I have had many people leave me, and this isn’t some sad rumination; it’s a fact of life that as you live life people will enter your life and leave a life. Not everyone leaving your life feels the same though. Some time in my 20’s I realized I’m starting to forget my elementary school friends’ names. I thought I would remember it forever.
There was a guy who friended me on Facebook and he messaged me, he was so excited to connect with me. But I couldn’t remember him for the life of me. As unfortunate as that situation was, I can’t make up memories about him and pretend everything is okay and I wasn’t as eager as now to start a new ongoing relationship so that was the end of that.
One of the most painful experiences I’ve had with goodbyes is with my grandmother. We had to say goodbye because she passed away. The other goodbyes that felt so sad was saying goodbye to my dad at the airport because he had to go back to Korea. There are many types of goodbyes and out of them a specific one deserves the focus of today: romantic goodbyes.
Why do romantic goodbyes hurt more than a typical human relationship?
Mixing of Context
Regardless of your sexual orientation, you don’t think about kissing your friend-friend. You also don’t think about taking care of your friend in their elderly days. You don’t report to your friend, and you can’t fire your friend.
Your friend is just that, your friend. Your boss is your boss. Your dad is your dad. We typically don’t like contexts missing so we have laws about nepotism and conflicts of interest.
With romance things get a little bit tricky. We have the context of a sexual partner. But also we have the context of a life partner. They don’t necessarily have to mix, but typically we keep on mixing them up. We also mix the context of spouse, co-parent of children, caretaker, and so on.
Why don’t we like to mix contexts? While mixing contexts gives us the convenience of enjoying multiple aspects from a single relationship, there is more room for conflict as well. What happens when my life partner is also my investment advisor? When the market goes down, I can normally just deal with it with my investment advisor but if I happen to have some grudges against my life partner I start introducing that into the financial discussions.
In reality, a romantic breakup is just one person exiting your life. But in a lived experience, it’s so many breakups at once.
Heaven to Hell
When you have a pleasant experience, what’s the impulsive reaction to that? You want more of that pleasant experience. Both in terms of frequency and intensity.
You hold hands. It feels pretty awesome. You want to keep holding hands, and also you want to kiss. Kissing is pretty amazing too. So now you want to hold hands and kiss. But if only we could stop there! Now we want to touch each other and do all sorts of other things.
We get emotional intimacy. That feels pretty good. We get more vulnerable with each other and we also start depending on them. That feels awesome because now you feel not alone and you’re in something together with someone. And with that you want to keep adding on.
Although we get used to the many aspects of having a relationship, when we objectively look upon it it’s generally an accumulation of events and experiences that we enjoy over and over again. Basically we keep stacking more things we like on top of our relationship because why would we add things we don’t like?
But unfortunately nothing is permanent and even if you have a lifetime of a stable relationship death comes to collect its dues. So when the relationship ends, you go from this giant accumulation of things that made you happy to having NONE OF IT, in one instant. This is like an extreme heaven to hell experience and this is prime brooding ground for anxiety because the next time you get something good in your life going, your unconscious will remember it can end in one instant.
Which makes you keep demanding reassurance from your partner. Which ironically tends to achieve the opposite of that goal. And so on.
Moving On
This writing is from the perspective of the person being left behind (if there is such a thing?). In this case it also benefits us to see the perspective of the person who leaves.
Even when you haven’t had a romantic relationship ever, you have plenty of experience leaving things behind. You leave kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, your childhood home, and so on and so forth. What are you thinking when you move on?
You don’t really have a personal vendetta against the things you leave. Sometimes you do, but the more important point here is that bittersweet feelings or rage, those things are not required of you to move on. Moving on is about YOU, rather than the things you moved on from. YOU graduated. YOU matured. YOU found another job. YOU moved.
Which means the people who left you, it wasn’t really about you; it was about their time, their circumstances, their life changing and needing to move on. Who knows? They might regret it in the future, because we tend to be regretful creatures. Who knows? Your best days may be ahead of you. But understanding WHY people leave and move on from things in general, and understanding that perspective from the other person’s pov is also what helps YOU move on.
HOMO SAPIENS! We are that. Homo Sapiens started about 10,000 years ago and civilizations as we know it started about 5000~2000 B.C.. We used to all be in Africa but throughout time we have spread throughout the earth. That is a crazy long time but get this: earth is 4.5~ billion years old. So from the perspective of the earth, we’re like a fractional part of it.
In that fraction of a fraction… We happen to coincide in the same lifetime. We get to live in 20something together. And ALSO we get to live somewhat close to each other… We get to SEE each other… We get to fall in love with each other.
Many people know this conceptually. But the more you sit with this great miracle of coincidence and coincidence that was not in any way MEANT to be… The more grateful you become by the simple existence of your relationship. Or maybe you won’t be grateful, but I guarantee you you will feel at least differently.