Meeting ‘The One’
Long ago, I had a boyfriend who used to tell me, “My goal is to lie on my deathbed without regrets.” We lived in different countries. He was elusive and mysterious, showing up without warning in front of my college dorm with one of those black and white marbled composition notebooks on his lap, or leaning against a lamppost across the street from a restaurant where I worked. I’m not sure how he managed to make it feel like a coincidence every time he materialized from out of nowhere, but he did–even after taking a train for nine hours from his country to visit me in mine, hundreds of miles away.
This was long before cellphones. We wrote each other obscure, angst-ridden letters about our lives when we weren’t together: reams of letters. Because we spent so much time apart, our love-affair unfolded mostly in our imaginations and on sheets of paper. The time we spent physically together was brief, passionate, and frustrating. After a two or three day visit, he would disappear from my life as inexplicably as he’d appeared.
A Cultural Template for Love
One day, on an impulse, I took the train to visit him. He wasn’t expecting me and he didn’t look happy. We sat in a dingy corner of an East Village restaurant. He acted distant. I could sense he was hiding something, and I remember asking him to tell me the truth. He sheepishly admitted he was seeing someone else. His face looked pained. He avoided my gaze, and said he planned to break up with her.
When recently heartbroken people say “it felt like someone had punched me in the stomach,” they’re not exaggerating. It can physically hurt to hear the truth. But it can also be liberating. The conviction that an effortless, mysterious sexual attraction I felt towards one special person would sustain me, nourish me, and carry me through my life –this belief had been with me for as long as I could remember. At that moment, it seemed one of my biggest life dreams collapsed into dust. The world as I knew it was rearranged in that moment, internally and externally.
So many of the women in my family–my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, my cousins–had all believed in ‘The One.’ It was one of the most powerful cultural templates we’d all had for love, and reinforced in one another in countless ways. It was in my DNA. And now, it was gone.
My future as I knew it had vanished.
Heartbreak and the SCAM
Heartbreak has the potential to jumpstart your life. It can loosen the grip of the Sexual Chemistry Attraction Myth, which I call the SCAM. For me, it began with rigorously questioning my vision of romantic love and attraction for years to come. Romantic illusions–the ones that have us believe something or someone external will make us happy and whole–keep us stuck in a place where we’re waiting to be rescued from the inner work we can only do for ourselves.
The work is this: opening to the power of your own life force, and also to the intricate, mysterious world that’s available to you outside of your narrow and preconceived notions of attraction and of your “romantic type.” Our inner work is a process of embracing all of our vulnerabilities and darkness, rather than clinging to who or what we think we need to feel whole.
Blessed are the Heartbreakers
Heartbreak is an undervalued portal to genuine selfhood. Blessed are the heartbreakers, for they have a difficult and sacred calling to fulfill–releasing themselves from their own idealized image in the eyes of a romantic partner. Heartbreakers are seldom appreciated. It can take great courage to break a heart. And it can be the beginning of the end of the SCAM.
Blessed are the heartbroken, for they have their own sacred calling to embark on: self-love and expansion. They shall inherit their own real life.
My heartbreaker showed me his reality, even though it was vastly different from the one I would have given almost anything to believe in, at the time.
He set me on a path toward genuine freedom.
Originally published on The Good Men Project.
