It Hurts Just The Same

I had a patient a few weeks ago who, for whatever reason, decided to ask me about my past relationships. He was a dialysis patient that was admitted because he needed to get a blood transfusion. Hospital policy makes it so I have to stay in the room during the first fifteen minutes of the transfusion to keep an eye out for any reactions. In that amount of time my patient managed to ask me if I ever had my heart broken. I told him yes. He paused for a bit, looked at me, and said something I may never forget: “Your heart is broken when you can’t eat, can’t sleep, and when you do get sleep, all you dream about is the one person who did the deed.”

I told him about my ex-girlfriend from college. By his definition, it was really the first time I felt my heart was truly broken. I won’t go into detail about that here because I’ve already done it in previous posts. 

He then told me a story about the first time he got his heart broken. It was sometime in the winter of 1976 during his first year of college. He and his high school sweetheart had gone to different colleges that was by separated by a 3-hour drive on the highway. “It was a wonderful time to be in love. We we’re crazy about each other.” He’d make the trip every weekend to take her out on a date.

One Thursday night while they were talking on the phone, she told him she was feeling under the weather, and that he shouldn’t come visit for the weekend. She said she was afraid of giving him whatever she had caught, and didn’t want him to make the long drive just so they could stay in all weekend. He reluctantly agreed.

Being a gentleman, he made the trip anyway, but not before stopping at a nearby diner to get her a chicken dinner. It was snowing. He trudged through the parking lot and made his way to the doorway of her dorm. He knocked three times without an answer. He stood outside her door for knocking for 5 minutes before he walked back to his car. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, he thought to himself, “Maybe she was in the shower, maybe she was asleep and couldn’t hear me knock.”

From his car he was able to see her window, and her light was on. Not three minutes later, the light turned off. He thought to himself, “She must have gotten out of the shower and went to bed, just missed her.” He got out of his car and trudged through the snow once more and arrived at her door. He knocked on the door again, hoping to catch her before she fell asleep. He heard the door unlock and open.

“Can’t you just leave me and Linda the fuck alone?”

He dropped the dinner and looked at the man standing in the doorway without his shirt. All he could manage to say was, “Who the fuck are you?” The man replied it wasn’t any of his business and shut the door.

My patient walked back to his car, and made the three hour drive home in silence. I can only imagine how he felt. He didn’t have a cellphone, there wasn’t Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. There was no way of communicating with anyone on that drive home, it was just him and his thoughts. When he got home his dad asked him where he had been, he told him Linda had been calling for the past 3 hours.

“Tell her I’m out.”
“Something bad happened, huh? I can’t keep using that excuse.”
“Then tell her I’m dead, that’s how I feel anyway.”

I felt for the guy. I didn’t know what to say to him. He told me that 37 years later, he still feels it. The pain internalized so deeply that it felt as though he had scar just around his heart. No one ever signs up to get their heart broken, but it’s a reality you need to accept when getting into a relationship. 

Having been through several relationships, breakups, and breakdowns, people always say, “Protect your heart. Be careful. Don’t get hurt.” The warnings are absolutely warranted, the pain kills. They tell you different methods of dealing with the pain, pushing it aside so you don’t have to live with it anymore. But what they don’t warn you about, is that one day you’ll break someone’s heart.

One day you’ll be the reason for the pain you wouldn’t wish on anyone, even in your angriest moments. But it’s a role that needs to be played. Saying “I love you” again and again is a lot easier than telling someone you can’t love them anymore. You’re afraid of being the bad guy, so you stay. You’re afraid of missing them, so you stay. Neither of those are good enough reasons to continue on with someone who isn’t right for you. You’re going to have to break their heart, and they won’t understand why, no matter how much you try to explain. They won’t understand that a piece of your heart is breaking too, that it hurts just the same.

My patient taught me something about love that day. He told me he loved that girl enough to visit her every weekend. He told me loved her enough to even try to work it out a few weeks after that event. He told me that she loved him enough to come back home for the first few weekends to try to make it work. But he said you shouldn’t have to love someone “enough”. You shouldn’t have to love someone enough to be with them. You shouldn’t have to love someone enough to stay with them after something like that. You shouldn’t have to love someone enough to try to work things out. When it’s real, there is no such thing as enough love. You should just “Love. Completely. 100%.”

I’d need to find someone who’d give me that look that made me feel alive, invincible. That look that only I could appreciate. That look, that person I selfishly wanted to myself. That person that turns you into a hopeless romantic, that ruins you, that makes you not want to settle for anything less. 

“You’ll find that person, or maybe you already have and you just don’t know it. You need to be prepared to get your heart broken though, and you need to be prepared to break some hearts yourself. But no matter what, it hurts just the same.”