A friend of mine reminded of this recently – the after-love love-life.
(side note – this is just a musing, it has nothing to do with my personal life at present…but it is about someone close to me).
There’s something about breakups that reduce all of us – no matter our age or social standing, to the girl doing the ugly cry on the edge of the dancefloor, because nobody asked her to dance on prom night. Whether we reveal it or not, we’re all Martha Plimpton and her friend in 200 Cigarettes.
We’re morose, convinced that we’re unloveable and – quite simply – nobody is coming to our party. Some of us even layer on some sarcasm to toughen our way through it. Honestly, the truest laughter I’ve ever had has been in the midst of some heartache, when my best friends will force me into giggles past the tears, and then wreck me into finding the humour in the heartbreak. In my world, you’re allowed to be a complete wreck in the face of a breakup. In fact, I endorse it – there’s healing in there.
Perhaps it’s the barefaced emotion that comes with splitting. And it’s that which makes exes hate each other, fight, or try very hard to pretend that the other one does not exist. It’s all *that* emotion that spurs people into making life changes and choices, that could involve: (a) moving overseas (pretty common, actually); (b) cutting all their hair off (I claim that one); (c) going on an endless series of benders to try and “have some fun” (and end up crying in the bathroom, mostly) or (d) plotting the complete ruin of their previous significant other (we all do this, whether or not we admit to it) or (e) sitting in your room for days on end, listening to awful music and crying into the phone to your patient best friend. I call this the five stages of purging.
By the way – and this is my experience – when a break up is termed “amicable”, it means at least one person is suppressing their barefaced emotion and this will probably end up with one of the above-mentioned 5 experiences becoming ridiculously messy.
But I’ll end that little toot there. There’s an aspect to breaking up that goes way beyond that. For some, it comes with a new relationship, for others, it is about starting a new life somewhere else, and – for many – it comes after a long time of soul-searching and trying to make sense of what the hell actually went down. There’s often a lot of listening to songs like this.
Back to beyond the breakup, and the journey towards healing. A lot of the time, when you’ve forgiven each other, you end up having to forgive yourself for a whole lot of stuff (that sometimes occurs during those five stages of purging, and mostly occurs during the relationship itself).
It’s only then that you can see your ex in public and not want to throw inanimate objects at their forehead. That’s even more true when your ex moves on to a new relationship, and you don’t, or you move on to a new relationship and your ex doesn’t. It’s at that point in your life when you really need to let go. And by letting go, I mean burn the love letters, delete the couple photos on Facebook and close all chapters. Go ahead, you can do it. To do anything but that would be unfair on both of you, and hey – you both deserve happiness (even though you probably didn’t believe that at one point).
In that barefaced emotion of a breakup though, we get angry, we get sad, we get *everything*. But in the peace that comes after the strange emotional limbo we get stuck in whilst listening to Michael Bolton on repeat, is what we have to strive towards.
Someone very dear to me is there now, in a new life, with the post-trauma peace, that I call the after-love love-life. The knives have been flung and the love letters burnt. They’ve made way for new love letters and housewarming gifts. There are new pictures popping up on their Facebook and new life plans being made. They bear zero resemblance to ones we’re used to witnessing, but – heck – they’re beautiful.
I guess that’s my point. The after-love love-life is never without it’s history or process. No relationship starts out fresh like a tabula rasa of unscarred hearts and bright-eyed sparkles. There is always some strange background colour that brings a strange shadow to that person’s experiences of love.
But I will tell you this – the colours of that new painting spell only possibility to me. I see vistas of beautiful things as the painting comes into view.
I can’t wait to see the full picture.