The Window to be Loved is Closing

I started writing this because I started chuckling about being dumped at 49 years old. It seems like such a young person’s problem, of getting heartbroken and broken up with. I don’t know if it’s because I was just supposed to be married, or if it has anything to do with being too old for puppy love, but either way, I chuckled at being almost 50 and getting dumped. There aren’t many books and movies where some old guy gets dumped, mopes around, listens to sad music, and wonders if he is okay. Heartbreak is a young man’s game.

While I have done a few dumpings, people have dumped me before. Many of my relationships have ended because of my own mistakes. I have checked out, been ungrateful, angry, negative, closed off, lied, depressed, been outgrown, and probably a lot of other issues I can’t remember or haven’t been told. I have never cheated, but one bad behavior out of a thousand doesn’t make one a saint. This last time, though, I was trying hard to be a good partner, so I didn’t see it coming at all. Just confident that things were going well and that I was doing a great job. Putting a lot of effort into being kind, grateful, invested, positive, optimistic, and intimate so that the relationship could thrive. I was putting in the work because I felt lucky and in love.

First off, I am not angry. I think it takes a lot of courage to tell someone you don’t love them. I have known people who stayed in relationships they didn’t want to be in long after they realized it. I never want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me. That hurts, and while it is my worst nightmare not to be wanted, it was necessary. I can’t be someone I am not, and that is what hurts. I loved her, and I wasn’t what she could love. I wish her all the happiness and that she finds what she is looking for.

I hate the feeling of heartbreak. It has a unique feeling that is different than most other forms of grief. I wonder if I will ever feel loved again. I’m not writing this for self-pity; I am just stating the feelings and the process of grief that I go through when I feel this kind of heartbreak. I see the window of being loved closing as I near 50. This last time I was single was terrible, and the dating world is horrible. I was feeling like giving up on dating forever before meeting this last person, so I felt very lucky. I’m not sure my luck can keep going, though.

Then there is the meaning of anything after a breakup. What is the point of anything? Why am I still in Rhode Island? I start to second-guess everything in my life. There is that existential feeling when I am heartbroken and wonder what will happen, and it fills me with angst. I wonder if I am just unlovable, unable to be in a loving romantic relationship.

I start to become nostalgic for past relationships and think about them in an almost euphoric recall kind of way, like one does when they miss drugs. I loved them all—even the crazy one. I feel deeply, and because of that, I feel heartbroken like a crushing avalanche of rocks burying me in the sea. I find it hard to believe that I can be loved again, and that feeling is getting worse as I get older.

It was also bittersweet that on Tuesday, my 7th wedding anniversary fell. While she and I have been separated for three and a half years and are still very good friends, it adds to the feeling of relationship failures. I did everything wrong, especially at the end, and I’m lucky the friendship survived.

Don’t mind my emo writing, I have been listening to sad music for a week now, and Elliott Smith has been heavy in the rotation. When other bad things happen in my life, I tend to try to get out of them. I go out with friends more and try to be helpful to other people, but when it comes to heartbreak, I want to isolate and hide. I feel unworthy, and I embrace the ache. I welcome the sadness and put on sad music to wallow even more. I sink into the mire. If you have been a long-time reader, you will know this used to be a more common post than the funny shit or the tarot stuff.

One of my old friends told me that I get more romantic after a breakup than I do when I’m courting someone, like some sick, sad pervert. I feel like this time, to quote the wise Roger Murtaugh, I’m getting too old for this shit. I am too old to feel this depth of sadness anymore, and I don’t know if I want to go through it again. While alone in my bed and the lights out and I’m just staring into the darkness, I wonder if I should give up on dating altogether, if I wasn’t built for it. I keep fooling myself because of books, movies, and music, where we want that one, the romantic one, we want to find our partner, our other half, the best friend forever person. Some of the sad songs I am listening to glorify this kind of madness. I know I’d be too scared of being forever alone.

After the first few times I got my heart broken, those many years (decades) ago, I felt the same way: I will never be loved again, I can’t be loved, and I am incapable of loving someone. I think this one stung more because I didn’t see it coming. I have always had a healthy amount of confidence in dating, but I could sense when everything wasn’t okay. This time, I was blindsided. If you were to ask me, even a few minutes before she broke up with me, if things were good, I would have said things have never been better, and meant it. I went from feeling very loved to feeling not loved at all in seconds.

Learning lessons after making lots of mistakes is easy; the process is looking at my part, making amends, and not bringing that shit into future relationships. Seeing my errors is simple. When I haven’t done a whole lot of damage, and when I look on my side of the street and don’t see much mess, in fact, seeing a lot of positive change and growth, learning what I can improve becomes difficult. points out that the very essence of who I am as a person isn’t lovable. It wasn’t me, it was me. It wasn’t the dark side of me that was selfish and self-centered; it was the whole of me that wasn’t lovable.

Again, this isn’t for self-pity. I don’t want a list of things that make me lovable, because let’s be honest, that would make me very uncomfortable. This is just how my brain is talking to me as I am in pain. The point of life isn’t to do away with negative feelings and thoughts, because that is impossible; it’s how we act on or don’t act on those thoughts and feelings. Too often, feelings will lead us astray, and thoughts will isolate us, so it’s up to us to discern the information we are given and act with love rather than fear. So by sounding like a complete loon, I save myself, and hopefully others, from making shit worse. Sad things happen, and we will feel sad, but what we do with that sadness is the point.

As the week went on, an ache settled in. It settled right in my chest. I ached for something that wasn’t there anymore, and will never be there again, not in the way it was. I ached to feel loved, but instead I found solitude. I feel untethered to anything, and that means from people, places, or things. I feel like Guido Anselmi, floating above a beach, only loosely tethered in the movie 8 1/2. I want someone to pull me down.

That weightless feeling can be euphoric, but it can also be that ache. For some reason, I want to fill that ache in my heart with the saddest songs I know, and if it isn’t helping, I don’t care, because I crave the haunting of a sad, sad song. Why would I want to fix heartbreak with heartbreak? There is no shortage of sad music, poetry, and movies to comfort my melancholia, but it does keep me in the darkness instead of swimming towards the sun. People are already telling me I’ll meet someone soon, like I got fired from a job and need to start putting out resumes immediately. Why would I want to take this aching heart out into the dating world? While I’m not mad at anyone, I am still hurt, jaded, and hopeless, which doesn’t make for great dating material, and as I have grown old and fat and never gotten rich, I need all the edge I can get when I do decide to go back into dating again. Being a sad sack of shit isn’t gonna work in my favor. I already have a lot of shortcomings.

I suffer from just straight-up depression. Nothing fancy, just that feeling of walking under mud all the time, no matter how good my life is, and even with not drinking or doing drugs, going to AA meetings, and even going to ongoing therapy, I still don’t have a sunny disposition. On top of that, I have seasonal depression, whether it’s winter or summer, and even if it’s spring or autumn. The changing of the seasons depresses me. Then I also suffer from the awareness of reality and current affairs, which even when I try not to pay attention, finds me, and I don’t know if you’ve looked around the last twenty or so years, shit’s fucked. I also suffer from ranging from existentialism to the dark part of the universe: nihilism, so not having too much to believe in or have faith in can make finding the joy in life a challenge. I also suffer from physical pain, just ongoing chronic pain that makes feeling comfortable an impossibility, so happiness can seem out of reach when I have aches, pains, and discomfort all the time, and when it’s cold, I’m achy, and when it’s hot, I feel like my joints are on fire. Then on top of all of that, I have heartbreak.

Again, not writing this to have anyone feel sorry for me, I know that writing this out helps. If I’m going to err on the side of existentialism and find any meaning in any of this, then I need to get my thoughts on straight, because left to my own devices, I will not find any, and now is not the time to be without meaning. Hearbreak opens a wound in me that I keep working to close, hoping it will fully heal so it doesn’t reopen, but now it festers. It triggers that abandonment and loneliness in me, and while I don’t fear being alone again, I do fear the isolation of not being wanted.

While I’m not ready to date, I do think about it, and the idea of dating again is beyond depressing. To find the last person took everything I had. I went on date after date, but I didn’t really find anyone who fit the ideals I’d set for myself. I went on a lot of dates with people whose whole personalities revolved around their ex-spouses and kids. And I am too old to get lucky and go on a date with someone who doesn’t have kids and doesn’t want them. Then it’s finding someone I can feel emotionally connected with, but also have an intellectual bond with. New England is ADHD Land, so everyone is so intellectually adverse. Some people were cool, but they weren’t into me, and so it felt like something was never going to happen.

Beauty is only skin deep, so I need someone with a brain and a heart, but I do like a good-looking person, as I am a Libra. Some call it being a demisexual or a sapiosexual, one who needs to have an emotional and an intellectual connection to have a sexual attraction to someone. Dating apps don’t really address that kind of need, because gamification and instant gratification are the exact opposite of the process of becoming emotionally and intellectually attracted to someone.

I’m a long way from swiping or putting myself out there, but the prospects are disheartening. I’m not hopeful, but I will try to be open to whatever the universe has in store for me, a 50-year-old, chubby, health insurance mid-level manager who goes to AA and therapy, but still acts like an immature ass.

Do I want to put myself through heartbreak again? Like I said, this sucks, so why would I put myself in harm’s way to find someone to fall in love with again?

Heartbreak is hard because it puts me in a place where I don’t want to ever feel like this again, but that is the absolute worst thing I can do. The whole point of life, of communing with others, is to take risks where I could put myself in a position to be hurt like this again. I can only take the things I loved and the things I wished I had done better and bring them to the next relationship. Not itching to get into that place again, so for now, I will grieve and try to let the demons who tell me the window of being loved is closing convince me.