For centuries, the whole of humanity has grappled with heartbreak. From Ghalib, who excavated loss with the precision of a surgeon, to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who wept through his qawwalis in ways words alone never could- heartbreak has, for the longest time, been treated as one of life's most sacred reckonings. In the classical tradition, the one who suffered was not to be pitied but to be envied.
Interestingly, the feeling of that same envy has become the heart of our social media drama. Your digital presence has suddenly become the unmissable signal to the world that you, too, are living deeply. Heartbreak, once a private excavation of the soul, has been repackaged into content. The breakup isn't an ending anymore. It's a rebrand.
But let's be honest about what we're actually mourning. It's not the loss of the person. It's the loss of the self, or more accurately, the ‘ego’. Who will we post stories with now? Who will we make the mushy posts with? Who will be our reliable +1 to all our parties and gatherings? Strip away the performance and what remains is not heartbreak. It's the sudden, uncomfortable confrontation with our own loneliness that we have spent months, sometimes years, successfully avoiding.
Sartre used the concept of 'bad faith' to explain this. He looked at the very human tendency to escape the anxiety of our own freedom by losing ourselves in another person. We let the relationship define us so we don't have to bear the burden of developing and defining ourselves. The other person thus becomes more than a companion. We see them as an answer to a question we are too afraid to ask. And so when they leave, we are not just alone. We are answerless.
And so the cycle continues. Fear, masquerading as love, pulls us straight into the next relationship before we've made sense of the last. We carry the same unexamined void from one person to the next, convinced that this time will be different. We go through relationships as if asleep, cycling through the same romantic butterflies and devastating heartbreaks, everything neatly documented on social media and quietly archived when the person is eventually replaced with someone new.
Our only hope of breaking free from this cycle is to look inward and to sit with the silence long enough to recognise everything that is missing. But that is perhaps the hardest thing to do in an age that rewards noise. When we release the pressure to “win the breakup” is probably when we gain the perspective to survive it.