Perhaps if he had failed me earlier or later on in the relationship, my heartbreak might have taken a different form. All I know is that the ingredients in my own brain soup were bubbling on high boil the day he dumped the cauldron in my lap.
In the days, weeks, and a month (so far) following my "sanday" massacre, it's hard to say what really hurts — would it be the insult that he was the one who broke the bond, or simply the fact that it's all over? Moodwise, a persistent despondency alternated with sharp spikes of anxiety, a tag team that made it all but impossible for me to sleep or eat. Providing running commentary on these feelings was a nonstop flood of intrusive thoughts and images that assaulted me both day and night.
When scenes of him flirting with somebody new arose off-guearded in my mind, I get overcome with rage and fantasies of revenge. Other times, I'd suddenly find myself reliving memories of him in our sweetest, most endearing, most vulnerable moments. The urge to once again invite him to our house or to show him off to my schoolmates as we walk along the corridors of GET and DPT, or just simply flirt with him are even worse than the thought of throwing a glass of water on him, or slapping his face.
When I found myself cataloging his perfections, I tried, in vain, to negate each one with a flaw. But these, too, served only to make him more human and endearing.
Obsessive despair is endlessly inventive — it has a genius for knowing what a sufferer least wants to hear. It's like being trapped in a box with a loudspeaker that amplifies your own voice, continuously broadcasting your shortcomings. Nothing I would do could make me shut up.
On a parallel track to all of this ran the feverish schemings of an addict. Cravings for him could be set off by almost anything — a whiff of his scent, places we usually go to, songs on the radio, a silhouette that vaguely resembled him. I couldn't escape even in sleep — I had recurring dreams that he'd never left, dreams that turned to nightmares at the moment of waking.
After almost a month of this, I tried to replace him with another guy. He was kind, smart, and fairly good looking, but he never smelled like him, nor talked like him. Once when he was flirting with me with sweet, flattering words, saying thank you was all I could do to keep myself from turning my back on him. He wasn't Ernest, and that was something I couldn't forgive.
While Ernest and I were together, I'd desired him intensely for the happiness he brought me. In his absence, happiness now seemed the merest of trifles. What I craved from him now is just a cure for the pain. But even that seems impossible.
It's easy to see why natural selection would favor our ancestors' capacity to feel love's rewards — what they call "the mind or body opium" of romantic triumph. Much harder to understand is why they would also have passed down such a capacity for suffering when love fails.
Just as human intelligence has installed reward mechanisms that flood our brains with pleasure when we are successful in love, so had this equipped us with brain circuits that steer psychological pain when we fail.
Intuitively, this doesn't seem to make any sense. Given how incapacitating heartbreak can be, wouldn't we be better off inheriting bounce-back genes — the kind that could let us shrug off rejection and move on without missing a beat? I have digested the lesson and learned to be more careful next time. But in my every weeping and rejection i endlessly wonder, what possible good can come from such persistent pain?
There's this knee-jerk bias we have that only 'feel-good' states are adaptive, and things that make us feel bad are pathological. But there are actually many unpleasant states — pain, fever, nausea, and diarrhea, for example — that definitely don't feel good but are nevertheless highly adaptive.
Still, as i look back, I know Ernest made me feel that I was intelligent, witty, attractive, and worthy. So despite the pain, my heart is still overflowing with gratitude for the knowing that I am actually worth a man's attention.
