Let’s Treat Heartbreak Like the Serious Injury That it Is
A broken heart is an injury of the highest order.
When I lived in New York, I went to a charity bachelor auction and bought a cute doctor. His name was Ed, and he seemed pleasantly surprised when I showed up to the date. I still remember what I was was wearing: a DVF wrap dress, strappy sandals, the best light pink never-to-be-found-again nail polish on my toes. I’m not sure why this detail is important. My working theory is that my brain was so scrambled after Ed eventually left me, it was like my hard drive wiped out, leaving a detritus of images floating around.
Soon after the first date we were sleeping at each other’s apartments, drinking Cuban coffee in the morning, talking about our future. We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together. He was only forty, but had been married not once, not twice, but three times before. Somehow this red flag didn’t register.
One night he came over for dinner. I was in the middle of making baked brie with pears and walnuts when he sat down at the kitchen table and told me that it was over. I can’t remember exactly what he said; I do remember floating to the hall closet like a ghost, pulling out his white coats and silently handing them to him.
He looked shocked, which I couldn’t understand — why would I keep his work clothes if we weren’t together? For months, I held onto to this small, weird moment as evidence that perhaps he didn’t really mean it. But he meant it.
Over the course of the next seven days, I lost 11 pounds. I must have stopped eating altogether, but I don’t really remember. I do remember my boss telling me that I looked great, “svelte, no longer zaftig.” I remember chain smoking on my fire escape, calling him way too many times from my home phone (this was pre-ubiquitous cell phone use), frustrated that he never picked up. I remember taking the subway to my friend Heather’s house to call him from her phone, to see if he would pick up from an unfamiliar number. He did, and so I lost more weight.
I was unhinged. But I’m generally not unhinged — it takes quite a bit to unhinge me, actually — and so looking back now, I wonder if I was suffering an actual injury, a sickness. It wasn’t just sadness, it was a disorder, a disease. The heartbreak had sickened me, and taking the subway to make that test phone call was a symptom. I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t stop crying, my body hurt all over, my brain was unable to form thoughts. I could barely string a sentence together.
And yet every morning I got up and dragged myself to work, although I still have no idea how. I was sicker than any cold or flu would have made me, but it never occured to me that I could call in sick because my boyfriend dumped me. This didn’t occur to me because despite all the art and literature centering heartbreak, we don’t actually take it seriously. We leave it for the songs, the books, the self-helpy memes. But isn’t it more serious than all of that?
We know that sex releases oxytocin, otherwise known as the “bonding” or “love” hormone. Oxytocin is what keeps mothers from throwing their infants out the window when they cry incessantly. Oxytocin is what derails one-night stands — you think you’re going to be fine if he doesn’t call, but if the orgasms were fantastic, take heed: you are bonded. Suddenly his not calling may seem like a real emergency.
During the Renaissance, French doctor Jacques Ferrand claimed the cure for a broken heart was bloodletting — so much bloodletting, in fact, that the heart failed. Killing your patient and by extension putting them out of their misery is clearly one way to handle a broken heart, if not a dramatic overreaction. Still, as ridiculous as a death cure is, I have to give Ferrand credit for realizing that a broken heart is so agonizing that something, anything — even a form of euthanasia — must be done. But what?
Ask anyone today how to cure a broken heart, and they’ll spout platitudes about radical self-care, maybe suggest a yoga class. But this misses the mark so spectacularly, it’s like telling a cancer patient to drink a green juice. And yet the modern medical community seems uninterested. Yes, there is something called “broken heart syndrome,” but the definition dances around the issue, simply saying it’s caused by extreme stress, like a car accident. Please. Where is the recognition that the pain associated with being dumped is a whole different animal entirely? Where is the recognition that romantic heartbreak makes you feel like you will die? Where is the recognition that you might actually want to die?
Eventually I healed after Ed, had other heartbreak, healed from those too and then forgot about the agonizing pain. That is, until last Saturday morning when my friend Allison called me to tell me that her live-in boyfriend of four years picked up a backpack and walked out the door. I went to her house Saturday night, and watched Allison cry and shake, while she drank almost an entire bottle of wine by herself. Her eyes were sunken and she trembled uncontrollably. She hadn’t eaten since Wednesday, when Frank had started to hint that something was wrong.
That night, she took two THC gummies to sleep, but woke up at 3:00 a.m. in physical pain, heaving with tears. I saw her Sunday night, and she still couldn’t eat. I could see the blood pooling into the dark circles under her eyes, like her heart had almost given up on pumping blood, depositing it just wherever it could. No wonder Dr. Ferrand thought bloodletting was the answer.
My concern for Allison turned into alarm this morning when she called, wailing, screaming, crying. Frank had sent the inevitable “when can I pick up the rest of my stuff” text, and it suddenly became actually, truly, real: he was gone, he wasn’t coming back, and worse, she didn’t know why. The combination was too much to bear, and she made noises on the phone that I can only describe as elemental, a wailing that I hadn’t heard since I was at a funeral for my high school friend, when her mother collapsed walking to her grave.
As I was listening to her — which I guess is all I could really do — I wondered why we haven’t found a fix for this. We have medical intervention for depression, for anxiety, even for a deficient attention span, and a host of other so-called disorders. And yet here was my friend, in physical pain, in psychic pain, making the same sounds she would make if she had been hit by a car, wailing that she both felt like she was going to die and wanted to die, and there was nothing I could do but sit on the other end of the phone.
In the movie “Midsommar,” the protagonist Dani sees her boyfriend having sex with someone else. Her heartbreak is so visceral, so agonizing, she runs from the building, heaving with sobs, sounding like a wounded animal. Other women surround her in the sleeping quarters, holding her, wailing with her, matching her breath. I thought of that scene while Allison wailed on the phone. How is that in 2021, the only thing we have to heal heartbreak is to surround the heartbroken with friendship, with community, with empathy — matching their breath? It might be something, but it’s not enough.