Love’s Lessons Learned

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Broken Heart

If you’ve ever suffered a broken heart or comforted someone who has, then you understand the appropriateness of this term. The pain of love lost can be as searing as any physical wound. In fact, there is evidence this sort of pain is felt both emotionally and physically, so it’s a powerful visceral experience. 

Recently, I listened to a young man in the throes of losing his first love, and it brought back memories of my past travails in this regard. Long gone as it is, I still recall the emotional devastation that ensues when spurned, even if gently, by someone who seemed “the one.” Along in years as I am and seasoned by melodramas long past, it is tempting to counsel romantic neophytes in matters of the heart. But admonitions like “time heals all wounds” are like teaspoons of tepid water cast on the roaring flames of those who have loved and lost.

With time and experience, one recognizes the risks of surrendering one’s heart to the care and keeping of someone else. The phrase—“falling in love”—is, in fact, an accurate idiom. Like the “trust falls” practiced by participants in team building workshops, the love-struck fling themselves upon the mercies of each other. Too often they discover their chosen one is neither sufficiently merciful nor suitably mature to handle so great a responsibility.

The decision to be utterly vulnerable to another person is less common among those older and more wary of starry-eyed romance. Even with couples who have grown and sustained true intimacy, there is a sense that one should not “fall” completely into the enveloping embrace of the beloved but, instead, stay on one’s own feet and reach out. As the great poet, Kahlil Gibran, told us, it is not wise for two trees, nor two persons, to grow in too close proximity. Rather, they are best served by first standing alone, so that each may connect with but not be overshadowed or smothered by their partner.

Temporary Insanity?

To the young or uninitiated, this seems incongruous. After all, how does one fall in love without surrendering to the experience, without swooning in the emotional rapture of infatuation? The answer is one does not. By definition, infatuation constitutes a sort of temporary insanity that often obliterates rational thought. In contrast, true love does not always emerge from emotional “falling” and the accompanying capitulation to urgent longings. Sometimes it grows slowly but steadily, like a rising tide rather than a flash flood.

Still, infatuation hardly seems like a conscious choice. One is smitten, swept away and flung into an emotional vortex, like it or not. Over time, many learn not to heed the seductive call of “being in love with love,” and seek a more balanced bonding as two independent but connected individuals. But the battering of one’s heart during this period of emotional learning can be, for some, quite devastating.

So, what should one say to those newly initiated, naïve or hurtling toward danger in the arena of romance? Perhaps that love, like much else in life, is a teacher, and that its lesson plans are sometimes wonderful and other times excruciating. Or, as author James Baldwin put it, “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle. Love is a war. Love is a growing up.” That may be a tad strident for many, but the “growing up” reference usually applies.

Whatever our varied experiences with love, its lessons are many. These may lead us toward gratitude or bitterness, compassion or indifference, trust or suspicion, openness or withdrawal, tenderness or cruelty, ecstasy or agony. As a shrink, I’ve witnessed all these outcomes in my clients. However, the one I run across the most is typified by a quote from author Jodi Picoult: “You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they are not.” 

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