Brendan, Jeff, Kris, Lorenzo, Joey, John, Evan, Matt, Kyle, and Dan. These are the men in my curio cabinet of romance, men who each elicited some sort of feeling strong enough to brand his name on my heart. Some of them were perfectly lovely, some unnecessarily disrespectful, some criminally clueless, and some simply cruel. For now, I’ve locked the door on this cabinet of curiosities and stowed the key. Currently, I’m not seeking any new entries to this unholy order. That’s enough heartbreak for now. No need to add to my collection for the foreseeable future.
The latest heartbreak came just a few months before my thirtieth birthday. I received my “crushing romantic disappointment” merit badge just in time for some major birthday-adjacent reflection. Thinking about my current experience of rejection and the ways I’d previously felt strong feelings of romantic disappointment, I realized that I’d never used the word ‘heartbreak’ correctly before. I couldn’t have; I didn’t know what it meant. Heartbreak isn’t some slight feeling of sadness that can be put aside with a few glasses of champagne and a good laugh. It’s what happens when you give someone a map to your heart and think they understand what they see, only to realize that that information has been harshly misused either by neglect or by design.
This relationship was both the zenith and the nadir of my romantic experience, a thrilling high followed by a crushing low. Looking back at the facts I’ve arranged on my mental shelf, I can see disaster coming from a mile away. Early in our relationship, I’d been concerned that this man, without really knowing me, had put me up on a pedestal, seeing me as an ideal I couldn’t possibly actually live up to. And indeed, I never did live up to his image of me, and rather than breaking this news to me gently, he dumped me over the phone, refusing to see me in person even though we live in the same city. Down from the pedestal I fell, with the sudden removal of his regard leaving me feeling shattered, choked, and wholly, strangely, uncomfortably new. With just one devastating phone call from my beloved, I became a Sad Woman with some entirely new experiences to consider.
The pain from this breakup was so complete that for months I couldn’t possibly consider moving on; I could only look back, and I did so extensively, opening up my romantic curio cabinet and searching through the memories, trying to find a rhyme or reason for it all. I realized that I had simply been collecting bad experiences — reasons to doubt my vivacity, my beauty, my social competence, and my sanity. I walked away from the vast majority of these experiences with nothing but a bruised or broken heart, keen disappointment, and a vague sense of betrayal. Blame for these unpleasant outcomes can be shared around, but in the end, I consider myself to have been a very careless collector.
It’s not that these relationships were all uniformly bad. It’s that, for whatever reason, my collection of memories doesn’t really focus on the good times. As I curate my feelings about a relationship after it ends, I tend to totally discount the things I liked about these men (except, in pretty much every case, their physical characteristics) as a naïve assumption that was based on bad intel. Now that I’ve seen these men at their worst, as one invariably does at the end of a relationship, I consider myself to know the real, hidden truth about them. Because it’s the bad things that inform my opinion about these experiences, good memories can be bound and put out of reach on the highest shelf of my mind, where things like instructions for long division and baseball facts are stored. Ultimately, it’s less painful to focus on the bad than the good.
So, I accept my role as chief curator of this collection of bad experiences, and I take responsibility for the way I’ve stored and displayed these experiences in my mind. I’ve organized this romantic curio using the limited resources available to make the most educational collection of memories. In the end, I don’t think that the good memories would add anything. The good times only highlight the bitterness of loss. I’m not necessarily a pessimistic person in daily life, but when it comes to matters of the heart, I’m just not myself.
And that, I think, is the heart of the matter when it comes to my decision to stop collecting. This is an area of life that doesn’t make sense to me, and yet I’ve always felt social pressure to participate in the funny games we play with each other’s hearts. I’ve followed some bad advice in the past, advice that has told me that I should stifle who I am and put my needs and sense of comfort second. As a result, my collection is the work of a woman who isn’t sure of what she wants, someone who’s willing to put up with a lot of bad treatment and disappointment, and that kind of behavior is absolutely not representative who I am in other parts of my life. Of all the voices that fill out the annals of my romantic experience, my own voice is far from the loudest.
Ultimately, my collection lacked the presence of a strong and fearless woman, the woman who defines me in so many other areas. I haven’t yet learned how to engage in the world of romance in a way that’s authentic to my strong, whole, true self. I haven’t figured out how to escape the bad advice and the lingering, arcane anxiety that my worth is tied to whether and how much a man wants me. My authentic self rejects all of these notions, and yet I haven’t been able to connect the behavioral dots between a woman who thinks traditional Western wedding ceremonies are disgustingly patriarchal and a woman who is afraid to speak up when she feels disrespected by the man she loves. And until I can learn how to get my strongest self to show up when matters of the heart are in play, it doesn’t make sense for me to keep collecting. If I ever decide to unlock my romantic wunderkammer again, it will be with a new sense of purpose and a feeling of complete devotion to myself first. After all, I collected these experiences for a reason, and I can’t think of a better way to honor my past experiences than to learn from them.
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