How To Mend A Broken Heart, Mending After A Break Up, Get Over Your Broken Heart

Anyone who dares to really look at themselves can admit to doing stupid things for someone they loved, or at least thought they loved.

In second grade, I gave Jake Thomas five dollars that my mother gave me for the book fair so that he would like me.

In sixth grade, I wore black lipstick to get a boy in my art class.

In ninth grade, I gave up my virginity for a senior who was pretty popular.

Freshman year of college, I broke up with my high school boyfriend for some attractive, cocky, college drop-out.

It doesn’t take an expert to guess that having started the way they did, they all ended pretty badly.

Cue weeks of painful variations on a broken heart… Blubbering, nothing but sweats and t-shirts, and listening to angst-ridden break-up music as a way to soothe my broken heart.

Remember The Goo Goo Dolls? On repeat.

The stupidest thing I ever did, however, came with my first “real” relationship. This wasn’t little kid stuff anymore. We were two adults who were wildly attracted to each other, shared an intense appreciation for indie music and sarcasm, and simply clicked. It lasted two years, and throughout the whole thing, I’d sometimes get this sudden nagging pit in my stomach that maybe there were things going on that I didn’t quite know about. But how many people are comfortable about letting go of a relationship over a stomach ache?

I did a few crazy things, I’ll admit it.

I drove up to his house to pay “surprise visits”.

I asked him roundabout questions in an effort to catch him in a lie.

I even peaked into his phone while he was in the shower.

Every female name in his phone made me sicker and sicker. Who’s Margaret? Who’s Paola? Who the hell is Tiffany?! But then I just pushed it aside. I mean, I have guys in my phonebook. How am I to crucify him? Margaret might be a friend of the family’s. Paola might be his dog groomer. I still don’t know who Tiffany could be, but he probably doesn’t want her anyway.

My shining “Aha!” moment? E-mail snooping.

There it was, laid out for me – dozens of flings and flirtations. At first I rationalized; Oh, people slip up. It’s fine. We’re fine. They’re not super recent. We can get past this. I was heartbroken and trying to avoid it. I didn’t want to break up. I wanted to avoid the inevitable loneliness that comes when you know that person you turned to day in and day out for even the silliest things (I made chicken with rice for dinner, what did you eat?) isn’t going to be that person anymore.

I like to call that the calm before the storm now. Because the next morning found me crying and screaming into my cell phone about what a cheating bastard he was, and how good he had it, and how I was cutting all ties forever. Just rambling on and on to.. his voicemail. That’s right. I couldn’t even wait to get him in person. My rationalizing the night before exploded and there was no containing it besides the eventual phone call to my mother and some more angst-ridden heart broken music.

No Goo Goo Dolls this time though.

MarieBL
20, Student,

When I was in my early twenties, I was unceremoniously dumped by my first love. I truly thought that there was no possible way to mend my broken heart. Little did I know that time truly was the key to healing after heart break. At the time, the pain felt overwhelming, I remember asking friends and family members to tell me how do I mend my broken heart? The advice was always the same; it takes time to mend a broken heart.

So what exactly did I do while passing the time until my bruised, battered and broken heart was healed? I slept. I slept a lot.

You know the girl in the movie who spends a week in bed with the covers pulled up over her head until her mother comes in and pulls back the drapes, letting in the bright light of the sun, giving a cheery pep talk? Yeah, that was me. I can recommend no greater way to pass the time directly after being dumped than to sleep, preferably with the covers over your head.

After this first week had passed and I got over the shock that the heartbreak was not going to be the end of me, I moved on to phase two of my healing process. I like to think of this phase as the “Feeding your heart” phase. It involved copious amounts of ice cream, and not just any ice cream, Baskin Robbins “Jamocha Almond Fudge” to be exact. The ten pounds I had lost the week before where quickly found in multiple pints of that swirly coffee ice cream goodness. For a short time, I believed I had found my new love, and its name was ice cream.

By week number three, I had stopped sleeping all of the time, and had tentatively put down the ice cream spoon and backed slowly away from the freezer. It took a good long time to fully recover from this, my first heartbreak. Even now, some 15 years later, I can remember the pain and hopelessness that I felt at the time. But it is absolutely true what they say, time does heal all wounds. I know that someday I will have to nurse my own daughter through her first broken heart. I will assure her that as lame as it sounds, time will mend broken heart. Then I will pass her the ice cream, pull up her covers and wait with her.

Margot Brosnan
37 years old
Veterinarian Assistant

My first severe breakup – there had been others before it but none quite so painful or resonant – happened under false pretenses, and was executed by a woman I may now – in retrospect – recognize as having been the most unstable and irrational woman I’ve ever known. And yet, I loved her. I was a junior in college at the time, and had at that point been through innumerable breakups of no real consequence, and so had subsequently never been confronted with the issue of truly coping with a break up, of healing a broken heart that – at the time – seemed tattered and beaten beyond recognition and recovery.

So this is what happened: we met early in the fall, sharing (fortuitously) a class on abnormal psychology. It was platonic at first, but after a few study dates we became intimate, and in a couple of weeks we were dating. Things went well for five months: I met her parents and she met mine, we enjoyed the company of each other’s friends, and probably went no longer than five minutes without touching when in each other’s company.

It was halfway through the fourth month that she started acting strangely, spitting our spontaneous and irrational demands (when the power went out in a thunderstorm: “Fix it!”; over dinner on my 20th birthday: “I’m not even joking, you need a vasectomy.”) and speaking in fond reminiscence of ex-boyfriends, regaling me with clearly malicious intent of her best sexual experiences (of which I was featured in none but for those I suggested).
Shortly thereafter, she ended it, and I was left wondering: How do I mend my broken heart? How do I overcome this?

Well, there are techniques: spending a lots of time with friends (particularly those whose company you enjoy and with whom there’s never a pause in conversation). Fill your schedule for a few days or weeks with things you know you’ll enjoy: parties, gallery events, a new movie, a lecture; go see a sporting event or a play or a stand-up comedian. The goal is to keep yourself occupied, keep yourself distracted from the pain, and to make sure that, with a packed schedule, as soon as one thing ends you have something else to look forward to.

Each of these is a remedy for a heart that is broken, I promise. But the inescapable fact is that they won’t numb the pain, and nothing will. Heartbreak must simply be endured, I’m sorry to say it, and it has to be endured patiently, the sufferer knowing – with 100% certainty – that the love of another is waiting for them around the corner.

My brothers were married, so I figured I should get hitched too.

I found the perfect woman — just my type. Ah, those blissful months with Linda! (Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent).

The marriage day was set, tuxedos ordered, as was cake, punch, everything even to those little doilies people set under the cups. The preacher was paid — so was the organist, photographer, and the janitor.

Then, about a week before the blessed event, Linda called to say she had second thoughts, that she felt we were like a pair of old, comfortable shoes together instead of electric moon boots. “No spark left,” you know?

So, I moved from my home state to one about 3,000 miles away. That was step one to mending my broken heart: distance. Lots and lots of distance.

There, in my new state and with a new job, I first could throw myself utterly into discovering the place. I journeyed the back roads to find the World’s Biggest Ball of Mud. I found one of the few hand-operated ferry bridges still left in the world. Yes, men pulled on ropes to haul cars and people across a rushing river. I went to concerts featuring the local taste in music. It was loud, with an annoying polka beat and featured accordions. I ate what the people ate, even if it seemed to largely consist of the entrails of mammals, sometimes hidden in a soup, sometimes not.

Secondly, I dated the local women to heal that hurtful breakup. Lots and lots of dating.

There’s this feeling right after that broken heart experience that if one is rejected by a girlfriend, one must not be worthy of any woman. So I set out to prove that wasn’t so. I dated older than me, a cougar who doused herself with gallons of “White Shoulders.” I dated younger than me, a supermarket checkout girl who was fond of popping her bubble gum at the movies and everywhere else. I dated within my career; I dated outside my career. I dated girls from the bar; I dated girls from church. “There are lots of fish in the sea,” my buddy had said, and he was right.

And in all of the wandering, I discovered that the right woman to heal your heart sometimes can’t be found — sometimes she finds you.

Glen Farquar
Age 47
Teacher