When Hearts Get Heavy
By: Christie Alex Costello
Tags: Dating Advice, Dating, Relationships, Relationships Love Dating, Love

Sometimes in love, things don’t go our way.

The cards aren’t necessarily stacked against us, but we definitely aren’t in any position to bet the house. We are somewhere in the gray area of winning and losing; We haven’t lost per se’, but the story is nothing to write home about. So when you write about love, and your relationship hits a low point, what do you do? This is my latest challenge. The adversity and tribulations of relations.

Personally, I revert back to poetry when love escapes me. Why? It’s short, dark, and ambiguous. Poetry is perfect for when my heart gets heavy or on the opposite side when I experience so much joy that no one would believe me. I don’t want the attention of everyone in my extremes (by everyone I mean my 100 readers). I don’t want sympathy for my piss-poor mentality around relationships right now. I don’t want comments like, “Sending love your way.” No. I enjoyed it when a reader commented back to me, “I take no pleasure in being right on this.”

I read and re-read all the love articles I wrote back when I had so much hope. I can’t help but think to myself, “WOW. Aren’t you so full of wasted words?”

We’ve all been blinded by the dopamine-drugged love brain

For a moment we have that hope and we think to ourselves, “The world may be a little more perfect than we expected.” We put on our rose-colored glasses and write story after story about the love we never thought possible. When we find love, we think to ourselves, lucky me.

I wholeheartedly believe my partner to be an amazing man, but wow, the earth shook me as it left small clues of his deep imperfections. As a woman, this forced me to recognize that I was lying to myself, minimizing my own truths, and overlooking such important data early on. I think I just wanted that Cinderella story so badly because I couldn’t fathom the idea of a broken heart even one more time. But here we are, mending the breakage and like Rupi Kaur says, “What is stronger than the human heart which shatters over and over and still lives.” She is right. I have seen the boldness and the breakage.

Sometimes we have to push the reset button.

Needless to say, relationships evolve and people change. As we uncover new opportunities, we have to re-start our relationships. My partner and I began anew and to say that it has been easy would be a complete lie. In the year of COVID, nothing has been easy for anyone, but what we do find more than ever, 2020 is the year of truth rising to meet us. The hardest part of starting over is recognizing the feeling of imposter syndrome. A lot of my stories on Medium now feel completely invalid. I feel like a fraud. I’ve considered deleting everything, more than once. Sometimes, we will feel like nothing we did before was right. It is an acute reminder that we are allowed to be imperfect, even in our connections to another.

Over coffee the other morning I told my friend, “I wish had never written that stupid book about our love story.” He quickly reminded me, “This was you becoming a writer, celebrate that instead of the words on those pages.” It hurts to think that I was running around the world with rose-colored glasses looking foolish and no one tried to stop me, shake me, and bring me back to reality. To be honest, I’ve even drafted new articles on how the things I write on Medium were wrong sometimes too. I don’t have it all figured out. Right now, writing about love completely sucks to me.

Staying open

I have no idea how to love with a completely open heart anymore. Maybe vulnerability like love can be fluid and we have more ups and downs than I first understood. That early version of love I knew was erratic and blind in hindsight. As the world rips away the hope I was once given, what do I say to readers? Oops, sorry guys. Nope, that won’t do it justice. These platitudes are fleeting and my stories take the stand for a jury of my peers to judge, but what I can say about love with even the heaviest of hearts is: