How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

"The Bee Gees - How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" by The cover art can be obtained from UK: Polydor, USA/CA: Atco.. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? via Wikipedia -

“The Bee Gees – How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” by The cover art can be obtained from UK: Polydor, USA/CA: Atco.. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? via Wikipedia –

How do you heal a broken heart, a friend ponders painfully. First, one must let go of the beloved one. Sounds simple, but what does that mean really? Well, the obvious things are you stop seeing the person. You stop talking to the person. You stop being one another’s beloveds. You stop sharing parts of your day, your self, your dreams, your thoughts, your heart.

It used to be more clear-cut back in the day–before this newfangled technology of the interwebs, but some time after fire was discovered. You’d break up, lament to your friends, drown in your tears listening to sappy music, freak out if you saw the person at the mall or movies or happy hour, and that would be the end of it. You would likely think about the person a lot, maybe hear about the person through mutual friends. But that would be that.

These days it’s harder. Do you stay Facebook friends? LinkedIn contacts? Twitter is public. You can see the history of your text exchanges. You can see all the old emails. It’s so easy to stalk or otherwise stay connected through tenuous threads. They’re not real, active, authentic connections. But they’re ethereal enough to hold out for some hope, to hold on to some illusion of connection. We share so many parts of ourselves and our thoughts and our dreams so publicly, that it’s easy for anyone to catch the pieces that we throw out there. Our beloveds can just reach out, and they have a piece of you.

There are no good answers to how we navigate letting go these days where social media is part of our lives. But really there are also no good answers when we really look at our lives and our selves. I mean really, every person, and every experience, is a stitch in the fabric of our beings. Do we ever really let go?

We don’t really. We bring parts of everyone with us. One Great Love left a love of red wines, an eggplant parmigiana recipe, and the most beautiful memory in upstate New York of seeing the night sky lit up in more stars than I had ever seen, and have yet to see again. One Nice Guy left experiences of holding the Stanley Cup and Detroit and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and his grandfather who always called me the China Girl, and the realization that nice isn’t enough for a relationship. One Great Love left an intimate knowledge and comfort with sexuality, and the now deep-seated knowledge that self-respect is vital in well, everything. One Husband left two small children and a belief in me that made all the difference. One Great Crush left the reminders that we are all broken, that we all have struggles and are worthy of love, that timing matters, and coping skills other than smoking pot are desirable. One Fond Like introduced me to sushi and Thai food and great white wine, but would not introduce me to his father because I was not Jewish. One Good Love left a new way to embody kindness and mercy, knowledge about scotch and motorcycles, and a box of channa masala mix.

So really, we don’t ever let anyone go. We bring parts of people with us every day, in the stories we recollect and share, in our preferences for food and drink and music, in our belief and sense of self, in the way we view ourselves that may have originated in how our beloved viewed us. All of our beloveds become part of us; each is a golden thread in the tapestry of Self, woven in and out of experiences and joys and sadness and memories and stories we tell about them in the future to our therapist, to our friends, to our children, to our next beloved.

So I say to my friend, don’t hold on so tight. That is how we heal a broken heart. When you hold on so tight, you don’t realize that the connection your white knuckles have wrapped tightly around is only an illusion. Exhale, don’t hold on so tight. Exhale, and you can feel your beloved settle into your soul. Into the proper place of your being. You hold on so tight because you’re afraid of losing your beloved forever. This tightness, it’s suffocating, it’s painful. My friend, our beloveds are right there with you, always.

This entry was posted in Dating, Empowerment, Mindfulness, Relationships and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

20 Responses to How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

  1. Lovely reminders to both let go and treasure the bits and pieces we’ve gained from those we connect with along the journey.


  2. Healing Grief says:

    You are a great writer. You easily help the reader understand the many layers of change and of what it can mean to let go.

    I love your description of what people leave with us as well. I think when we focus on those gifts instead of what we have lost, we can move one step closer to healing.


    • Thank you. Thank you so much for such touching and kind words. They mean so much to me, truly thank you.
      And yes–gratitude. It transforms the loss, the hurt, into a wonderful gift that we hadn’t had before. To be so lucky… 🙂


  3. Hariod Brawn says:

    An old friend of mine embarrassing himself many, many years ago. [Warning! Eighties Alert!]

    Hariod. ❤


  4. Appreciate the post. Like your new Gravatar just as much. 🙂


    • Thank you so much! I appreciate your readership, and your presence!
      And thank you–it just occurred to me that the gravatar was original from over 3 years ago! It had to go. Those yellow tomatoes were getting stale 🙂


  5. ♡eM says:

    It’s comforting to know all of those people are still with me. 🙂


  6. Dani says:

    This is just beautiful. It’s funny how even when things end/end badly, there is still beauty present–still moments of joy to be remembered and cherished.

    I constantly remind myself that every experience, like every person, has its positives and negatives. And we will always find blessings if we search out the positives.


    Thanks for the reminder.


    Liked by 1 person

    • Dani, I completely agree–and honestly had not always lived my life agreeing there is beauty and gratitude in every situation and person. I think you’re right, it takes the active decision to find it, to see it, to remember it–it’s so easy to taint everything with the pain or hurts. The ability to do so, for me, has been transformative in how I experience the pain now. Thank YOU for the reminders as well! Grateful we’re journeying together in this 🙂


  7. You are a wonderful writer, I loved description about relationship and the video.Thanks for sharing. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    • Thank you so very much for such kind words!! Thank you always for taking the time to be with me in these moments of reading the blog and taking the time to share your thoughts! And, I love that video!! 🙂


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