Long ago, I had a boyfriend who used to tell me, “My goal is to lie on my deathbed without regrets.” We lived in different countries. He was elusive and mysterious, showing up without warning in front of my college dorm with one of those black and white marbled composition notebooks on his lap, or leaning against a lamppost across the street from a restaurant where I worked with his hands in the pockets of his loosely fitting, navy-blue dockers. I’m not sure how he managed to make it feel like a coincidence every time he materialized from out of nowhere, but he did–even after taking a train from New York to Montreal to pay me a visit.
This was long before cellphones. We wrote each other obscure, angst-ridden, self-centered letters about our lives when we weren’t together–a lot of letters. Because we spent so much time apart, our love-affair unfolded mostly in our imaginations and on sheets of paper. The time we spent physically together was brief, passionate, and frustrating. After two or three days in bed, we would get dressed, go to a cafe and sit in silence. I was too proud to ask him when I could expect to see him again. He disappeared as inexplicably as he’d appeared. For a week fews after he left, I sank into depression.
This was also long before emails, and the sight of his handwriting on an envelope that arrived via postal mail made me dizzy with hope and fear. Sometimes, he sent me one of the black and white marbled composition notebooks I’d seen him writing in when we were together full of his cynical assessments of human beings and human nature, things he’d observed working as a bartender, or getting coffee refills in a sidewalk cafe (this was long before Starbucks, too).
I read and reread his letters and notebooks, trying to decipher the cryptic erotic segues into something we’d done together, or some part of my body he was particularly fond of. I sought clues to our future in his stream-of-consciousness musings.
One day, on an impulse, I took the train to New York. He wasn’t expecting me and he didn’t look happy. We sat in a dingy corner of an East Village restaurant, drinking cheap red wine. He acted distant. I could sense he was hiding something, and I remember asking him to tell me the truth. He admitted he was seeing someone else. He said he’d planned to break up with her. His face looked pained and distracted.
When recently heartbroken people say “it felt like someone punched me in the stomach,” they’re not exaggerating. The muscles in my stomach contracted sharply. The conviction that an effortless, mysterious sexual attraction I felt towards one special person would sustain me, nourish me, and carry me through my life in its powerful wake–this belief vanished in an instant. It seemed like one of the few real, pure, transcendent joys I’d been able to reliably experience with another person collapsed into dust. The world around me changed. He reached for his glass of wine, looking paler than usual. I stared out the window. My future as I knew it had vanished.
Heartbreak has the potential to jumpstart your life. It can loosen the grip of the Sexual Chemistry Attraction Myth (the SCAM). I saw his choice to cultivate another romance as the problem, when in fact, it was the solution. Romantic illusions–the ones that have us believe something or someone external will make us happy and whole–keep us stuck in a place where we’re waiting to be rescued from the inner work we can only do for ourselves.
The work is this: opening to the power of our own life force, and also to the intricate, mysterious world that’s available to us outside of our own narrow and preconceived notions of attraction. The work is a process of embracing all of our vulnerabilities and darkness, rather than clinging to what we think we need to feel good. Illusions are meant to collapse.
Heartbreak is undervalued. It’s a portal to genuine Selfhood. Blessed are the heartbreakers, for they have a difficult and sacred calling to fulfill–releasing their own idealized image in another’s eyes. They’re seldom appreciated. It can take great courage to break a heart.
Blessed are the heartbroken, too, for they have their own sacred calling to embark on: self-love and expansion. They shall inherit their own real life.
My heartbreaker showed me his reality, even though it was vastly different from the one I would have given almost anything to believe in, at the time.
He set me on the path toward genuine freedom.
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You may also like by Alicia Muñoz
7 Counterintuitive Ways to Deal With Jealousy
The Sexual Chemistry Attraction Myth (The SCAM™)
The Price You Pay for Believing in Sexual Chemistry
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