What’s Worse Than a Broken Heart?

I’m a confident person who is happily single. Or, at least, that’s how I thought of myself until I was walking through a neighborhood on Halloween dressed in my natural witchy aesthetic and escorting a Squid Game player (067) and a hot dog when the playlist someone was blasting shifted from the typical Halloween fare to a Disney classic.

Never let anyone say a singing teapot can’t pull at one’s heartstrings!

Tune as Old as Song

I blame Beauty and the Beast for much of my romantic lore. An introverted reader who is given a whole library? Excuse me while I swoon! Tale as Old as Time was blasting through this neighborhood, and my long-dead desire for a relationship was reawakened. This was not the zombie apocalypse I prepared for!

I did not expect a song from a Disney cartoon to break me. I tried to shove those feelings back into their box. No talking teapot was going to change my mind! But the words were an arrow straight to my heart … Just a little change, small to say the least, both a little scared, neither one prepared, Beauty and the Beast.

Eventually, someone switched over to Thriller or The Monster Mash, and the spell was broken. I shook it off and returned to my happily single self. But there was an itch in my brain that I couldn’t quite scratch. Something felt … off to me.

And sad.

I don’t usually struggle to articulate my feelings. Words have always been my strength and my comfort. But I was having a hard time saying exactly what I was feeling later that night, so my best friend filled in the blanks.

She does that a lot. We really can finish each other’s sentences, but we’ve been friends since high school, which gets further away from us every year. She’s one of those people who is brilliant at everything she does. This includes friendship. So, when I was trying to find the words, she helped me. Not just because she knows me and knows what I was trying to say, but because she’s had the same hard-to-express feeling.

Worse even than a broken heart is this: Losing the ability to believe that love will ever work out again.

Beauty and the Beast

The last relationship didn’t just leave me brokenhearted. It left me disillusioned. Even though I’ve had relationships and have been married and divorced, this was the first time I let myself fall freely into love. It wasn’t a practical decision. It was this pure trusting that I could love this person, and he would love me back, and it would all work out in the end. I believed in a way I had never fully believed before.

It was different for him. His past was littered with relationships where he’d believed and been disappointed by love. I was just another woman in a line of them that hadn’t worked out. But for me, he was the only man I’d ever been certain about, and to find that I was entirely wrong was more heartbreaking than the actual heart breaking.

Because after it was over, I realized that I’d lost my beautiful ability to trust that love would last. How could I believe it when I’d watched him falling out of love by degrees and then all at once? How could I trust that love would last when even the person I thought was different turned out to be more of the same?

I came to my friend frustrated at being unable to identify the thing that was harder than a broken heart, and she just said it straight out. It’s the lost confidence in love that hurts so much. It wasn’t just that they stole our hearts and broke them. That happens. It was that they made us believe everything would work out and that love could be trusted only to choose a life lived without us. She’d arrived at that conclusion long before I had. It had simmered in my consciousness, a constant discomfort.

Bittersweet and Strange

The song that played had awakened something in me: a memory of what it was to love like that, intertwined with the memory of crushing loss. I just don’t believe anymore. I believe love works out for some people, but something about losing that relationship made me believe that it won’t work out for me. I haven’t let a lot of people get that close to me. To realize that the closer he got, the less he loved me did something to my psyche. It punched a hole in the idea that I could be loved unconditionally.

Sadly, childhood trauma had once made me believe the same thing. But I’d worked that out in therapy. I didn’t expect to be facing the same feelings after a failed relationship. I tried telling myself that one person not being able to love me didn’t mean that no one ever would. But my heart just wasn’t buying it.

Years after the relationship ended, I still can’t quite believe how much I believed in him. It wasn’t like me. I’d always held back a little before. I was so sure of our connection that I just went all in. My cards were on the table. And I lost more than I ever bargained for.

Not just him. Not just the relationship. But a core belief in happily ever after outside of fiction.

So, I heard the song, felt a surge of hope, and then it was followed by this strange sadness and anger that I just can’t trust in love anymore. Perhaps I should have some sympathy for him since he’d had this experience long before he left me. Other people in his past had made sure he couldn’t believe anymore, so when I came along, why would he believe it would be any different?

That thought allows me to have so much compassion for his brokenhearted attempts at our relationship. I don’t have to imagine what that must have been like for him anymore. Now, I’m one of the people who just can’t believe, and I have that experience because of him.

Is that all we ever do — go through life hurting people in the same ways we’ve been hurt? Broken hearts seem a lot more common than happy ones. But that’s why I know I have to be the one to change.

Finding You Can Change, Learning You Were Wrong

I know I have to do the next part differently. It’s the only way to break the cycle. I can be happily single. I have been up until the moment that song reawakened that memory. If I ever meet someone again who tempts me to believe in a love that lasts, I can’t just do what’s been done to me. I can’t punish the next person because the last person didn’t love me.

I’ll have to find a way to heal this broken heart (and broken trust) so that no one else cuts themselves against it. I’ll have to learn to be softer when all I want to do is build a defense that no one can ever get through. I don’t want to do to others what was done to me. I don’t want to be a person capable of love who refuses to ever give it freely again.

I can choose to stay hurt and bitter, a person who distrusts love, or I can be someone who learns from it. I can be a person who forgives the one who hurt me because I now know that it wasn’t intentional. He felt a fear I hadn’t yet encountered. Now that I have, I can see how hard it was for him to believe in me or my love or our relationship. I might have been afraid, but he was terrified. I know because that’s the terror I’ve felt since — a bone-deep haunted feeling that love will falter, and it’s so much wiser not to fall at all.

I can forgive myself for the defenses constructed in the aftermath of that hurt, that self-protective time. I can learn to soften those defenses and let love in in all its forms. I can do things differently even though the terror sometimes whispers beneath the surface. I can be disappointed that a relationship I wanted didn’t work out and still build the belief that other relationships can last.

Song as Old as Rhyme

The sad truth is that sometimes love doesn’t work out despite our best intentions. We don’t always feel bitter because the other person set out to hurt us. Sometimes, we let our sadness become anger because it’s so much easier to stay mad than to grieve and fully feel that loss.

Most people don’t go into relationships trying to break hearts. Who has the time? Most of us want to connect, but life experiences haven’t always taught us to do that in a healthy way. Added to that, many of us are struggling with the past baggage of having loved and lost. It’s an ever-present worry we carry with us into new relationships — and leave at the door in case we need to make a quick getaway.

A lot of the time we fail to love each other well — either because of basic incompatibility or because we lack relational skills. But we don’t have to come to the conclusion that love only ever hurts, even though pain is often said to be the price of love. We can decide to be hopeful and to be a better partner to the next person than we were to the last.

A couple of weeks after Angela Lansbury’s voice stopped me in my tracks, I sat sipping coffee in the morning sun and thinking about the last few brokenhearted years. I gave what I could. I loved with all I had. I know that my love was as imperfect as I am. But I don’t regret any of it. Not even when I think of all I lost.

Because I look around and see what all I’ve built from that bitter disappointment. A home of my own. A garden as wild and unruly as I have become. A depth to my writing I only ever hinted at before. I have made a beautiful life that I don’t know that I would have if the relationship had gone another way. Bittersweet and strange, indeed!

With the cool morning air on my face and a hot cup of coffee cradled in my hands, I let myself soften into a belief in love again. I don’t know that I’ll find it in this lifetime. I only know that I will keep choosing happiness whether it’s me on my own or a life shared with another.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.