How to Come Back from Heartbreak

You thought it was the beginning of forever.

Behind the gruff exterior and the calluses you have collected from multiple different life experiences, you were secretly giddy at the person you thought was your person.

Now you are here. Scrambling and scraping to collect the pieces of a broken temple you erected for the one you called “love”. That now must be stored away in hopes you can find someone else worthy of its construction.

You didn’t grab a bullhorn and exclaim your love to the world for this reason. You were afraid of the moment when everyone would ask, where she was, and you’d have to deliver the news.

You may be unsure or feel uneasy. Sick and burdened with a broken heart and all the physical manifestations that come with it. Chest pains that wreak havoc on your demeanor, and thoughts lagging due to the headache that wraps around your head like a sweatband.

I’m not going to give you the simple standard answers on how to “fix you”. Going to the gym is one. “Find someone else”, maybe another statement. Far too often, as men, the advice given to us by our fathers, grandfathers, and even mothers, sisters, and aunts, though well-intentioned, can be surface-level at best. They seek to position you in the least form of reflection possible, looking for cathartic methods to escape what inevitably occurred. And frankly, society gives men enough of those as is.

I’m writing this as a follow-up to one of my pieces.

Not all young men, especially in this society, are blessed with the community to help them rise after they have fallen in the relationship realm. I crafted this from my own experiences and what I wished my father had told me.

Hopefully, it finds someone going through a tough relationship breakdown, and they can at least take a point or two from it to add to their arsenal.

Step 1: Take A Step Away for a Little Bit

“We need to talk”

We have all seen this variation of a text message, and immediately grown in fear and anger.

As men, when the heartbreak is occurring, we feel vulnerable. This barrier that we erected for the world, to keep us alive, has been drawn down. We shared with our partner our deepest secrets. The father wound that won’t heal, or the sense of insecurities that our past relationships have birthed within us. So when the axe falls, when the guillotine comes falling on what we thought would be a long-term relationship, we don’t feel our partner is abandoning the relationship; we feel we are being abandoned. And they take all that baggage with them, all our secrets.

The first response is anger, and why wouldn’t it be? As Jason Wilson puts it, as men, we don’t have the same semblances of emotional range that women do, or at least the understanding of those emotions. What he dons the “crayon theory”, women can tap into and operate in 64 emotions, like a crayon box, while men are left to use the popular 8. So when tragedy happens, when our heart is broken, the right response is anger and physical manifestations of our frustration.

However, anger in its totality isn’t a conducive emotion to handle such a delicate situation. Your anger may drive you to say, do, and utter things in an act of reciprocity that can’t be taken back. And now you have stepped out of the bounds of your character and allowed yourself to be painted as the sum total of your actions in that moment.

When the pain of heartbreak presents itself, don’t be afraid to take a step back, allow yourself to reflect and process what just occurred. Communicate to your partner that you need time to think and process before speaking to them again. It will give both sides time to emotionally rest and come back with coherent dialogue prepared for the next conversation.

Step 2: Seek Closure

When you have stepped away, it may seem as though you don’t want to return. Return to that very conversation, especially if you aren’t in agreement with the need to terminate the relationship. But it is necessary to come back and reflect on the feelings and emotions that both of you share.

If, after careful consideration, both you and your partner conclude that maybe a reconciliation is in the cards, create a plan to hold each other accountable to grow and save the relationship from eventual breakdown and collapse.

If, after careful consideration, your partner is still certain of their decision to remove themselves from the relationship and the partnership, you must honor that decision. You cannot keep a grown person hostage in a relationship, even if you believe that they are mistaken in their decision-making. You must allow them to leave and find their happier selves, even if you are not involved in that process.

This doesn’t mean that you both shake hands and fall out of each other’s lives. You can still be friends, or acquaintances, and cordial with each other if you both share children. But don’t allow them to go unknowing of how they may have hurt you. Show and portray to them how their actions in the relationship have harmed your soul, and accept their responses of how you did the same. This isn’t a means of trying to be vindictive. It’s to allow the one you loved the grace to know where they failed in the relationship. So that perhaps in the future you can rekindle your union on better terms. And if a future reconciliation isn’t in the cards, they can be noted and better off in their future romantic endeavors.

Step 3: Soul Searching

This, perhaps, is the most pivotal part of the how-to guide.

Far too often, heartbreak is such an unfathomable pain for us as men that we try and find other mediums to soothe ourselves of the feelings of rejection and abandonment. Sometimes that feeling may be triggered by a previous relationship or another moment in our lives where we were told we weren’t worth saving or even interacting with.

A man must look deep within himself to find what was the cause of these feelings beyond the caress of drugs, alcohol, or any particular means of throwing yourself into a pit of something to avoid the feeling.

You must find out two things.

1. Why did I take this breakup so hard? Is it just a hatred of rejection, or was it something deeper?
2. How did I personally contribute to the breakdown of our relationship/union/partnership/marriage?

This consistent microscope inspection of failings of relationships will help you be on the lookout for the things you can steer clear of when you finally decide to begin dating again.

Step 4: Do Not Fall Prey To Misogyny

Far too often, when nursing a heartbreak, people become heavy-handed with overgeneralizations about the opposite sex.

Men are not the exception.

It’s easy to de-invidualize your circumstances and try and come to general and politicized conclusions about why your relationship ended. Conclusions that transcend the bounds of substantive individual critiques and evolve into misogynistic dogma.

We live in an age where there is a fair share of figures who will feed us narratives of the entitlement of women that swim on the surface of a worldview that leads to their eventual subjugation.

I tell you, do not entertain those actors, just move right past them and continue the journey to healing.

They are trying to profit from your pain and grow their audience at the expense of your growth and self-fulfilment.

Step 5: Don’t Walk This Walk Alone

Heartbreak is hard on everyone and anyone.

And more often than not, due to a lack of relationship maintenance, we as men can suffer the most.

Our communities are tattered, and we feel as though no one truly understands our struggles, so we bury our pain deep inside. We hope that the next person can be that lighthouse, only for them to leave, and we find our pain and feelings of rejection compounding.

It’s important to communicate, talk to your family, your loved ones about your feelings. Share with your brothers where your heart may break. Sometimes we aren’t the biggest monsters that even we think we are. You may hear something profound or surprising.

Tyrese Gibson, a R&B singer, went through a high-profile divorce from his wife. His many shared, much-liked, and utilized meme, What more Do You Want From Me was clipped and used as a means of displaying comic-level frustration. But the original context of the video was him weeping in the barren, cold cave of social media about his daughter he was afraid to lose, and his marriage that ended much to his disapproval.

When Gibson appeared on the Breakfast Club after his divorce was finalized, he touched on a myriad of topics relating to both his current relationship, his mental health struggles, the death of his mother, and yes, his divorce. Gibson articulated that he knew people were going to have an issue with the fact that he was currently in a relationship despite how his past marriage ended. He critiqued modern-day self-help culture that pushes the narrative that in order to enter a relationship, you need to be 100% healed and whole. He believes that it propagates the myth that there is a desired perfect healedness and that the narrative can contribute to self-harm.

I both agree and disagree. I still believe that there should be some healing and self-reflection involved in isolation. However, I do understand the point being made that community, and even in some cases, a new love interest, can eventually help flesh out the healing process.

It’s dreadful being alone after a break-up, whether the cause is infidelity, abuse, lack of trust, or even just one party falling out of love with another. There will always be those moments, conversations that will swim to the forefront of your mind that should have given you pause. There will be times when actions were done that should definitely have caused you to pull the plug, when instead you grovelled for your partner to stay.

That is why other people have to lift you, support you. Allow you to be immersed in their presence, to let you know that your breakup isn’t the totality of your life. Or even who you were in your relationship isn’t inherent to every relationship that you have.

Relationships are hard. Period full stop. Everyone involved has a horror story, and maybe a success story as well.

I have found that traditionally, women have always created the spaces to help each other heal.

And men?

We have never engaged in such behavior. We pass on the same dogma to each other and wonder why we all feel trapped in a cycle of pain and despair. Why do we have so few fruitful relationships? Why do we settle for the fruitless and transactional?

The treasure chest lies in the center of your heart, not at the bottom of a bottle, pill jar, weight bench, or the surface of another woman’s bed. You must do the hard work of unearthing, challenging, inquiring, and accepting to move forward and begin to live a fruitful life past a break-up.

To recap, the steps are:

1. TAKE A STEP AWAY. Give yourself time to breathe so you don’t say something brash out of anger.
2. Communicate your feelings and SEEK CLOSURE with your partner, don’t allow her or you to walk away without a conversation.
3. SEARCH YOUR SOUL for any patterns you noticed and begin to search for why you were so blind to them, so as not to succumb to them in the future.
4. DO NOT FALL PREY TO MISOGYNY. All women aren’t the same as your last relationship.
5. DON’T WALK THIS WALK ALONE. Find that community and share with them your concerns. Don’t allow yourself to be consumed by your grief.

My brothers, if no one else has told you, I am rooting for your success. You have a place in this world, and it isn’t over just because your relationship ended.

This article is as much for you as it is for me. The time is now for us to build the brotherhood that we all deserve and can profit from.