Sometimes feeling heard can be experienced through music. I have always used my connection with music to cope because music accompanies experience unlike anything else. Therefore, to accompany this experience, please enjoy the Losing a Relationship and Grieving the Living playlist.
This is a story about heartbreak. When any relationship ends, it can be hard to understand. You are coping with the idea that someone will no longer be in your life, and you’ll have to move on by yourself. I don’t know that we will ever be able to entirely understand losing people we care about. It’s one of those big life questions that never have a good enough answer, but I have a theory that it is grieving for the living. I’ve lost people before, whether it was a friendship or the permanent loss of death, but I have since discovered that loss doesn’t always feel the same. Maybe it depends on the nature of the relationship, but grief never seems to be an identical experience. Labels never seem to matter when it comes to how you actually feel, so what’s the use of limiting and invalidating experiences by telling people how they’re supposed to feel when they lose someone with a certain label? So, this isn’t about what happened to me, or what kind of relationship I lost, it’s about the loss itself and losing someone you loved and can no longer love. There’s this sense of silence, loneliness, and feelings kept to yourself when you lose someone you once shared them with. I have found it helps to be heard and to know other people can relate to you. This is for those of us who have grieved love, who are struggling to cope, and for people who are looking for something that makes you feel seen.
There’s this psychology concept that says when you’re in a relationship, you begin to overlap your identity with that of the other person, gradually integrating them into your own identity. So essentially, when you go through a breakup, you feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself. You might feel empty or like you’re not yourself anymore. It was comforting at first to know what was happening and rationalize the way I felt somehow. Still, the reality of literally losing a part of you is worse. Suddenly you’re questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself and seek change just to find an answer. I felt a lot like I had to change myself because I felt like a different person. This change was so huge that I no longer resonated with the person I was before. I wholeheartedly believe you shouldn’t change yourself for anyone if it’s not what you want, however, you shouldn’t feel bad if you do. Sometimes it can help to make changes if you feel like you’re not the same person anymore. I think that’s why people cut their hair or get a tattoo when they go through a breakup, it makes you feel a little more like your own person again.
I made a strange realization that it oddly felt like a death. It was like someone had died and they were just gone; with the same helplessness you feel by not having control over the situation. Having experienced the grief of death and heartbreak, it’s weird to realize how similar they are. The overwhelming difference is that they’re not dead, they will move on with their life and so must you. We only get one life and the thought of something that once brought you so much joy to never happen again, at least not in the same way, is devastating. While its not the kind of loss we understand as death, it is loss. Attempting to understand something by comparing it to an experience like death might seem morbid, but finding your niche way of understanding can help you move forward. There is no wrong way to move forward and rationalize things that have happened in your life because it’s your life.
Losing a relationship with someone who is still alive is sort of inherently messy by nature. Whether it’s a clean cut, or a back and forth, there is a dissonant feeling behind knowing you could still be around someone technically and physically, but for whatever reason, you just can’t anymore. I think that makes it hard to accept, no matter what kind of relationship it is. When you love someone or care very deeply for them, you try to imagine how they fit into your life in the future in any way that may be, it makes sense to want to keep people you love around. When you lose them, you continue to think about the future but stop yourself when you imagine them in it and slowly realize that it’s no longer realistic. I don’t think you ever truly understand how deeply involved in your life someone is until they’re gone. When little things remind you of people while they’re around, it happens so often that you don’t notice. Those things still remind you of them after they’re gone, you just feel pain of their absence instead. Then it becomes a game of avoiding the pain. It’s hard to learn to unlove someone when you never intended to, when you weren’t ready to. People often tell you to just try to forget, but it’s never that easy.
Losing relationships in your 20s is something that is not talked about often enough, even though it’s such a huge point of change in your life. Grieving a relationship is hard to understand until you go through it. I always thought I’d be able to handle it if it happened, but it was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through. Imagine walking around with a stomachache for weeks or months, that’s how it feels. For anyone to downplay the intensity of losing someone is simply unreasonable, if you’ve ever gone through it, you would agree. My advice to you is to make the most of the time you have with people you love. You never know who might come or go and for what reason. It’s incredibly painful to lose someone, no matter the context. You should not have to apologize for the way you choose to cope with things because a relationship is a relationship, a loss is a loss, and all the context is just extra. Whether it’s your friend, significant other, situationship, or family member, regardless of the label, grieving a relationship is very real and if that person meant something to you at all, your grief is valid.