I won’t glorify or romanticize heartbreak. For me, it was a kind of death and I was forced to keep living.
-Warsan Shire
I remember the first time my heart was broken. I remember sitting on the cracked linoleum floor of the kitchen in our rented university house, thinking the pain would never end. I remember trying to go out, to put on a face, to admit to everyone that I had moved on, yet the alcohol and the pain of being out in the world again, alone this time, only pushed me deeper under. I remember searching every crowded bar for his face, wondering if tonight would be the night I’d see my ghost.
I remember missing or rather, ignoring, all the signs, the subtle attempts, he threw at me to try and get me to pull the plug. I remember how naive and stupid and foolish I felt for not seeing them before…the calls from other girls, the texts, the passive attempts to get rid of me.
But I was young then and didn’t want to see the signs. I was young and in love and needed the experience. Well, now I have it. And I know what to look for. I’m smarter and stronger and won’t be fooled again. I won’t be fooled, but I may get my heart broken again.
Being smart or old doesn’t save you from that. And for anyone going through that exquisite pain of heartbreak, just know you’re not alone. Every woman on this earth has felt it and every woman will continue to feel it. Don’t feel stupid and don’t feel ashamed for missing the signs. Learn from this, grow from this, build from this.
Until you’re strong enough to go out without missing him, checking your phone a thousand times for a text, silently praying he’ll realize he made a mistake and ask for you back, relish in the heartbreak. Learn to appreciate how the feeling of death is really the feeling of life. You are alive. You are in pain. You are experiencing one of the consequences of being human.
Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out, she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
—Alice Munro
And it’s amazing how much noise people ignoring each other can make.
—Eoin Colfer, Benny and Babe
People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one.
—Marina Abramovic
Even now, in my thirties, whenever a romantic relationship ends, I find myself saying, He’s not the person I thought he was. From a distance a lover I knew so well becomes a man I do not recognize. I see him with his new girlfriend and even his posture is different. With her his stance is more solid, more aloof. I no longer see the cracks, the vulnerable places where he let me in. He is across the room at a party—with a little effort, an adjusted angle, our eyes would meet—but he might as well be on another continent. Have you met X? someone says to me, and I do not say, I used to share his bed. I used to know his passwords and his whims. Instead I say, in the same vague tone I reserve for elevators, I think we met once a long time ago. Because the person who he is with her is a stranger. A foreigner. Maybe the person he was with me was just a role he was trying on. And maybe the words he fed me were lines. But that doesn’t mean the relationship was any less real. It felt true to me.
—Elliott Holt,
It was never about what he did to me. It was about what he took from me.
—Sandra Lidell
There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it.
—Alice Munro,
It is stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.
—Anne Carson
I won’t glorify or romanticize heartbreak. For me, it was a kind of death and I was forced to keep living.
—Warsan Shire
And now — now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home.
—Clarice Lispector
