You Are Justified in Feeling Heartbroken

At the end of January, I was feeling kinda heartbroken.

For the previous six weeks, I had been chatting to someone on Tinder whom I was quite excited about. We had spoken most days, sharing intimate details about ourselves and divulging our feelings towards each other. Unfortunately, due to distance and the UK lockdown, we were unable to meet so all we had were virtual means of communication. One day this person stopped replying to me all of a sudden, which rocked me a little. I figured that perhaps life had been busy or something more urgent had been going on in their life so I mustered up the courage to ask what was going on…

“I think I’m falling out of this”.

That reply shook my core. I’d been careful for the first couple of weeks, knowing that our situation wasn’t likely to improve for a while but this person seemed confident in us and they also seemed really into me (“I’d really like this to go somewhere when we meet”). As time went on, I had started to fall for them. Just five days earlier they’d given me a security blanket; they were content with what little we had. But just a couple of days later, a change of heart had swept over them.

I was confused and hurt but also embarrassed about those feelings. After all, it had only been a six-week virtual affair.

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You Can’t Help What You Feel

I instantly messaged one of my friends and asked to chat. She knew something was up so she grabbed a glass of wine, called me up, and listened as I sobbed through the story over the phone. My friend compassionately said that she wasn’t a fan of the person I’d been talking to and said what all best friends say in this situation: You’re loved and you will be better off without them.

I admitted to my friend that I felt embarrassed to be upset after such a short courtship, with no real-life physical intimacy, but she reassured me that I shouldn’t feel that. I had every right to feel how I felt. I’d let my guard down and invested in a person, which is an incredibly vulnerable thing to do. My therapist later backed her up on this.

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Online Dating Doesn’t Make Things Easy

After a series of heartbreaks, and in an effort to understand dating and relationships better, I decided to dive into the literature on the subject. I was quite surprised by how relatable and eye-opening the books were about dating and relationships.

I discovered the reason that I fall quickly for people and why they sometimes choose to drift off from the conversation, rather than honestly owning up to their feelings that they’re just not that into the relationship anymore.

In the first book that I read, Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg share that dating is very stressful nowadays. There are several forces at work in modern online dating; we have an unlimited number of options (which can lead to choice overload), texting is instant (and yet we can hack into the desire of reward uncertainty by playing games with our date), and we’re all looking for a passionate, soulmate type of love (whereas those in the 1950s were looking for ‘good enough’).

Such a stressful landscape means that we often feel relieved when we finally connect with someone. I was taken off guard when I started chatting to this Tinder person back in December (in fact, I was about to delete the app as I didn’t want to be chatting with someone during a lockdown), but we hit it off and we hoped that we would make it through the uncertainty that covid has brought. Unfortunately, we might never know what might have been.

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Our Biology Drives Us to Attach

Sometimes I wonder why I become so wrapped up in the romantic embrace of a stranger. I have an amazing unit of friends and family, and yet someone I hardly know takes up residence in my mind; they’re the first person I think of when I wake up and the last to vacate my mind as I drift into my dream world. It turns out that the answer might be found in attachment theory.

In Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, discuss the biological drive that we have to seek attachment. They share that “our need to spend our lives with someone is part of our genetic makeup”. We are truly animals, with mammalian instincts and remnants of a reptilian brain; how we feel is often a result of our evolutionary drive to mate. But there are also a series of attachment styles that we could exhibit; secure, anxious-attached, avoidant-attached, or anxious-avoidant. Understanding these attachment types and finding a partner with a compatible attachment type seems to be key to successful relationships.

As attachment theory says, when we lose the person that we attached to, we feel pain. “The emotional circuits that make up our attachment system evolved to discourage us from being alone. One way to nudge us back to the safety of our lover’s arms is to create the sensation of unmistakable pain”. In the earlier days, having a mate made the difference between life and death. And we still experience those archaic feelings because evolution hasn’t caught up to the modern-day. Hence, feeling heartbroken makes complete sense. I was attached to the person I was dating and my human psychology is driven to associate loss of attachment with pain.

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Not Only Is There Pain, But There Is Also Grief

When you lose someone in any kind of relationship, you don’t just lose that person — you lose everything surrounding your interactions with them; the future you imagined, the intimacy of the connection, the feel-good dopamine hit of a message from them. With the loss, comes grief.

And it’s hard to protect ourselves from feeling things. Being guarded is a skill that I am yet to master and although protecting our feelings might feel safer, in reality, there is very little chance of finding love unless we are vulnerable and we open ourselves up to the potential of romantic relations.

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!” — Elio’s father, Call Me By Your Name

Although dating is tough and brings about a slurry of emotions — changing with each day, each text, each emoji — it is important that we allow ourselves time to feel. As Elio’s father says in his monologue, we will remain as a shell if we didn’t allow ourselves to feel anything; neither pain nor love.

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To Feel Is to Be Human

The major point of this article is that you are not alone if you’re feeling heartbroken. Whether it was a week of intense passion or a few years of companionate love, you shouldn’t be embarrassed for feeling pain, loss, or heartbreak.

The fact that you felt something for another person is beautiful and risky and human. You let your guard down and opened up to possibilities which is the scariest thing in the world. It goes against our inherent nature to avoid risk and the scornful past experiences that teach us not to do so again. We are ultimately better off for having taken that risk and to have felt both the beautiful duration and its painful end. That is the adventure of life.

I don’t know about you but that’s what I need to hear.

As for me and my dating life, I’ve decided to take a break. After attempting to relight the flame, the Tinder person and I simply fizzled out of communication. I don’t want to break the lockdown rules and it is way less fun to go on a socially distanced date. I also want to become more comfortable with my single life. I want my life to be so exuberant that it would be “inconvenient” for me to fit a partner into it, as Daniel Sloss says. Because if that person is worth it, then I’ll find a way to overcome that inconvenience.

And when I’m next heartbroken after a romantic rejection, I’ll know that I’m justified in how I feel. I’m biologically driven for attachment, after all.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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