Perhaps you have felt, when I have said
that from the moment I began falling for you
my heartbreak was a foregone conclusion,
that it means that I only believe in failure,
or that I doubt you or myself or doubt our
respective and collective abilities to love.
I do not, particularly. I do not think it about you,
or about myself, but about love:
heartbreak, such as it is, is the far side of love,
however successful and long-lasting: Something more,
love and faith, I think, is needed
for love to not have heartbreak built-in.
Heartbreak for the lover is built-in if
his avowed love is unwelcome by the beloved,
or if it is unreturned.
Heartbreak for the lover is built-in if love is reciprocal,
for love without the bitter hint of heartbreak
effortless between two individuals over time
is unlikely and might lose its savor for want of contrast.
More probably, love between two individuals
is tempered and peppered with feelings of loss,
confusion, betrayal, hurt, frustration and damning wrath
through those two individuals' sheer individuality and chafing
at the shared voluntary commitment to something like that
idealized perpetual and self-perpetuating love,
through either of those individuals' idiosynchracies, pet peeves,
momentary thoughtlessness, and potentially terminal furies.
I don't mean to sound like I'm advocating the
break-up and reunite to spice up the sex life cycle
like there is talk of around water coolers and movie theater exits.
I am not advocating that people who know
they ought not to be together, or who don't want to be together,
keep getting back together to have more passionate sex and forestall
the actual going onward as individuals. Instead,
I am acknowledging that it seems to be the case that
people who love one another still have conflicts,
and work through those conflicts with varying degrees of
expression of their love, as circumstances develop
and as necessary over time because of that love.
So, those people who make a go of it, love,
presumably living together and engaging in
some collective activities of significance to each,
do not necessarily feel the final desolation of heartbreak,
at this point, as a result of natural interpersonal conflict,
though the natural course of events will likely give them
constituent flavors reminiscent of or heralding the possibility of heartbreak.
And these, I presume, are subsumed in the long, quiet, deep love
of people who spent their whole lives learning to
ignore the irritating habits of their beloved cohabitant,
to love and care for one another through a lifetime of it.
And then there's the guaranteed heartbreak
for even these paragons of the successful love:
the prospect of a separate death;
it seems unlikely to me that the partner who dies first is spared
any of this heartbreak, unless the death is soon, quick and unexpected.
Heartbreak is built into love. Systole to euphoric diastole
if love followed so simple and mechanical a waveform, which,
thankfully, it does not seem necessarily to do.