Lessons in Love

by Diya Aneja

In all honesty, I had a terrible summer. 

This was the summer of my first-ever heartbreak. It was heavy. It was painful. And most of all, it was my decision. 

Because of that, I felt like the entire world was expecting me to easily move past it—to pack my memories into boxes and leave them to dust in the attic. Quite unfortunately, however, I’ve never really been that great at change. I just found it so hard to justify moving on from things, especially when I honestly didn’t even really want to. 

I know that sounds hypocritical. I was the one who ended things, I was the catalyst of this turmoil: I should have no right to hold on so tightly to something I chose to leave. But after experiencing what it was like to be in love, I didn’t really know how to return back to a life without it. It felt like as soon as I released my final grasp on that relationship, it would cease to have ever been real. As if all those months, those memories, those emotions, would now only exist within my mind—like a dream that never actually happened. 

However, I have since grown to realize that moving forward does not necessarily mean you have to forget; and it shouldn’t. 

There is a common narrative that after a breakup, you should send every memory to the grave. Burn all the pictures and smash all the gifts, as if erasing every trace of this person will alleviate the sting. While this may work momentarily, the band-aid will need to be replaced within a matter of days. You can’t just ignore the pain, you need to mend it. 

And that certainly will not come from pretending as if that love never existed. Whatever feelings you had, love or not, were real. They were vulnerable and deep, and they may have held such a great weight that you could physically feel the happiness within your chest. That’s exactly why it hurts so bad, and you are well within your bounds to acknowledge that. To lay within that loss. 

The change, or rather the letting go, comes with releasing the resentment and frustration that's been building up inside of you from the heartbreak. I spent so much time forcing myself to be angry, convinced that if I focused on all the bad surrounding the circumstances of the breakup, all the good parts of the relationship would cease to have ever felt that great. How incredibly contradictory—you will never move forward by fueling anger into the past. You’re just going to spin in circles, spiraling over something that is completely out of your control. Soak in what happened, soak in how it made you feel, and most importantly, take that along with you as you move on. 

Instead of dwelling on a false sense of hatred, I started pouring all of that time and energy into the life around me. I called my dad more than I ever had before, I got coffee with old friends, and I slowly let myself come to peace with all the changes in my life. I found out how much genuine love exists in so many aspects beyond a romantic relationship. This was something I obviously already knew, but I was now making the conscious choice to bask in it. Truthfully, I still think about my ex a lot, more than I ever wanted to admit to myself. It’s so incredibly inevitable, and that’s okay. There are times when he’s the person I want to call, he’s the person I want to drink coffee with. Hours spent just wishing for one last meaningless conversation. It’s human. But as the seasons change and time continues to pass, those moments become more infrequent, they become less painful. Some days I’ll be in a lecture and grab a purple highlighter for my notes, and I’ll think about how it’s his favorite color. But as the scars fade, I no longer let them fill me with grief or anger. I no longer want to look back at the relationship in vain. Rather, there is an appreciation that I ever got to love someone so deeply. And that it will come again. I know that because I possessed that emotion, I possessed that power. 

I now like to think that love never really leaves you. 

It is always going to linger, in the doorways or the shadows, and sometimes even right at the center of your heart. By this, I don’t mean romantic love for an individual. What you’re left with instead, is the capacity to hold such a feeling, and the ability to express it. My relationship made me grow so much as a person. I felt emotions I never had before, which made me realize what I valued in both the care I receive, as well as what I can give to others. I’ve found that I can be so grateful, so lucky, to have had the experiences and relationship with the person I was with, without feeling like I necessarily need to keep clutching onto it so firmly. The love I hold now is not the same as the love I had. It’s different, and I’m different because of it. And isn’t that wonderful? 

No love, however brief or however deep, is ever wasted.

As kids, we would lay in bed sleeplessly as we felt the pains from the growing of our bones. Now, that familiar body ache may return in the form of old conversations, recounted over and over again in your head as you try to pinpoint exactly where everything went wrong. With all growth, there is always going to be adjustment and pain. Embrace it as it comes, all while knowing that at some point, you will have to get up again.

Edited by Julia Maynard & Kate Castello