Falling out of love

The extraction of cupid’s arrow is a costly and painful procedure, often requiring assistance from a soul surgeon, be it a best friend, a therapist, a priest, a stiff drink, a credit card, or all of the above. Falling out of love is always harder than falling in love.

a cute pendant i found on etsy!

Executioner's guilt

In a relationship that feels like it will expire soon, there’s an urge to end things prematurely. Instead of letting dysfunctional habits deteriorate the relationship, we sometimes want to euthanize it before it dies from slow, painful natural causes. We want to break up on good terms before things go bad.

There’s this story about Abraham, who takes his son, Isaac, up a mountain to sacrifice him by God’s order. Whenever I think of this story, I wonder who endured more pain—Isaac had to die but Abraham had to continue living after killing the one he loved the most.

Two people who know that their relationship is coming to an end pass the knife back and forth, volunteering to be the other’s Isaac because no one wants to continue living with executioner’s guilt. Heartbreak can feel worse than death.

(my advice on this matter found here.)

Heartbreak

The bits of happiness left in a sparkling moment feel like danger because what is very sweet must also be very close to rotting.

The intimacy of learning their tone and gestures…and the grief of unlearning it all. It’s like opening the wardrobe and flipping through the clothes in your childhood bedroom as an adult: everything in its place, yet nothing fits.

One day you find yourself the sole archivist of a private language no longer in use. You carry the encyclopaedia of an inner world that’s been sealed in a fantasy novel, sealed shut by two hard covers.

You are disoriented. You feel lost because you feel estranged from what you got used to. Frank Sinatra:

Over and over I keep going over the world we knew
Once when you walked beside me
That inconceivable, that unbelievable world we knew
When we two were in love

Heartbreak is the process of unlearning something that once felt like home.

Aftermath

The question we ask when the fever has broken: what’s the difference between loving someone and being in love with them?