Gerald and Sara are sipping on their hazelnut freddocinos. Gerald says I always finish these things way too quickly and it annoys me. I say I’ve already finished mine while I was waiting for you to get yours so same. Sara is facetiming her sister and little nephew. I ask Gerald if his sister has kids, he says she doesn't. Pretty sure she got her tubes tied actually, he adds. He has often likened me to his sister due to our overlapping feminist beliefs and the way we defend them. Would I get my tubes tied if I were sure I was done with the whole asking yourself if you want kids ordeal? I think I would. I can see why you would compare me to your sister, I admit. He laughs, yeah she’s a lot like you, she’s also jaded from previous relationships I guess. In the past, I have used that word to describe myself: jaded. Still, it gives me a little jolt when someone else uses it so easily, when it just rolls off his tongue as if it didn’t weigh a ton on my shoulders. The afternoon sun reflects off the black plastic table we’re sitting at, Sara is making cooing noises at the little kid on her screen, the smell of her Nutella crepe fills my nostrils, the rolling waves of the ocean, just visible through olive trees across the street, color the air blue. Life is good, I think. And I am jaded. Somehow both are true. Ambivalence.
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Wow, I say, yeah I guess you could say that about me. Gerald opens his mouth as if to apologize but I won’t let him: you’re right, I assert, I think I am jaded, and it sucks. I wish I weren’t but I don’t know how not to be. There’s a part of me that believes in love, that’s sure it’s gonna happen again someday, that the magic is still there and there is hope for romance. But there’s also a part of me that doesn’t fully believe it, that’s afraid and thinks it won’t ever happen again. He looks me in the eyes, understanding, his ever patient and gentle gaze makes me feel less upset about my disillusionment. I’ve been there, he says. Strange, I can’t imagine Gerald as jaded. But it just didn’t work out for me, the not believing, he explains. About ten years ago, I was in the same place as you but, long-term, that feeling just didn’t do it for me. I ask what he means: how did you get over the frustration? I don’t know, he replies, I just did. I can’t really explain it. I guess I just found out that it didn’t help, giving up, it didn’t make me any happier.
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A week ago, I straight out asked Gerald if he ever thought that it was never gonna happen for him. “You’re forty now, right?” I said. He laughed and very calmly answered “Yeah I’m forty”. “And do you want to find someone, like a romantic partner, I mean, to spend your life with? Do you think such a person exists?” He looked out over the sea, the specs of sunshine reflecting off it resembling a net of sparkling crystals and said “Of course. There isn’t just one person, though, there are thousands of women who I could spend my life with and I would really like to find one of them to do exactly that.” “But do you never feel like the chance to find someone who you can spend your life with has passed? Like romance just isn’t gonna happen for you?” He doesn’t even think twice. “Absolutely not. I believe it’ll happen for me. I mean it’s been ten years since I last felt that way about someone but still I believe it’ll happen again eventually, maybe in another ten years, maybe tomorrow, maybe when I’m 80, but I fully believe it will happen.”
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I want to be like Gerald - I want to believe that someday I will be sure about someone again. But I don’t know how. Ten years since he was last in love. Will it take me that long, too, to regain my trust in romance, to de-jade? I say I don’t sit at home crying every day but I do wish I could at least believe that someday I could fall in love again. Because the way I feel now, it seems impossible. Don’t you miss that feeling? I ask. Gerald says that he is also not sad for like 30 days and then he has a week where it gets to him and he does sit at home crying because he misses being in love. It’s the thing that I crave the most in the world, he admits, that romantic connection. I understand: being in love is, after all, one of the most exhilarating feelings one can experience. Even though I have trouble admitting it, it’s also something that I simultaneously miss and fear - and whether I want to or not, I constantly think about it. Liz Gilbert once wrote that even when people have been through the worst that is humanly imaginable, they still end up talking about their love life in therapy. So maybe I can forgive myself for being so preoccupied with the topic, it just seems to be in my human nature. And maybe, just like Buddhism teaches, the pain of love is inevitable, but the suffering doesn’t have to be. The question is how to suffer less.
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A few days ago, on our way back from the grocery store, Nick said “After my ex and I broke up, I really felt put off by people for a while, like I just didn’t want to be around them, women especially, I felt like it was too much pressure to be something, perform something. I started getting extremely annoyed at how shallow everyone was, talking about all this superficial stuff, it seemed so meaningless. I just wanted to be alone.” I wish I could have shown him how deeply I felt his pain, told him that heartbreak can get like that – make you want to isolate, make you want to only connect to people who have felt the same anguish, who can see it, hold it, make space for it. It consumes you, envelops you, shapes you. It changes you. But the best way I could phrase this on the spot was “After my last breakup, I felt exactly the same for a while. I was so annoyed with people’s shallow bullshit, I just wanted to run away from everyone. And I still feel different, like something deep inside me has shifted, like hoping for romance is somehow wrong now.” “Yeah”, he said, “I hear you.”
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Grief changes you. And that’s what we do when we’re heartbroken: we grieve all the possibilities, all the good things, all that future that we didn’t get with a person. It’s disappointment in its purest form: we hope for things to go a certain way and then they don’t. And of course, this happens all the time because the world and other people’s lives don’t revolve around us. But if grief inevitably changes us, can it not also change us for the better? Maybe the skill I’m looking for in order to de-jade is learning how to handle disappointments. And maybe contentment is not the absence of such expectations, it’s the deep belief that, when we hope for something and that hope is not met, the ensuing grief cannot destroy us. But if being content means knowing how to tolerate frustration of our expectations, what, then, is such an absence of hope as I am experiencing at the moment? Jaded - just another word for hell, I think. Gerald made it out, now how do I? How do I regain the ability to hope? The resilience to trust in romantic love again? How to teach my gut that heartbreak won’t destroy me? Does it really have to be ten years for me too?
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Even though blanket statements tend to miss the mark, there is one thing I am fairly certain of: getting over heartbreak of any kind always takes longer than you think it will. If you allow yourself to feel the feelings when they come, someday they will stop coming, you just have to be patient and kind to yourself while you feel them. But I also know how hard these feelings are to allow when you never learned how to tolerate them, only know to combat the pain. Getting your heart broken means you had hope for love, connection, acceptance, belonging or whatever it is you seek in another person. And not getting that hope fulfilled can feel like the end of the world because, the more you lack something you didn't consistently get when you needed it, the more you hope to get it from someone else - yet the deeper you hope, the deeper grief strikes you. And, in that pain, we blame ourselves for hoping, for having unmet needs, battle the grief, increase the suffering, instead of holding space for the underlying yearning. That way, when I made myself vulnerable to someone by wanting them to fulfill my need for acceptance and belonging and they couldn't, I felt needy and stupid. But does my neediness, my hope, really make me a stupid and naive person? I don’t think so. It just makes me human.
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Hoping deeply is what we’re used to: even though this can literally kill us, when we are born, we are innately helpless - all we can do is depend on others for nurture, hoping they will take care of us. So, it turns out that we are predisposed to hope for survival even though this can fuck us over so terribly. Our modern-day hyper-individualism would have us believe that depending on others is shameful, a burden and an imposition when it really is all we do for the first years of our lives. Conversely, grief is an innate part of life - as long as we hope, we can be disappointed. But because we are taught to be ashamed of our dependance, our hope, we end up ashamed of our grief as well - being needy has become an insult and we hop from one remedy to the next, always trying never to feel the discomfort of being let down. Moving out of this isolation takes stopping to hope or learning to grieve better. Since not hoping has turned out to frustrate me immensely, I think I’d better get to grieving. Unfortunately, this requires feeling the feelings we were taught to suppress – our innate neediness and vulnerability. But, just like every other feeling, if you let yourself feel it when it arises it will eventually subside on its own - every time. It’s almost like magic.
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A friend once said that hoping is like training a muscle; it has to be done regularly in order to work. In my mind, hope is the metaphorical muscle’s movement towards a need while getting the need met is the muscle’s queue to stop and recover from the strife. So, growing up, when we consistently hope for what we need and actually receive, the pertaining muscle is trained in a sustainable way, grows strong and dependable. Once it has memorized by heart the motion of reaching in a certain direction, finding the motion’s aim and resting, we’re ready to try our strength out in the world - prepared for setbacks and knowing where we can go to get that need met if the outside won't. However, if we keep flexing without reaching an end point, without experiencing the relief that comes with receiving what we lack at that moment, the muscle grows weary and tense. We teach it to repeat an aimless motion that overexerts its ability and eventually causes us chronic pain. In order to overcome this, we have to painstakingly unlearn that faulty motion sequence in favor of acquiring a new, healthy one. And of course, this can take a very long time.
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Some of us may spend a lifetime retraining their food- or money-muscles because their needs weren’t met in that area when they were little, some have to patiently re-learn how to stretch for the closeness, acceptance, peace, belonging or tenderness they lack without exhausting themselves. By changing the way we use a muscle, we are not only strengthening it, we’re also preparing it to know to take a break and recover even when we don’t get what we need - which is inevitably going to happen. When we’ve rested and healed our tired and aching emotional bodies, disappointment does not have to feel like such a threat, the pain of such setbacks simply becomes part of life. We can begin to rest our muscles especially when their grasping couldn’t reach the target instead of doubling the effort to avoid discomfort – we learn to grieve.
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A big part of this process for me has been the realization that grief is not a problem to be solved. But if you grow up in a society that requires you to function all the time and presents emotions as a hindrance to that, then of course taking time to feel what you naturally feel in response to disappointment is not acceptable. Individualism thrives off this belief that, if you are always responsible for your own fate, then you have no time to process the past – which is essentially what retraining your muscles is – and calls this dwelling or slacking instead. I once complained to my roommate (two bottles of wine deep) that the heartbreak I was experiencing was the kind of thing poets used to write gut-wrenchingly painful sonnets about, that people write whole novels on and kill themselves over, and I am just expected to go to work tomorrow. Of course, distraction can sometimes be needed but it cannot be the only coping mechanism our society manages to come up with. When feeling grief is reserved for death and divorce and only acceptable for a certain period of time, it’s no wonder we’re all so tense.
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In my case, all these societal beliefs also feed into my inherent tendency to feel like “too much” for having needs and feelings. So, I used to always try harder for certain things I wanted from people – belonging, acceptance, connection - and never stop to acknowledge and honor that they just couldn’t give me what I was looking for. By avoiding that pain, my pertaining muscles worked themselves raw until, one day, I was so tired that I put all my remaining strength into one last push for what I needed – this time was gonna be the last time, the last person, the last effort, it just had to be. Unsurprisingly, all I did that way was burn myself out trying to get something that wasn’t there. So now, I need to recover and slowly retrain my hope-powered muscles for acceptance, belonging and connection by recognizing when my muscle memory response is to dig deeper for what I want instead of resting and acknowledging my loss - and then consciously making an effort to do the latter. This is an ongoing process, and I am trying to allow myself to fail at it sometimes, too, because years of faulty motions cannot be undone in a day. At those times, I remind myself that hope and grief are two sides of the same coin every day – if we want to learn to hope, we have to learn to grieve.
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I am also becoming more and more aware that the hope I used to routinely extend towards romantic partners has not been met with fulfillment because I have trained my muscles to reach where there is nothing to be gained my entire life. Want acceptance? Better believe that person who cannot accept themselves will provide you with what you need. Belonging? Surely someone who has the same deformed belonging-muscle as you will be able to help you achieve that goal. Need to feel connected? Who better to make you feel that way than another poor soul with connection-cramps. Yet, whenever I meet people who never had to retrain those muscle groups, who had the privilege of receiving sufficient exercise for them when they were growing, I feel weird and misunderstood. That’s why I can’t be with someone, romantically, who doesn’t have a similar experience, whose muscles were obtained all too easily.
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Of course, that means that I have to find someone who is also committed to retraining their muscles (or re-parenting as some people call it) with compassion and patience. And this is also part of what makes me a little desperate sometimes: that I meet so few people who are. The truth is I want someone who can understand how hard it is to actively unlearn so much of your emotional body’s muscle memory, who wants to share in my daily connection-stretches, belonging-exercises and acceptance-relaxation to arrive at a love-routine that benefits us both. But thankfully, although they are not here in the same place with me every day, I already have my biggest fans cheering me on in this enterprise. Lifeling companions who have seen me grow, retrain and regain for years and years and years.
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My friends provide me with invaluable support on my path, and it is through them that I have learned what it feels like to extend my arm and touch love, acceptance, connection and belonging. They show me what love is and teach me how to grow. Especially when my muscles are still continuing to find their healthy form, having people around who love and accept you while you are learning, who remind you that you need rest, even just on the phone, has been a great source of relief for me. And whenever I was reaching into the dark, exerting myself, looking for something that wasn’t there, they forgave me for looking so far when they had been behind me all along. They always provide me with a place to recover; it’s because we all have muscles to retrain in certain areas that we know how important taking breaks is.
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Still, having someone who will share in your daily rituals of hope, who will gently redirect them when your muscle-memory has taken over again, someone who trusts you to do the same, who you can slowly build your rituals towards when you have continued to reach in their direction and consistently received a response, that’s something special my friends cannot fully provide - simply because we do not share enough space and time and have different visions for our lives. But I am realizing more and more that this is what I want: someone I can grow and stretch but also enjoy all of that with. Because regaining my strength doesn’t have to be a dreary, solemn process; growing as long as you live can also mean laughing about your blunders and cherishing in what you’ve built at the same time. I also realize that I overextended my muscles to a point of exhaustion that I thought I couldn’t come back from. But I am coming back from it, slowly but surely, and that makes me very proud. And I couldn’t have done that if I hadn't allowed myself to depend on other people - even just in trusting their word. People like my lifelong companions. And people like Gerald.
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About a month after the hazelnut freddocinos, Gerald and I are sitting at a different table in a different city. He’s visiting and I am ever so happy about it but, incidentally, this time I am crying into my zero percent beer. Trying to be sober has really sobered me up. How do you get over that, being so sure about someone and then it still ends? I demand, like how could you ever be sure about someone else ever again? He tells me about his last relationship, the one that ended ten years ago while tears continue to run down my face. I was sure she was the one for me but there was something inside me that just didn’t wanna settle down and I knew she did, so we broke up after years of being really happy, he relays. I still don’t know why I didn’t want to, a part of me just really needed to be on my own. I went back to my home country, I lived a very different life, had a different job and slowly I got over it but it took me years. Sometimes, when I was cooking and the sun hit the window just right for example, I thought that life was beautiful and suddenly I felt like I was over it, even just for a minute.
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It didn’t always last, you think you’re over it and then something reminds you of her and you start crying again as if it had been yesterday. But I guess you can’t really track it, there’s no bell or cash prize when you’re finally over it, you just wake up one day and think “hmmm I haven’t actually felt bad about this in a while” and then you realize it’s gone, that terrible feeling. It disappears bit by bit and you won’t be able to pinpoint when it left for good. Gerald’s words resonate with me; you have to allow yourself to grieve, to really grieve what you have lost. And someday, it’ll be over. After all, you have not only lost that person, you have also lost all that hope. I have been feeling bad for grieving for such a long time but in reality this is how it has to go – in order to regain, you have to rest first. Every time. Even if it takes ten years - you gotta take as long as you take. Yet, somehow, when you’re in it, you forget that this is how these things go. Always.
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A few years ago, when I was also very heartbroken, I decided to run a half-marathon to feel better. On the first five kilometers I could tell that, fueled by anger at the coward who had dumped me via text message after four months of dating, I had gone too hard on my body – something in my thigh didn’t feel right and continued to get worse the longer I ran. After a while I started gritting my teeth, forced myself through and made it to the end still running. Afterwards, I limped around my waitressing job for a few weeks, to the detriment of everyone involved. I had used my muscles in a way they were not meant to be used, out of raw emotion and hope for catharsis. But the hope that had powered my movement wasn’t met with the release I was seeking but instead with concrete and Gatorade. In the same way, I have habitually directed my hope towards people and ideas who weren’t able to answer it with true acceptance and connection. Finding this truth took tearing a muscle fiber in both cases - one physically, one emotionally. I guess learning how to hope better really does take learning how to fucking rest. Hope is patient, hope is kind.
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When the tears subside, I tell Gerald that I’m writing a Gospel about him. His eyes brighten as he asks what it’s about. It’s about this conversation we had when we got the coffee, do you remember, about what you said then. Oh, yeah, I remember the coffee, but what did I say? he inquires. That you got over the jadedness, that you still believe love is gonna happen for you, that you have no doubt about it. He laughs: did I really say that? Confused, I ask if he doesn’t feel that way anymore. Oh no I do, he ruminates, but it’s funny that I said that because of course sometimes I don’t one hundred percent believe that I’ll find someone, not every day anyways. What? I am shocked. So you don’t believe you’ll fall in love again? Oh no, I do believe I have the ability to, I just also have days where I get frustrated that I so rarely meet anyone who I see that potential with. Oh, yeah that makes sense, I admit, you're only human after all. I guess it’s like that priest in Fleabag said: when you find someone you love, it feels like hope. He looks me straight in the eyes, smiling, and says: that’s the best feeling, isn’t it? Hope? Yeah, I agree, it really is. Can my Gospel be about that? he asks. I smile now. Of course, Gerald. It was gonna be about that anyway. Because love isn't only in romance. So hope isn't, either.