Hollywood love stories don’t expose you to what heartbreak is like for a limerent person. Especially the bullet-to-the-chest-tear-right-through-your-vital-organs feeling of being dumped by the person you think you love – even if it’s complete self-delusion.
In the movies made for heterosexual women like me, they will show you the female protagonist (cisgendered) crying over a pint of ice-cream surrounded by supportive and sassy best friends. They will show you a plan being devised for the protagonist to put on a sexy outfit, get past a grumpy muscled bouncer in a tight black t-shirt, and saunter into the busiest nightclub in town. They will show you the meet-cute, falling immediately into the arms, and then the bed, of the next love interest – a man (cisgendered) – who will likely be the mythical soul mate. The magical forever person. They will show you that no matter what, love will conquer all obstacles. These will be the lies they try to sell you, while you scoff popcorn and lick your choc-top, lapping up the dream of fairy-tale romance from a comfortable middle-row seat.
The truth is you will be crying over more than a pint of ice-cream. You will be crying for so long and so hard that your eyelids swell as if stung by bees. You will be crying over multiple bottles of the cheapest ‘champagne’ you can buy. You know the one, the five-dollar bargain from the supermarket chain store Bottle-o. The store clerk will know you by name. Each time you get to the counter, bottles clinking in your arms, you will have to make polite small talk while shaping your lips into a passable smile. When the bottles run out the tears will remain thick through the prescription (and not-so-prescription) pills that barely touch the sides of the throbbing grief. The Valium you begged the doctor for won’t suffice, nor the Oxycodone you’ve been holding onto from a past back injury, nor the Xanax you got from that slightly weird club kid you used to know.
You will try anything just to find a second of relief, and it will seem perfectly normal and not unhinged to sniff amyl nitrate in the bath in the middle of the day. For weeks you will call your boss telling them you have a terrible migraine-flu-bug-diarrhea-death-of-a-distant-relative emergency because you can’t just say ‘crippling heartache.’ Instead of going to work, you will sit in lukewarm water, holding a tiny bottle of synthetic relief and sniff-sniff, staring at your naked reflection in the round metal showerhead. You will appear as distorted as you feel. Warped and muddled, head spinning through memories that slip away like bath water down the drain.
There will be friends who rally around you, who kindly ignore the empty bottles and the bizarre new amyl addiction, who even indulge your sudden urge to shout the lyrics to that Marilyn Manson song repeatedly. The one with the chorus that says ‘fuck you because I loved you’ which you can’t listen to anymore, because Marilyn Manson is a piece of shit. All men will become a piece of shit to you, and if you saw one at a nightclub you might punch them in the dick unprovoked. The longer you fester in these savage thoughts the harder it will be for your once supportive friends to stay in your dark orbit. Their well-meaning plans to get you back out there will be met with your violent fantasies, like ‘what if we just castrated them all?’
Any friends who stick around for the long haul will never quite seem to understand what you really need. You won’t need to hear ‘have you thought about getting back on the dating apps?’ because that’s precisely what got you into this mess. What you will need is emergency therapy sessions, because you’re fantasising about stepping in front of the tram that careens around the Lygon Street corner.
When you’re sitting in the counsellor’s waiting room with three different coloured walls and some truly psychotic paintings of fish, you’ll question the legitimacy of the doctors. You’ll regret that you chose the government rebated sessions instead of forking out for a fancy therapist – one with leather couches and statues in the lobby like in The Sopranos. Your counsellor will look ten years younger than you, with a name like Crystal, and you will find it hard to take her seriously from the outset. In the first session you will ugly-cry and snot into tissues, mortified that your mental health problem is ‘my boyfriend dumped me’, when there are people out there facing real issues. Crystal will be calming and validating, telling you to invest in a journal and giving you homework to do. You will immediately head to the shops and buy a $20 Kikki-K notebook feeling hopeful, but you won’t do your homework.
By the third session you will have an empty notebook and decide that therapy is bullshit and go back to unhealthy vices and shit talking to anyone who will listen for free.
Your parents will start bringing you Tupperware containers of frozen bolognese sauce because they don’t know what else they can do. It will be a welcome upgrade from the ‘champagne diet’ or daily pizza from Dominos, family-sized-extra-cheese-for-$5-pick-up deal. You’ll appreciate your parents’ love, but feel ashamed of how, in your therapy sessions with Crystal, you blamed all your negative ‘schemas’ on the divorce they had when you were nine. How your unhealthy thought patterns are all their fault because they couldn’t hold a relationship together and how that’s why you were doomed to repeat the same fate. That’s why he didn’t love you, and they are the reason you will never find love like a normal person with normal parents in a functioning relationship. The bolognese will taste like guilt.
To cheer you up your mum will take you on a trip to the National Gallery of Victoria. A place you’ve loved since you were a toddler, with fingers in the running water trickling down the glass entrance, to see the Chinese Terracotta Warriors. She will say perfectly reasonable things, the soft and wise things that come from a mother who knows exactly what you’re going through, who went through it herself with three young children to feed and a mortgage to deal with – yet didn’t let heartbreak break her. Instead, she got on with it like a real warrior.
‘I know you loved him, we all know, things will get better,’ she will say.
And even though it does help to hear it, you’ll sob in the gallery café, and repay the unconditional maternal kindness by reverting to your petulant teenage self, giving her the silent treatment as you cry through the entire exhibition. Strangers will look at you and you won’t bother to hide your mottled cheeks, or mascara-stained eyes, hoping they think you’re moved by the ancient collection of stoic clay soldiers with top-knots.
Eventually, there will be no more tears left in you. There will be nothing left but the black hole of grief that swirls inside your chest, threatening to swallow you whole. You will try to take baby steps back into the real world, catching up for skinny lattes with girlfriends who have miraculously stayed steadfast through your self-indulgent ‘blue period.’
‘Anyway, what’s been going on with you lately?’
You will try to remember to be a good friend in return, before steering the conversation back to your failed relationship. Your friends will start to wonder why you can’t just get over it.
‘You get the length of the relationship to mourn and then the sympathy card runs out,’ they will assert.
The sympathy card will run out.
Sitting in a crowded café the urge to scream at the top of your lungs will smack you in the face, because somewhere amongst the chatter you will hear a love song playing in the background. And unlike movies with their cheap attempts to show you what heartbreak is like, love songs will permeate your bones. Suddenly every love song that’s ever been written will be about you. Your relationship, your love, your heartbreak. You will make dedicated playlists on Spotify to soundtrack your misery. You will suddenly get jazz. Billie Holliday’s ode to wallowing in solitude will be at the top of every playlist. Lying in bed alone in the dark, headphones on, clicking replay on the same song for the 50th time in a row, 100th day in a row, you will find solidarity in lyrics.
In the stillness you will find a rage that begins to take the place of sadness. An anger born out of the hopelessness you feel, because you couldn’t just put on a new dress and move onto, and then under the next body. You couldn’t leap into the unknown of a new love like you were meant to, like they said would happen. Instead you are stuck clinging to the past. You’re more pathetic than a Hollywood cliché, and you wouldn’t buy tickets to this film (no one would). But they already sold you on love. You bought a ticket into soul mates, forever, and the idea that love will conquer all. What will you do now, knowing that love is not enough? Can you still get a refund if you ate the popcorn?
Tess Fletcher is a creative non-fiction writer, blogger and yearning poet. In the non-fiction realm, her work explores themes of identity, feminism, and feelings of millennial melancholy. Her poetry, written under the alter ego @notverypoetic_, is currently preoccupied with love, loss, and limerence. She can be found at Not Very Poetic.