On heartbreak and polyamory

A workaholic of the heart reports

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about heartbreak, mostly because I’ve been conducting field research. My question on the subject is: how much is too much?

Given that heartbreak is broadly defined as ‘crushing grief, anguish, or distress,’ aiming to be entirely free of it feels like a fair starting point. It’s easy to see that caring about things is the first obstacle to an unheartbroken life. Remove love from the equation, and you’ll be able to part from people and places you value, and simply… not care very much. What a sad little life! Suddenly a small amount of crushing grief seem weirdly appealing, no?

I once met a person who categorically stated that he had never loved anyone. He couldn’t recall being hurt by the end of a relationship, either. I almost believed him, but not quite. The worst heartbreaks of our lives mostly happen in childhood, before we have the words to describe them. In early years, love, abuse, and survival are often messily entwined. Psychotherapy teaches us that the first heartbreak is the template for future reactions – everything afterwards is an exercise in repeating, avoiding, or recovering from that betrayal. The man who never loved anyone sounded heartbroken to me, perhaps more so than anyone else I know.

After considering it, however, I began to realise that love isn’t always to blame for heartbreak. Attachment is the real culprit. When I’ve lost my bearings over people that I’ve loved, it has seemed only fair: the pain is proportionate to the role they’ve played in my life. What doesn’t seem right is that even a naturally transient attachment can fuck me up too. And it’s so much easier to become attached to someone than it is to love them. Unless, and I think maybe this is the case, attachment is just love in degrees.

Either way, when things end with a person I’m attached to, I’ve come to know I’ll end up visiting a kind of heartbreak timezone. While I’m in the timezone, I will crave the oblivion of sleep, though insomnia tends to win out. When I do sleep, I’ll wake up to remember why I’m sad. Mornings will be difficult. I will cry often, all over the place. 

Then there will be reflexive phone-checking (even when they’re blocked), re-reading of old messages, and intrusive memories of happier moments shared.

I will google increasingly existential questions, and read everything the internet has to say about loss, grief, and attachment. I’ll audit my psychological triggers, and (but of course) theirs for good measure. I will revise what I know about dysregulation, the window of tolerance, and self-soothing. I’ll practise the latter by going for walks, immersing myself in bodies of water, forcing myself to complete pieces of work.

If possible, I will spend time with animals, who don’t really mind big emotions in the people who fuss them. I’ll talk at length to friends who get it, and try to internalise their thoughtful perspectives. At some point, I will inevitably explain my generally shellshocked vibe to someone who did not ask.

If the heartbreak timezone sounds strange to you, may I just say: congrats, I guess?! Given that the breakup credo du jour is ‘Block. Delete. Move On’, I do at times judge myself for my more obsessive reactions. But things like going over old messages is a means to understanding, part of the process. Such impulses feel human to me. Haven’t people re-read messages from past lovers since the invention of the written word? And in time, you do find other things to think about. Experience teaches me that, like jetlag, the acute phase of loss usually ruins just a handful of days, all told.

Even so.

Heartbreak really sucks. Various studies quoted here affirm the negative effect it has on our wellbeing and longevity. For people who experienced abusive behaviour early in life, and have a disorganised attachment style, complex PTSD, or mood disorders like BPD, frightening levels of inner and outer turmoil can be unleashed.

Physiologically, things can go off the rails. Though my longest relationship ended amicably, I couldn’t eat properly for several days, or sleep properly for several months. I reacted to it more strongly than I reacted to a death in my family. In a way, that makes sense to me: it felt more total. The past hurt. So did the present, and the future too. I needed to grieve someone who wasn’t even dead. Breakups are weird like that: the person is out there, walking around, doing their thing – but choosing to be apart from you. The invisible cord that once connected you is gone.

And that was an amicable case. When a split is one-sided, the removal of agency can make the acute phase very bad. Last autumn I was abruptly ghosted after a whirlwind romance, and the abject hope that I woke up with each day (maybe this time he had sent a message while I slept?) kept me company far longer than the relationship itself. Even now, thinking about that ongoing silence prompts a non-trivial diminishment of my faith in other people.

In the case of my longterm relationship, when my partner and I split, my friends and family — and his family, too — knew that things would be difficult for us for a while. The kindness and understanding that everyone showed me countered some very dark moments. It was an amazing revelation of community. The essentially unofficial nature of a situationship makes breaking up very different. No-one I know has met either of the people I have been excited-about-then-hurt-by in these past six months. It makes getting over them feel claustrophobic and shameful — I’m a shell of myself over some random guy. How illogical! Evaluating what has transpired between us (the good and the bad) is disorientating too, especially where lies and gaslighting have occurred. There are no witnesses to assess the past with. A wreck just happened, and I only am escaped to tell thee.¹ How lonely!

Naturally, not all fleeting connections end with such high emotion. In more than a year and half of non-monogamy, I’ve experienced dating people for an enjoyable couple of months before a mutual slow fade, wrapped up with a gentle, and gently-received, ‘it’s been fun’. These feel like a sunset: predictable and pleasant. There may be mild twinges over what might have been, but goodwill remains. Self-doubt doesn’t enter the chat. Both parties sense that romantic incompatibility is the culprit, and a relaxed acquaintanceship begins to exist instead. 

What’s impossible to predict when you meet someone new is whether your dynamic is going to lead to a life together, or some fun memories and the slow fade sunset, or some fun memories followed by being trapped on an emotional rollercoaster that leads to one or both of you feeling violently unwell.

When I’m spiralling post-breakup, my penchant for research serves as a kind of halfway-house distraction. But most of the advice out there is for monogamous people. ‘Take a break from love and heal thyself before being vulnerable again’ is the gist of it. This makes sense, given the risks outlined above. But if you are in even lightly committed poly relationships, this advice is confusing. One breakup is bad enough; conducting two or three simultaneously would be emotional self-harm, and hurtful to others. Think about friendship breakups (a slow burn agony all of their own). Would the loss of one friend be remedied by cutting ties with everyone else you like spending time with?

Of course, monogamous agony aunts aren’t telling poly people to go on mad breakup binges. So I appreciate advice that is polyamorous by default. It helps with practical things like how to talk to my existing partners about a break-up in a healthy way. I get anxious about stuff like that: what if they don’t have the energy for a partner who suddenly becomes withdrawn, or upset? What if my overflow of feelings for another person triggers insecurities for them, prompting another split? The advice is to be clear with your partner(s) about where you’re at, check in with what level of support they feel able to give, respect each other’s boundaries, and enjoy your specific relationship. It turned out to be easy advice to follow, because my latest breakup news has been met with nothing but care, solidarity, and affection.

The new heartbreak happened when a former lover used my vulnerabilities to attack me. I’d hurt him, so he hurt me. Polyamory triggered him. This led me to wonder if I was causing too much pain, for myself and my partners. Not to mention taxing the friends who heard all about it. Yet solely pursuing monogamy would not inoculate me or people I date from disappointing each other. Equally, if I was in a committed monogamous relationship for a very long time – let’s say, for argument’s sake, ten years – and then had a major breakup… well, would that be easy on everyone around me? Experience is telling me no. 

And if I enter an open-ended period of solitude, I’d be surprised if that alters my experience of life as tracts of boredom punctuated by violent delights with violent ends.² One of my all-time hall-of-fame heartbreaks was prompted by political despair; others have been familial. No future is free of pain or loss, for me or anyone else. I’ve decided that the best course to commit to is the one that feels right on the inside, rather than the one that an onlooker deems preferable.

Though I don’t love one-size-fits-all ‘take a break from relationships’ advice, I have managed to find a way to apply it in a polyamorous context: just swap the word relationships with the word volatility. When you are recovering from emotional upheaval, being boundaried with anything volatile is definitely helpful. For me, volatility would look like prematurely ending things with an existing partner, and entertaining unstable romantic connections. It could also mean damaging friendships by leaning on them too much. Avoiding volatility helps me prevent an escalation of needless chaos. 

As for how much heartbreak is too much, I don’t actually have an answer. I’m sure there is one, given that it can cause sudden form of heart failure. The metaphor of scar tissue may feel reassuring, if downbeat: if you wound the skin enough, it thickens until it loses sensation. But the most affected part of the body, the part that lights up like a firework when loss is experienced, is the brain. Given this fact, the inner alchemy that transforms pain into something else feels curative. Comfort may be preferable to pain, but if pain must occur, at least some wisdom or art may follow. Though the risk here is that the alchemy fails — then, bitterness is the residue, and self-alienation the reward. 

I know nothing about heart ventricles and have little sense of how to heal a hurting mind, for all my layperson’s attempts to learn more about psychology. On a narrative level, I don’t really buy the idea of closure: life goes on, usually in a chaotic fashion. This is may be why I find separations so unnatural, and essays so hard to conclude.

For now I’m choosing peace by doing things I like where possible: walking, swimming, reading, sleeping, writing. Smiling at strangers, and checking in with those closer to home. Focusing on work, and friends, and trusted lovers who make me feel glad to know them. Though heartbreak really does suck, as the days pass it eventually becomes a celebration of everyone who keeps showing up. 

1. Being a nerd, I quote Herman Melville, by way of Job 1:15. ‘And I only am escaped to tell thee’ is from the closing chapter of Moby-Dick. Narrator Ishmael is the sole survivor of the shipwreck caused by Captain Ahab’s mad quest for ‘vengeance on a dumb brute’.

2. This one’s for the Romeo and Juliet fans (me).