There’s a quote I adore by Zadie Smith that states, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” I used to believe it described a reliable truth about love and loss: the pain you experience at the end of a relationship is a valid signifier of how much that relationship gave you when it was at its best.
Unfortunately, I was wrong. The grief we experience when a formerly fulfilling relationship reaches its conclusion is deep and warranted. But the (inevitable) end of a relationship that was confusing, toxic, or fundamentally flawed can actually hurt a whole lot more than it was ever worth.
How could this be? On the surface, it makes no sense.
But imagine a relationship between two people as a hallway with a door on either end and one person standing at each entryway. The relationship begins when they walk toward each other and arrive at a meeting point. In a healthy relationship, they meet halfway and although their positions will shift forward or backward from time to time, they’ll always come back to the middle eventually.
If a healthy relationship stops working and it’s necessary for the pair to part ways, they each have roughly the same amount of distance to walk in the opposite direction, albeit slowly, painfully, and sometimes with starts and stops along the way.
Now, imagine that the relationship started with a meeting in the middle of the hallway but then one partner began a pattern of unexpectedly retreating, forcing the other person to rush to cover extra ground to make up the difference. In that case, one person begins to do the majority of the work to avoid separation, and they rarely if ever get a chance to rest or be met halfway.
Often this exhausting pattern plays out when one person in the relationship (the person who frequently backs away) is avoidantly attached and the other (the pursuer) is anxiously attached, but it can happen for all kinds of reasons. For example, if the relationship forms too soon after one person has experienced a breakup, he or she may have the best of intentions but simply not be ready to be a full participant in a new coupling. There may be a significant difference in emotional maturity between the two people. One of them may experience a trauma in another area of their life during the relationship, and may no longer be able to fully commit to their partner. And so on.
No matter why it happens, when a relationship with this dynamic ends, the pursuer is going to have a lot of emotional ground to cover to get back to their end of the hallway and the promise of a fresh start with someone new. And the usual, expected amount of pain is going to be magnified once they realize how long the distance in front of them is compared to their partner’s.
Many of us will experience an intrinsically unbalanced relationship at some point, and there isn’t much that can be done to avoid the sorrow or the regret of knowing we gave far more than we got. To be blunt, it’s going to feel like absolute sh*t for a while. In those situations, it’s important to allow some extra time for healing and to be kind to ourselves in the process. We didn’t love “too much” or try “too hard”; neither of those things is possible.
Zadie Smith’s quote is still one of my favorites. But I would modify it in certain cases to reflect a harsh reality of heartbreak: Sometimes it hurts more than it’s worth, but just as much as we put into it. The good news is when it stops hurting (and it will, eventually), that extra legwork ultimately makes us stronger.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Gonzalo Kenny on Unsplash