BROKEN OR LONELY?

Today when I checked in to see what Sheila's been up to I was delighted to find links to the Demystifying Divas, four women who pick a topic each week and then opine about it on their blogs. I'm too lazy to link, but Sheila has done so and it would behoove you to go read what they've all written about this week's topic: Is it better to have a broken heart or a lonely heart. Not great options but still interesting to think about. While you're at it read what Sheila wrote on her "Salieri" link. I love her self awareness and her willingness to share all of herself in what she writes. It doesn't hurt that she's a kickass writer.

I've done broken and lonely, and for me it has mostly been a choice, e.g. the broken heart after falling for R., but then I knew what I was getting into so it was basically running onto the sword. I guess, in retrospect, I don't really count it except when we're together and I want to push his buttons and I bring out the "You broke my heart!" speech which I deliver with great drama and gravitas and occasionally a tear. There were lonely heart years after that ended, but that was also a choice. I was certainly out there dating it up on the internet and let me say that nothing will make your heart more lonely than going out with that many guys and discovering that there's not only no attraction, there's no connection either.

It was like the universe was beaming down a message to me via each bad date, "You are meant to be alone go forth and rejoice in that aloneness with great relief." Isn't it funny how my messages from the universe are kind of like dialogue from some old movie about the bible? Clearly I didn't have to be alone there were definitely options via the internet, but going there would've probably landed me on medication in a suburb of Temecula with two kids and a husband that I had to get really drunk to want to fuck, much less talk to.

And that would be a really lonely heart.

When I think about it my heart has been truly broken once. Broken in the sense that it wasn't about a wounded ego. When Gary died at the age of 30 it broke my heart to lose him. My heart still hurts from the missing of him. When I was at Allison's last week I was sitting on her couch Friday night, the 13th, having a wonderful, meandering, tea sipping conversation when I realized that it had been 12 years to the day since he died.

And my broken heart ached.

I don't think you can have a broken heart if you've only ever had a lonely heart. A lonely heart is a heart that hasn't loved. That's why it's lonely and why it can't be broken. When your heart is broken it feels like you might not survive. And part of you doesn't want to. But once your heart is broken and you do survive then I think it's easier to go for it. What I end up with a lot now is a bruised ego and some heartache, but it's not anything that I can't shake off. And you know that saying, it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Well, it's not bullshit. I would rather have all those experiences and memories of loving Gary - the good and the bad, than not have had the experience at all.

I'd rather have a battered, broken heart that survived the experience and knows it can, than a heart that is lonely.

But I didn't really know that until right now.