I have written a lot in the past few weeks about love. I believe we are here on this planet to love, to discover the love within ourselves as we explore and cultivate love outside ourselves. I may be biased, but all my research and exploration in the world has returned me again and again to the truth that human beings are social beings, and we all need connection and belonging above all else. Our true essence is love; our spiritual path is one of walking towards the light of unconditional love.
I have also written a lot lately about the role that suffering plays in our life. While the common human experience is one of trying to avoid suffering at all costs, moments of suffering are often one of our greatest teachers. We can turn our pain into medicine and let suffering awaken the heart of compassion inside all of us. Suffering is key on the spiritual path to point out exactly where we are stuck and exactly where we need to let go.
And so, what are we to do about the suffering that lies within the experience of love? It seems every step of the way, love has the potential to ruin our mental and emotional lives. Just recently I had a friend who, after many months of being single, was very excited to go on a date. Only to go to the restaurant where the date was going to be and be completely stood up. No message, no nothing from the other party. And my heart goes to to my friend, there are few things as demoralizing as getting dumped, stood up, or in today’s times, ghosted.
Listen to any number of songs on the radio, and you will inevitably come to the conclusion that the presence of love is pure ecstasy, while a lack of love is nothing but pain. This seems almost fundamental to the human experience. Who hasn’t had an intense crush on someone, only to find their love unrequited? Who hasn’t thought they found their true love, their twin flame, only to have the relationship go up into even bigger flames?
Interestingly enough, we can go pretty quickly from “you’re the only one for me” to “get out of my life.” Like Adele crooning that “sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead,” the transition from “you complete me” to “now you’re just somebody that I used to know” can happen in a very short period of time.
As relationships progress, the stakes get higher, and the pain of ending does too. The deeper we go into intimacy, the more vulnerable we become. Love feels like giving our hearts to somebody who has the ability to crush it if they so desire. If a long-term relationship ends, we don’t just experience heartbreak; we experience grief, both over the loss of the relationship and also over the loss of the other person being an essential part of our lives.
Interestingly, one of my most popular blog posts is the one on “How to love without attachment.” A lot of visitors come from Google after searching that very phrase. It seems like many people try to avoid the inevitable pain that come with loving another human being. Lovers everywhere want to be able to love without having to risk the emotional turbulence of it all.
As I wrote in the post, however, nonattachment is not freedom from emotions; it’s simply freedom from complicating them. Nonattachment is also being so present with our emotions that we let them run their course quickly and efficiently.
So what are we to do about the emotional suffering we experience when our romantic relationships end? How can we shift our perspective beyond the common platitudes like, “Don’t be sad it’s ending. Be happy it happened.”?
The answer has less to do with heartbreak and more to do with relationships, and even more to do about the true nature of reality and how we as human beings can do our best to cope with it.
The Shift
I have some good news and some bad news, and they are both the same news: everything is temporary. Nothing lasts. The only constant is change. Everything moves, nothing stays. However you want to say it, it’s true.
This is good news because it means that whatever pain, challenges, heartbreak, or issues you are encountering in your life will not last forever. This is why we call “emotions” energy-in-motion. They are feelings meant to course through us. The most common metaphor is “waves” that threaten to overcome us but inevitably, we prevail above them without getting drowned.
But the reality of impermanence is bad news too because it also means that the good things in your life won’t last either. Your new car will get a scratch, your new house will need repairing, your favorite sweater will get ruined one day in the wash. Sure, you might have a great job, but at any moment, you could get fired, the company might go under, or your boss might leave and get replaced with someone that makes your life a living nightmare. As the poet Jennifer Welwood put it in her poem on impermanence called The Dakini Speaks, everything that can be lost, will be lost.
Not only is everything in the physical world constantly moving, shifting, coming into and out of existence, but so too is our perception of it. This is why the early phases of a loving relationship are so ecstatic: we have met someone new, someone exciting, someone that has made us feel like nothing else before. But this feeling doesn’t last either, as nothing can stay new forever. Our mind will always automates the routine and repetitious factors of our lives, and our partner is not immune to this effect.
If this all sounds familiar and not very comforting, don’t be surprised. Most everyone knows that “the only constant is change,” and what was once esoteric Buddhist philosophy is now found in common discourse. But like a lot of complex ideas turned into glib advice, it is easy to misconstrue and misunderstand the truth behind it.
Because it’s not that everything is impermanent, it’s that no “thing” ever really exists in the first place.
Conditioned Existence
That’s right, neither you, I, this blog post, these words, your current, past, or future relationships truly exist in a lasting, universal, absolute sense. Sure, in a relative sense, you might have emotional pain or a desire to eat a muffin right now, but these experiences are not nouns of their own existence; they are verbs. We are continuously reading, feeling, breathing, just as the objects of those things are book-ing, emot-ing, and air-ing.
Life is a process, a flow, and our task as human beings is to learn to flow right along with it. Hence the famous quip from Jon Kabat-Zinn, “you can’t beat the waves, but you can learn to surf.” We must acknowledge the impermanent nature of reality learn how to remain equanimous through the gains and losses. Only by not being attached to either duality will we finally find peace. As the Zen Master Suzuki Roshi put it, “When you realize the truth that everything changes and find your composure in it, you find yourself in Nirvana.”
There is a famous story from the Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah, as it has been related by his student turned teacher, Jack Kornfrield, and repeated in Buddhist and meditation communities. It goes something like this,
““You see this goblet?” asks Ajahn Chah, the Thai meditation master. “For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table, and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
“To me, the glass is already broken” is one of the greatest shifts we can make. When experiencing heartbreak, we didn’t lose a relationship, we didn’t even have a relationship to begin with.
After all, what is a relationship? It is not something that you have, it is something that you do. You cannot save your relationship by putting it in a safe or upon a pedestal to look at. You cannot show me your relationship. A relationship is something we use to describe a continuous process of relating. And to an enlightened being, any relationship is already over, even while in it.
In fact, we are already dead. This is not some silly nihilistic statement, but actually one of the most profound and inspiring things to recognize. Impermanence means every moment is precious. Every kiss, as the poet Mark Nepo put it, becomes “soft and unrepeatable.” The knowledge of impermanence demands our utmost presence into the here and now, into this moment before it’s gone, never to return again.
Keep relating
This shift in understanding will transform your intimate relationships too. Because one of the most common pieces of advice I hear from couples’ therapists and coaches is to “never stop dating your partner.” Rather than get married and then you have a marriage, you never stop exploring new things, going to new places, showering each other with gifts and love and affection.
I can’t tell you how many couples I coach that do not tell their partner that they love and appreciate them because “they already know.” I also can’t tell you how many people get divorced and say things like, “you’re not the person I married.” Of course they aren’t the person you married! They aren’t even the same person they were yesterday. This is to be expected and welcomed, as a true loving relationship is one that encourages us to become the absolute best version of ourselves.
In meditation we say, if you are bored, you are not paying attention. As Chogyam Trungpa put it, “There is never a dull moment if you are actually in touch with reality as it is.” We can apply this attitude to our relationships too. If you think you are in a routine stuck with the “same-old” partner, you are not paying attention and noticing how each day is new, never to happen again in the history of the universe. Your partner is changing right before you, learning new things, gaining new experiences and memories, shedding old parts of themselves. You are too. The person who finishes this article will not be the same person that started it.
How incredible is that? Change also means transformation. Change means possibility. Change means the past does not define us and right now we can heal ourselves and live fully in love.
Impermanence means learning to let go, not just of old relationships, but all the expectations and desires we have attached to this other person. It is this letting go that taps us into the true nature of love, where we can let someone be who they are, in all that they are. This idea was summed up beautifully both by Mary Oliver,
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
And Lucille Clifton,
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
So to be honest, I’ve always hated the phrase “live like it was the last day of your life.” For me, it just conjures images of taking out as much credit card debt as possible and having a day of self-indulgent hedonism.
I much prefer, love like it was the last day of your life. Love like there is no tomorrow. Love like your life depends on it, because it does.
One of my absolute favorite lines of inquiry goes, “if you were going to die tomorrow, who would you call, what would you say?” and the follow-up line, “and why haven’t you done that yet?” I can’t tell you how important it is to reach out to a friend and tell them you appreciate them. Or how good it feels to receive a message that says you matter. You are enough. You are lovable. You are loved.
Yes, you, reader. I’m speaking to you too. Your eyes light up the world.
So the best way to get over heartbreak is not to see it as something to “get over” at all. Rather see it as fundamental to the human experience and recognize that we are here for all of it: the laughter and the tears, the joy and the pain, the bearable and the unbearable. We are here to love what is mortal, to love what does not last, and to be the love that floats among these waves in complete awe of the miracle that we are here to experience.
