know. 

People are going to say you just need to “love yourself” and everything will follow from there. They shouldn’t say this, because they don’t know what you need. Maybe you already love yourself a lot. Maybe you love yourself so much that you can’t fathom The Person’s inability to do so. Maybe you hate yourself so much that you never believed The Person could possibly love you in the first place. Probably both. 

People are going to say whatever they need to say to reify their own necessity-born theories about why love fails, why people leave, why someone left them, or why they left someone or why they didn’t. Let them say their things, and while they do, remind yourself that no one really knows anything. Go ahead and smile at the not knowing, that sly operator, and maybe even make it a flirty, encouraging smile. Who knows? The not-knowing may turn out to be the one companion who never leaves.