How to overcome disappointment in love and still believe in romance…

It is hard to “Try to sleep with a broken heart” and “Don't stop believin’” in romance at the same time, but as the proverb said "There is no pot that does not one day find a cover”…. 

Love is complicated… sometimes love is only one-sided, sometimes it is just unbalance or it gets sick and dies…. Whatever the case, coping with the emotional pain of having a broken heart is vital for the everyday survival… Moreover, being able to re-generate your heart to be able to love again in the future is even more important. Getting stuck in an old love wound can be very detrimental for your life and happiness and therefore, after some rigorous mourning time, finding the way back to romance should be a mission for everyone who has suffered from a broken heart.

After all, love is, in a way, a mental illness that sometimes can elevate our happiness, but some other times can also immerse us into a deep emotional pain…. Unfortunately, there are no broken-heart doctors, emotional painkillers or rehab facilities when love goes wrong. There aren’t any short-cuts either to forget the one that got away, but there seem to be some popular recipes to overcome love related sadness that I would like to review today:

1. Drink your pain away: Alcohol it is embedded our culture and seem to be prescribed as a remedy for everything. We both celebrate and mourn with alcohol as it is an artificial shot of happiness that ease up internal pain. However, as any short-cut, alcohol can only postpone pain, but it the root of the pain still remain.

There is nothing wrong with some procrastination and with taking things easily, however, alcohol or any other drug, are not a permanent solutions.

Pros: it help you to reach the “I don´t give a F**K anymore” state of mind that helps you to sleep at night.

Cons: It doesn’t cure the root of the pain…

2. “One nail drive out another”:  a proverb says and, most people would agree that the best way to get over one woman is to get under another, however there is a poem that summarizes the risks of this strategy if it is overdone:

To forget a miserable love

the girl devoted herself to other (wo)men

now she doesn't remember that love anymore

because she mixes up all of her miseries

(Translated poem)

Para olvidar un amor desgraciado

la muchacha se dio a otros hombres

y ahora ya no recuerda aquel amor

porque confunde todas sus desgracias

(Original poem)

José Agustín Goytisolo

Pros: brings back love excitement into your life

Cons: it can create a mountain of accumulate pain from multiple love miseries if there is not enough time to heal between attempts and new lovers are used as remedies.

My own personal recipe is to embrace the fact that, at least, you have shown that you have a wonderful ability to love and that, even if it didn’t work this time, you have learn and enjoyed the time that you were in love and no one can take that away from you…. 

Moreover, if you have love once, you can love twice (and three times and more… ) because the ability to love is like riding a bike or swimming, once its adquired, it can’t be forgotten, so give yourself some time and try again.

It is true that no other love will be the same, as Heraclitus said about 500 BCE: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”. 

Sometimes, you might lose hope on finding happiness in love, but you will never find happiness if you don’t truly believe that there is happiness to be found… At the end, we create our own stories and by having a negative mind-set we can only precipitate negative endings.

 Amazing sunset over L.A. taken from the Getty Museum (September 2014)

Update on my personal story: I still don’t know if my office crush likes me or not or if she is even gay…. However, I invited her a few times to hang out but seems to always have other plans…. Therefore, I am interpreting her busy schedule as “I’m not interested” and I have decided to move on. As a result, after my failed attempt to find romance offline and due to my social awkwardness in the real world, I’m coming back to the online world… I might not find the desired love-story that I am looking for and that the offline world seem to be more able to narrate, but I’m sure that I will be able to collect at least few interesting dates this summer…. Brighton girls, get ready because I’m back online!!!