Just When You Think You’re Past Heartbreak

When the loss of romantic love no longer breaks your heart, life finds another way

Illustration: Jesse Zhang

Last week I heard from a friend who’s heartbroken. The details of her particular situation are incidental; it’s always the same story. As it happens, she’s much younger than I am, but I knew better than to tell her any of the perfectly true things — that she was a brilliant, beautiful young woman and would, without doubt, fall in love again, with someone more deserving of her, that this would pass, that she’d be happy again — that would’ve been of no use to her. I didn’t want to condescend to her as though she were some silly little girl head over heels with hormones, and also didn’t want to sound like some desiccated old person who’s forgotten what it’s like to be in love.

I myself am not unfamiliar with the etiology of heartbreak. Let’s not dwell on this: I’ve written about it at length elsewhere, and it’s frankly embarrassing. A typical scenario involved me curled up on the bathroom floor weeping piteously into a smelly old towel. (“Weeping into the towel” became verbal shorthand for the whole ordeal, one that I’m afraid got wearisomely familiar to my closest friends.) The particular strain of love my young friend was suffering — unrequited, or unavailable — is one of which I made rather a vocation for a couple of decades. In my own experience, a recurring attraction to people who are unavailable usually means you’re not ready to fall in love with someone who is. Some form of love that’s impeded or incomplete (illicit, unilateral, long-distance, epistolary) may be all you can take — or, more importantly, give — at that point in your life. It may be, despite your protestations, what you really want. My friend Margot likes to ask, of people in such situations: “If you weren’t thinking about [x person] all the time, what would you be thinking about instead?” — because the answer is usually what you’re trying to avoid by burying yourself alive in your romantic/sexual obsession.

It’s been over a decade since that last happened to me. I hesitate even to write those words, like a superstitious pitcher afraid to break a streak. My loves used to be operatic; my heartbreaks, Toscan; and my jealousy not just Othelloan but Medean — the kind where you send someone a poisoned…