Member-only story
Suffering, attachment, and baseball analogies.
I remember being in high school and having my heart broken at least once a week. If it wasn’t the cheerleader who refused my heart-shaped box of chocolate, it was my date to a concert who met the love of her life in the bathroom line and ditched me.
They stung, but I always got over it, as young people are generally resilient to such setbacks. Even the moodiest of teens can shake off a heartbreak with relative ease, given you put something more desirable in their path.
I’ve had my heart broken in every decade of my life. They’ve slowed down a bit since I was a teenager, but they still happen, and it feels like they hurt worse every year. Much like hangovers going from a mild nuisance in your twenties to a crippling affliction in your 40s, heartbreak hits you harder the older you get.
Here We Go Again
The main reason heartbreak gets us so hard at this age is the lack of time in front of us. Typically, getting your heart broken by someone means the relationship or the potential for one is over.
When you’re 22, it might feel like a jolt, but you’ll soon forget as you have more Saturday nights ahead of you than behind you. The moment is painful, but youthful exuberance will cloud your mind, and you’ll focus your attention elsewhere.
At our age, there’s no reason to think we don’t have any time left, but the clock ticks forward unabated. Every relationship feels like it should be the last one, so when it ends, the process resets, and you die inside thinking about reactivating your Bumble account.
We just don’t have as many restarts available to us as the kids do, so the heartbreak seeps in a little deeper as we face the prospect of starting over.
Every day our bodies get slightly less desirable, we don’t get as many flirty glances as we once did, and our social circles have shrunk significantly in the last twenty years. Meeting someone new takes time, and it’s time we’ve convinced ourselves we don’t have.
