Introduction: The Nature of Love [00:00:00]
I want to begin with some lines about love from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet:
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
…
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you,
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
…
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better of you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the reasonless world where you shall laugh but not all your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possess not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it find you worthy, directs your course.
Love as a Force Beyond Us [00:01:59]
I start here because when we think of our knowledge of love, we tend to linger on our particular experience of it. What it means to us, where it went wrong and what we were blind to.
But Love, with a capital L, in the way Gibran knows it, is outside of us. It's not simply a feeling we have within, inspired by the existence of another. It's a force of its own. It expresses itself through us, and in doing so, teaches us something about itself.
So we do not love, in an ordinary sense, in the way we would normally understand it. It's not a power we generate and give away.
We are participants in love and attuned to it. And no matter how desperate we might be to make it so, it's will is not ours. Ours.
So when love leaves us and breaks our hearts, our job in part is to understand what it wanted us to know about it. To trace the market carved across our soul. To fall to our knees in the face of its power, and then stand again in preparation for its return.
I think that heartbreak leaves us with one big question which is, what did love have to teach us about Love? This is obviously just one of the many ways to think about love, but I think it's a neglected one and an important one for beginning to approach heartbreak.
Post-Heartbreak [00:03:37]
When we remove ourselves, even slightly, and understand love as something beyond our choice or manipulation, then we can give love its proper place in existence.
Heartbreak arrives, already interpreted. It's filtered through a culture shaped by consumerism, productivity, and the objectification of emotional life. So we have lots of advice on how to move on, how to get over your ex, how to become better, and how to learn to love again. That is, self-improvement, revenge, and healing.
But I think these considerations are symptoms of a misalignment with the reality of the experience, not the real problem at hand. To me, these look far too personal and small for an experience as profound as love.
The primary motivations post-heartbreak, to forget and to erase the pain, act against the exact things that we need. We need to remember and be haunted. We need to break. We need to linger in the pain long enough to see what it's showing us. We need to remember the person we loved long enough to know what they have come to symbolise.
Heartbreak isn't meant to lead us merely to more hobbies, a better body or a new relationship. It's meant to lead us to surrender, revelation and authenticity.
Relationship vs. Intimacy [00:05:25]
It's difficult to get our bearings after a breakup. There is a recognisable post-heartbreak self that's either desperate for a reunion or insistent on revenge. One that wants something to be restored or something to be proven.
When relationships end, we do not simply become unrelated to the people we love. Sometimes we remain in a relation to them for a very long time, sometimes forever.
The poet John O’Donohue takes issue with how narrowly we understand this idea of “relationship.” He writes in Anam Cara:
"Relationship" has become an empty centre around which our lonely hunger forages for warmth and belonging. Much of the public language of intimacy is hollow, and its incessant repetition only betrays the complete absence of intimacy. Real intimacy is a sacred experience.
And this matters because relationship and intimacy are not the same thing. And because thinking of love only in terms of relationship, corrupts it and obscures its real nature.
A relationship is a structure. It has roles, agreements, beginnings, and endings. Within it we are in a certain sense, replaceable nodes.
Intimacy is something else entirely. It's not a structure. It's not symmetrical. And it cannot be replicated. It belongs only to what we have truly known and to what has truly known us in return.
In the language of relationship, we are together then apart, related and then unrelated.
But in the lived reality of being human, this is rarely true. We are never simply unrelated. We remain in relation to people through memory, through the body, through a hand that instinctively reaches out to be held.
And when intimacy leaves, not just the relationship, we do not and cannot simply “move on.” We're haunted.
The Loving Gaze [00:07:34]
Heartbreak is the consequence of being seen and then unseen. I think love and heartbreak begin in the eyes. There is a way a person who loves you looks at you. And when they do, you “wonder who are you looking at?” Until you have that moment where you realise, it’s you. They have these adoring disbelieving eyes, that change us.
In their eyes, we see the self we long to be. The self that is rare and unforgettable. In their eyes, we are sacred. They confirm that we matter. And they tell us that we're irreplaceable.
The loving gaze confers a feeling of sufficiency, and I don't know if there's anything else in this world which makes us feel as real and alive.
But then, it goes, and they look at you as if you could be anybody else in this world.
If love is our first encounter with eternity, then why doesn't it last forever?
When that gaze is withdrawn, we lose ourself because we no longer have that mirror to see our reflection. There is a self that felt true, and maybe even a self we have only ever seen in their eyes, and absent them, proof of that reality disappears.
So we're not just attached to another person. We're also attached to the version of a self revealed through their eyes. We miss the way we looked at them just as much as the way we were looked at.
I believe that the absence of this gaze is at the centre of our experience of heartbreak. Because of this loss, we are left in a relationship of longing. There remains a wish to be seen by the other person. To know that we were loved by them.
What We Really Want [00:09:41]
Something interesting happens here within our psychology. Even though they're no longer beside us, they remain the subject of our deepest affection.
In our psyche, they become a witness. Not a lover anymore, but a measuring point. A symbolic figure who holds the power of final recognition of our worth or our transformation. And because of this, I think that often the things we think we want in the wake of heartbreak are mistaken.
We think we want revenge, admiration, regret, validation, or their return. But something deeper and more subtle is going on here. And the ultimate tragedy is not missing a person we love, but holding on to these misinterpretations.
The initial self after heartbreak has all of these desires in this relationship to the other because it inevitably and unavoidably feels insufficient. So it reaches for armour and proof and power.
But this reactive and compensatory response is our wounded psyche. Grasping for self preservation. Beneath these claims is something perhaps more beautiful and more tragic.
When we say that we want our ex to see what they've lost. What we are really saying is, “Look what I’ve found.”
And we only find these things because we go through hell. I mean, we only ever say “look at this,” to someone else when we think there's something valuable to see. And if in our mind it would be undeniable to them, then at some point it must become undeniable to ourselves.
When we want to be the ex they regret, what we really mean is that we want to become the person we wish we had been with them. The person who could have held themselves not collapsed, who could have carried their own myth and meaning and not borrowed theirs. It really is just the person who could have taken this loss. And that is also the person who could have continued to have been loved. The tragedy of young love, love that comes too early, is that our hands are not yet skilled enough to hold something so beautiful and so fragile.
And when we say we want them back, or we want them to realise that they made a mistake. What we really want is for them to know that they weren't wrong to love us. That they knew who we were, even if we strayed for a while.
Ultimately, what we are longing for is the restoration of a truth that we lived inside, but have now been made to doubt. The truth that we were beautiful to someone and we were worth choosing. That our love was real and reciprocated. That what they glimpsed in us was not just a fantasy and they had held something luminous just as we had, and it hadn't been imagined.
But I think there's something sadder and more difficult beneath these requests for redemption. We ourselves want to know that the version of us they loved, the version they saw, is real.
Yes. They were the first ones to validate the claim, so we think we want them to see it. But just as much we would like to know that what they saw was true.
There is a younger self within us that never got to be fully lived. That never got to complete the story. That never saw themselves with the clarity they once saw reflected back at them in the eyes of another person.
And it's this dejected and abandoned younger self that wants to be looked at and told that they weren't mistaken and that it mattered, and that it was real even if it didn't last.
The Self Revealed [00:14:08]
It isn't just the heart that breaks, the self does too. And the experience is so overwhelming and confusing because the post-heartbreak self is not just defensive and reactionary. It's split.
In Mary Oliver's poem Lead, she writes:
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Despite what it feels like, we don't just fall apart and fragment and collapse when our hearts break. Heartbreak has another essential function. It reveals us. It exposes who we really are. It redirects us to what's true.
So what is being revealed here is this dual structure. The intensity of the pain and its demands on the one hand, and the subtler, softer, slower demands of a self now revealed, asking you to sit tight, look a little closer, stay with the hurt a bit longer, and see what your longing is asking of you, see what has been revealed by this destruction.
But the heart does not naturally or easily break open to the rest of the world. When we're told that there are plenty more fish in the sea, our instinctive response is to say, “I don't care about the other fish. I just want that one.” Or when we are told of the many other people in our life who are deserving of that level of attention and devotion, that we have now proven we can give. Our heart tells us that it was only capable of directing this towards them.
The True Self [00:15:57]
So given this relationship between the loving gaze and our self-perception, the questions we are left with are: can we believe in our own radiance without someone else's eyes to see it? Can we learn to recognise ourselves? How can we look at ourselves in that way if nobody else does?
If we believed that we were the person we thought they saw, then we wouldn't stop believing it when those eyes disappear. Our extraordinariness would be ordinary, not a matter of disbelief.
In an interview with Krista Tippett for On Being, John O'Donohue says that:
Your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.
I think rupture reveals this self. This motif is across literatures about a self in us that's unharmed, often abandoned in childhood. A self that emerges when everything else has burned to the ground, that we feel in those grateful moments we have where we see that what we have is enough, despite everything we've lost and everything we've never got.
The Jungian analyst, James Hollis, describes it this way:
There is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.
He goes on to say that:
We are all called to keep this appointment with the inner life, and many of us never do. Fortunately, this insistent invitation comes to us again and again.
Heartbreak is one form of an insistent invitation, if not the only or ultimate form. And in revealing our essential self, it also reveals our life's work, which at its essence is the same thing for all of us. Hollis writes that:
Doing our work requires accepting responsibility, finding the strength to pull our projections back from others, and engaging in a dialogue with the inner world whence our life choices come. That of which I am ignorant owns me, brings repetition and misery to my life and to that of others. It is the task of a lifetime to sustain the process of sorting through these matters.
Self-Recognition [00:18:52]
So, as an initial attempt, self-recognition is not measuring yourself against an external source or value, at least in the social sense, but of knowing yourself, becoming aware of this internal sense of rightness and learning to listen to, and eventually submit to, the will that is is working through you.
So I think we end up, or are supposed to end up, somewhere much more subtle, with a deeper sense of alignment. By which I mean, you’re no longer at war with yourself, you know and have accepted your limits, and that your life is full of things that were made and meant for you.
Of course, we can look at our lives and be impressed and admire some things, but this is a temporary feeling. And instead, I think we're best off when we recognise ourselves in the everyday and when we finally live a life that we no longer want to give up in order to go back, or we have done so much good that it would be cruel to wish it away. Then, heartbreak has done its job.
Making Friends with Heartbreak [00:20:06]
The poet, David Whyte has this idea that heartbreak is something we need to look for and make friends with. He writes in his book Consolations:
Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and a parcel of every path, asking for its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken.
If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.
The ambition then isn't really to mend our hearts as quickly as possible, even though that's what the pain tells us to do. We don't really get to choose when we learn the lessons that heartbreaks supposed to teach us. Revelation, like love, is a surprise, like everything that makes this life magical and mysterious. But what we can do is stay with the feeling until something breaks through.
Conclusion: Becoming a Home for Love [00:22:11]
Heartbreak, love and loss, these are not means to an end. They're initiations. They don't ask to be fixed. They ask to be heard. And hearing them often requires admitting something humiliating and liberating at the same time: that we do not fully know who we are whilst we are becoming.
And what does Love have to teach us?
That it is a force that crowns and dethrones us, a visitor and a teacher. It chooses us so that we may know it and it can know itself. It leaves us because something in us couldn't hold it anymore. Because lessons need time to be metabolised.
Does this mean that love will definitely return? Does this mean that love will eventually stay? I don't know. But it is surely true that, if we listen to love and understand it, we can become a better home for it.