How can I mend my broken heart?

 Upon joining hubpages, I found myself browsing among the various topics and blogs posted by our fellas blogwriters and one thing that somehow surprised me was the copious amount of “how to mend a broken heart” articles. Typically they look almost like one of those recipes you’ll find in the back of a Betty Crocker devil’s food cake mix, stating all about what you need (ingredients), what to do (instructions) and what to expect out of the mix. I found myself surprised in the sense that I wasn’t expecting people to be so naïve to think that there is indeed some special combination of tutoring and events that will help you cure a broken heart. The depressing and at the same time nasty truth is that nothing and nobody will help you healing your broken heart until you are ready yourself to be restored back to health again. That is in the case that your heart is truly broken, however, and usually the way to distinguish minor injury from a broken heart is the amount of time that it takes for you to feel like you’re back in business. If you are capable to get back in the dating market and develop some kind of genuine and true interest towards a romantic prospect within a month or so, then let me tell you, your heart was never broken to begin with. If, still after a month, you don’t find yourself moping around the house looking back at every single happy memory you have spent together like in a movie screen but just inside your head, you don’t have a broken heart. If after time has passed, you don’t constantly look back at the last time you argued trying to figure out what you could have done differently and what’s to blame in the things you’ve said, once more, that’s good, because that means you don’t suffer from a broken heart, maybe some minor dislocation, or even just a few bruises, but definitely not a broken heart.

In my research of the “How To” for the broken heart case study I have had a chance to gain some unexpected yet insightful feedback as to what to do exactly, such as: read a book, go out and meet other guys, talk about it with your girlfriends, or do *not* talk about it at all; go watch a movie; start a new blog; make new friends; move to another city (lol!); work double shifts; have sex with random strangers; try bungee jumping; learn how to belly dance…The list could go on and on, but I will spare you from it for the sake of your attention. I believe that ultimately the truth of the matter is that the only absolute master that will gradually help you healing from a broken heart is named Mr. Time, nothing else. You (and I) will be left mourning in the meantime someone who just couldn’t care about us enough to want us in his life bad enough to make the necessary compromises to be in a relationship with us. Until Mr. Time, one day, will decide that the moment to shake the blues off has arrived, and that our perpetrator has been gone long enough to leave very few traces of his presence in our mutated life.

I mean, by no means, go ahead and try to throw yourself from a 700ft. bridge 700ft. in the effort to forget your long gone lover, if you think that after the jump the memory of him will have left your mind and your heart forever, but my best guess is that it will not be the case. The reality is that we are so concentrated on the lacerating hurt that comes from breakups that we don’t realize how therapeutic a stage of solitude and contemplation of our inner strength can actually be. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that you should confine yourself in some Buddhist Japanese monastery indefinitely in the attempt to find your inner self; as a matter of fact your inner self can actually be gathered and explored even in the presence of your most intimate and trusted friends, you know who I am talking about, the ones you have been knowing for a lifetime, the ones you’ve shared your most private secrets with and of whom you know things that are hidden from the rest of society (and probably for a good reason). Now, if you don’t have that type of friends, then we definitely have a problem, but I want to assume that if you’re a regular, middle class, not too terribly weird individual, then you do have at least one friend that belongs to the above mentioned category.

So, ultimately if I had to write my own “Hot To” guide on how to heal a broken heart, it would probably contain only three elements:

1.       Time, lots of time. Don’t be impatient, don’t be anxious. What’s to come will come.

2.       Friends, lots of friends. Remember though, good friends, the ones that know you like the palm of their hands and will be there to catch you when you fall.

3.       Solitude. Be alone; understand what you want for yourself. I know it hurts, and I know it gets extremely lonely, trust me, but solitude helps you discover aspects of your inner self that you will be amazed about, and it will help you loving yourself, which, along with forgiveness, is the first step to heal completely from a broken heart.

Finally, there is no special recipe to get over someone who has deeply hurt you in the core of your inner self, but the good news, and I do deem this to be the good news ladies, is that the power of healing your broken heart lays within your own self; look no further than a mirror to find a way to cure your lonely heart; there’s really no sweet escape.