What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?

I remember the first time I ever watched a handsome Prince ride in on his white horse, sword drawn, ready to rescue the beautiful Princess from the evil dragon that held her captive in its crumbling tower.

It was Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, and it was painfully and exquisitely lifechanging.

I was young, impressionable and immediately swept away by the complete romance of the imagery. The drama, the colours, the sounds and then the heartbreaking romance of the inevitable kiss that shattered the spell and woke her from her slumber.

It was all about that final look.

The way he looked at her, the way she looked at him – as if they had been looking into each other's eyes their entire lives and nothing and nobody could tear them apart.

The idea that true love could save you was intoxicating, and I suspect, like most women in my generation, I was immediately hooked by the idea that someday, my Prince would ride in on his white charger, draw his metaphorical sword and sweep me off my feet.

I wanted more than anything to be that Princess and while Disney kept churning movies out to the masses, I became more and more obsessed with the fantasy.

As we all learn over time, the fantasy is not reality, and to expect it to be is ultimately going to deliver heartbreak. For those of us who wear the rose-tinted romance glasses, it’s a hard pill to swallow.

How do you navigate a romantic life that doesn’t fit with what you spent your childhood being exposed to and believing in, and how do you make sure that you don’t put so much pressure on the person you connect with that they begin to feel that they will never match up to those unrealistic expectations, resulting in you losing them?

When is enough truly enough?

One thing I have learnt in my 40 something years, whilst trying to navigate the unimaginable stress of relationships and understanding the opposite sex is that romance manifests itself in many different ways.

In your early teens, when you first really begin to see boys as boys and not just smelly creatures who push you over in the playground and take the mick, romance appears as shy little secret smiles over a crowded classroom.

He carries your books for you, walks you home and writes innocent and passionate love notes declaring that you are always going to be his. At least that is until the next blonde with blue eyes and impossibly long legs catches his eye, and suddenly, those declarations of undying love and eternities together become a thing of the past and you’re left holding your torn, bloody heart in your hands trying to understand what you did wrong.

Teenage love is intense, all-consuming, fiercely overwhelming and deeply potent. Your world is epic and fantastical whilst you’re together, but when things go wrong as they ultimately will, it’s the end of everything.

Life itself stops and you feel pain like nothing you have ever felt before.

My first real teenage love was an unrequited love. He was handsome, popular and ever so charming.

For three years, I could think of nothing else. I wrote and recorded a love song for him that I left in his locker on Valentines Day. I wrote pages and pages of poetry. I even wrote a play for the drama club that cast me and him in the leading roles of a couple who fell in love and then tragedy struck, killing him and leaving her bereft and heartbroken. What I learnt during that period is that I do my best writing and composing when I am in pain. All those broken hearts seem to work in my favour. Go figure!

As I learned, and my parents had to endure, the broken-hearted teenager is a wretched, miserable creature, akin to the main character in a Greek tragedy.

Forlorn, bereft, purposeless and morose, they shut themselves in their rooms to dissect and understand the overwhelming agony of love and heartbreak.

They play love songs incessantly, refusing to eat or talk whilst they navigate their first experience of true rejection from someone who had quickly become their entire world, even just for a short time.

The journey is a difficult one, but they emerge hopefully just a little bit wiser, and a little bit more careful with who they give their hearts to.

Romance and love changes exponentially as you move through your teens and into your twenties. The innocence that encapsulated those early forays into romance and love begins to dwindle, introducing a much more physical element and creating a whole new dynamic to navigate and master. That dynamic is sex, and it changes everything.

My twenties were almost more uncertain than my teens had been. There is a degree of confidence and stubbornness in your teens. You know it all and nobody can tell you otherwise. As you head into your twenties though, you begin to realise just how little you really know, and relationships become a whole new monster.

Sex is introduced and it turns into the whole should I, shouldn’t I? What will he think, what does he want?

For all those twenty somethings out there, I know it's an old-fashioned idea but keep it in your pants! A twenty something guy generally doesn’t want to take the girl who slept with him on the first date home to meet his mum. She is the good time girl, not the one you settle down with.

The introduction of sex into a relationship creates a whole new dynamic and politics that you couldn’t have ever imagined in your teens. All of a sudden you have something you can weaponize, and that makes it a dangerous and potentially explosive dynamic to introduce.

In your twenties, you are still figuring out who you are.

You are still trying to be what you think people want and the confidence that you had embraced in your teens seems to completely disappear. My twenties were quite possibly the least confident I had ever been. I relied on other people to give me value. It was a dangerous precedent to set and one that followed me through right into my forties.

When I look back to my twenties, thirties and even more recently, there was broken heart after broken heart, not always mine and not always unavoidable.

What becomes of the twenty something broken hearted?

Well, we tend to hide our broken pieces behind huge walls that make it almost impossible for anyone to get close to us.

We create a persona that protects us and prevents others from getting too close. It makes it difficult for us to be who we are and almost impossible for those people who want to get close to us to do so.

A twenty something broken heart has not yet hit cynical and suspicious. It still has a degree of innocence and that creates a huge amount of pain.

The twenty something broken heart is the one that really has the potential to destroy the belief that love is everything that Keats and Shakespeare wrote endless sonnets about.

It’s the broken heart that will lay waste to all the love songs you listened to over and over in your bedroom as a teen when you thought you understood what love was.

It's completely shattering because it’s the one that allowed you to believe for a second that you had grown up, that you had found your soul mate and that the endless parade of dates, break ups and friends setting you up was over. It gave you a glimmer of a perfect future before it ripped it away.

The thing is, and you must take this from those of us who survived, it does get better!

There are those lucky souls who meet their better halves in their twenties, but for the majority of us, it’s a process!

I truly believe that the purpose of the twenty something broken heart is to rebuild you into the best version of yourself. In my experience, as one of them, when you haven’t figured out who you are and what you want, the broken heart is a lesson that the universe sends you to show you what you should be demanding from the people you let into your life.

How long it takes you to figure that lesson out is up to you. I have to be honest; it took me a while! The lesson is finally sinking in now that I am in my mid-forties, but it's an important one.

To find your twin flame, soul mate, or whatever term you choose to use, you have to know and understand who you are, what you want and what you need from a partner. Don’t get me wrong, it's very much about compromise, but you begin to learn in your twenties that you have to be true to yourself and what you want. Anything else is not acceptable. It's better to be on your own than it is to be part of something that doesn’t fulfil you.

My hope for you all is that the twenty something broken heart is the last one that you will ever experience, and you will find your lobster. (If you know, you know😉).

If like me, you find yourself hitting your forties and still experiencing heartbreak, it can feel extremely isolating. If you use it correctly though, it can become a completely reformative experience. You develop a much deeper understanding of who you are and the thought of being on your own – not alone – is no longer a scary one.

Life opens up so many possibilities when your soul focus moves from finding someone to complete you to realising the only person that you need is you, and that finding yourself and making the most of everything that your short time on earth has to offer is the only way forward.

Life becomes exciting for all the right reasons and there is no time to be lonely.

Don’t get me wrong, a relationship is an amazing thing, especially when you’re with the right person, but if you can’t be happy on your own, then you will never be truly happy with someone else.

You are utterly unique, exceptional and one of a kind and you deserve to be with someone who understands and respects that.

So, what becomes of the broken hearted?

We figure life out, learn to demand better for ourselves and learn that to move forward, you have to start to choose you!

Until next time.........