Dear Anna,
My son, now age 22, had been dating his childhood sweetheart for over 5 years. These two kids were inseparable and we’d always joke that they’d one day marry, just like my parents who have been married over 60 years. I only recently found out that when my son and his girlfriend first met six years ago she had a girlfriend, but that being bisexual was OK with him. “What? How did I not know this?” was my first thought. Fast forward to a month ago when she broke it off with my son to be with a young woman.
My question is: How can he learn to accept this? He’s hurting so badly that I hurt for him. He still lives with my husband and I, so we see him every day. He was always with her and never kept his guy friends, so now he says he feels like he has no one. Please help me to help him get through this. — Concerned Mom
Dear CM,
First heartbreaks are the hardest because we have nothing to measure them against. All we see and feel is the searing, insurmountable pain, not the overcoming of it. (That comes with time and patience and forgiveness and the wisdom learned by making many, many, many mistakes first.) When you’re young everything feels like the best or the worst thing that’s ever happened — because it probably is the best or worst thing that’s happened! In their relatively inexperienced lives.
When the first boy I loved left me for someone else, it took me three years to get over him. That’s approximately three times as long as the actual relationship was! But it makes sense in a way. Take a physical wound, let’s say a knife to the heart, to be grim and literal. The wounding itself is over in an instant but it takes months, if not years to heal fully from such an injury. Emotional pain is not so different. Our bodies are still bodies. When you wake from a nightmare, sweaty and heart-racing, your body doesn’t know the difference between dreaming and reality. It experiences the fear just as much as if you were actually being chased by a murderer.
This is why my biggest advice for your son (and by extension, for you) is to feel everything. Don’t push the pain down or run from it or pretend to be fine when you’re not. Let yourself be sad and pissed off and mopey and hopeless and everything else. This is not going to be easy. There will be times (and there probably have been already) where it will hurt so much that you’ll feel like you can’t breathe, that to carry on one second further the way things are will result in certain death. And when that arises, I want you to sit there and feel like you’re going to die and breathe through it and realize you’re not actually dying. I want you also to resist the urge to do something to make the pain go away, whether that’s numbing it with TV or social media or alcohol or simply forcing the pain from your consciousness. Such numbing is temporary anyway, as the feelings will surface eventually some other way, because feelings exist to be felt.
Doing this serves two functions. The first is that it shows us that the grief feelings don’t last forever. Usually the worst of it only lasts a few minutes, before being replaced by something else. He can even set a timer if he wants. The second reason to feel everything fully is because it helps us move on. The sooner we let the agony move through and out of us, the sooner we’re able to experience calmer, happier emotions.
(I realize there are times when it’s impossible to let the grief have its way with us. When my father died, I couldn’t just sob uncontrollably at work or while in line at Home Depot or whenever. In those cases, recognize the surge of grief, and tell yourself you’ll tend to it later. Then actually do it.)
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s the surest way to heal and move on. Acceptance comes in time, though sometimes far, far slower than we want it to. That’s okay. He might not be ready. Yet. He’ll get there.
My advice to you, CM, is to let him (and help him, if necessary) feel his grief — even if it hurts you to see him hurting, which of course it does. No one wants to see their loved ones hurting! One of the more harmful things my father (who was generally loving and kind) ever did was to witness me crying over my first heartache and to tell me to “get over it.” This does not help anything, it only makes the grieving person feel worse for experiencing their perfectly human feelings in the face of significant loss.
Also, and I know you didn’t mean anything by this, but I would resist the urge to compare any of his future relationships to your parents’ marriage, as it might create pressure and unnecessary expectations on him. Let his relationships be what they are — unique and entirely his own.
It might also help him to know that it’s extremely rare for high school sweethearts to get married (2%), and even when they do get married, divorce statistics do not favor the young (18-25), who have the highest divorce rates. Lack of exploration is the most common reason cited for such young relationships ending.
While your son likely can’t see the upsides of his relationship ending right now, I’m here to tell him that there are SO MANY. The biggest one is that he got to experience a wonderful, loving relationship for over five years! That is huge and rare and he should celebrate that. Just because something ends does not diminish or take away or cancel out the love that was felt. This is also something that I have learned from all of the great heartaches of my life:
Grief is love. Not an aberration of it. Not its opposite. Grief is the excruciating, molten center of love. The core of who we are and what we share. That he experienced a love like this is proof of its existence and momentousness.
Remember that. Let love wreck and reckon you, like the wild bird that it is, and carry on.
