Picture if you will: It’s early October. The smell of autumn is brisk and sharp in the air, breaking through the oppressive humidity of the last few weeks. You no longer arrive at work with your head all sweaty, looking like a used hankie. Your shoes have stopped sticking to the street. Thank god for fall—summer was the dregs. You’re all over this cool weather.
And then.
Out of nowhere, the mercury shoots up. For one last weekend, you wear your cutoffs and sit in the sun. You begin to think longingly of lazy, lolling days on the beach. You forget how you used to lose half the skin on your thighs every time you tried to get out of your car. You forget about sticky, sleepless nights. Summer never looked so good. You love summer. Summer‘s the best. Why did it have to end?
No, you haven’t accidentally opened the Farmer’s Almanac. See, it’s still us, Val and El. We’re just getting a metaphor thing happening, to illustrate a point. That being: You can be buzzing through your life, feeling almost normal, hardly dwelling on your ex at all. And just when you think that you’re finally over him, wham, something slams into you. Out of the blue, you’re . . . blue. Without explanation, you miss him all over again, maybe even worse than you did before. It’s so unexpected. It’s so unusual. What horrible thing is happening to you now?
We like to call this knotty little phenomenon heartbreak. Everyone experiences it, but few of us discuss it. Like menopause, we’re oddly embarrassed by it. We think that this lapse is a sign of weakness. That it means we’re maladjusted or something. That it’s an indication that we’ve lost the only true love in our life and we’ll never get over him.
Hardly. The bad news about heartbreak is that it’s no company picnic. The good news is, it’s no company picnic. What’s more, it’s usually the last gulch to cross in the long obstacle course that is your breakup. Just as you need to hit the bottom of the pool in order to push up to the surface, your emotions need to take one more downward dip before they can start a steady climb upward.
So let’s do what we do best and pick apart this feeling until it no longer resembles anything at all. Remember the upshot on this last heartbreak hurrah—after this, it’s all downhill.
What It Is
Well, you have the general idea: heartbreak is basically a second wind in your breakup depression. What makes it different from the first rush of tears? In a nutshell: time. You’ve had time to process what happened; you might even think you’ve recovered from it all quite nicely, thanks. And just when you think that you’ve stabilized, you find yourself singing a whole new set of sad songs. Which makes sense if you think about it. All the thrashing about you did in the immediate breakup aftermath was just to keep your head above water. It was about survival, not form or technique. Now that you know how to swim, you’re faced with the struggle of finding out which stroke works best for you.
Which still leaves you waterlogged. Just because heartbreak means that you’re on the way to a healthy comeback doesn’t mean it’s any fun. Most of the women we talked to said that this second wave was less dramatic and hysterical than the first, but more despairing. “It was a mellow kind of depression,” says one twenty-seven-year-old public relations exec. “I wasn’t all riled up; I just felt like life sucked. I accepted that I was just one of those people who would never meet someone; I accepted that my life was a miserable, empty shell. I figured I would just resign myself to the facts instead of crying about them. I stopped talking about my ex. I stopped going on dates—I had gone on a million and hated them all. I was so picky—one guy had a freckle on his lip, and I hated him for that. It was pointless. Everything seemed pointless. I wasn’t sad, I was bitter. I decided I didn‘t care if I was alone. I got into a routine of my own. My apartment was my best friend—I even felt sad to leave it in the morning.”
Almost everyone seconded this experience. “I had this terrible sense of waiting for something good to happen,” a twentynine-year-old TV programmer recalls. “It was like I was waiting for a voice-mail message that would change everything. When it didn‘t come, I was angry, resentful. I walked around as though there were a black cloud over my head; I couldn’t shake it. It was a quiet time; I just wanted to be left alone. In a way, I was bitter because I felt pressured to get out there, but I just didn‘t want to. I felt guilty for my reclusiveness — and bitter because I didn‘t want to have to feel guilty.” Another woman describes this period as “the time when my hate for one person—my ex—metamorphosed into hate for the whole world.” And a thirty-one-year-old actress says she”experienced severe mood swings. I was surly, cranky as hell. Whereas right after the breakup I was morose and couldn’t eat a thing, now I was aggressive. I said fuck it and ate everything in sight. I didn‘t hide my feelings. I stopped pretending to be happy for my girlfriends who were getting married or starting new relationships. On the whole, I was an incredibly unpleasant person.”
According to Dr. Bonnie Eaker-Weil, a relationship therapist in New York City, heartbreak is the final stage of soul-searching that has to occur before you can embark on another relationship. “At first,” she says, “you might spend a lot of time doing things that help you avoid the pain—crying, railing against your ex-boyfriend, going out like crazy, holing up. Then, things even out a little. You start to date at a fairly steady pace; you might even be feeling pretty optimistic. But as time passes, you find yourself meeting more and more people whom you simply can’t connect with, maybe people who are just as sad and lonely as you are. You realize afresh what you lost. You idealize your ex—and then won’t give anyone else a chance because they naturally can’t compare to the icon you’ve created in your head. This is generally when you distance yourself from the world and take time to think about yourself. You become extremely reflective about your breakup. Although you’ve mourned before, now you finally have the strength to step back and start the healing process. And while this is healthy, you have to be careful not to fall into it for too long. Being introspective and reflective is good, but you can’t use it as an excuse to keep from rejoining life.”
