Heartbreak is never fun. The common empathetic response to those going through the drudgery of despair after a breakup is to “not worry because someone else will come along.” In general, I think it’s good advice, and in the past I would believe in it wholeheartedly. I thought the universe makes us go through the motions of relationshipping, encountering the full spectrum of emotions, peaking with absolute love and bottoming out with its ultimate loss, and then somewhere down the line you end up with the one you were supposed to be with. Maybe it’s because I live in Los Angeles, have watched too many romantic movies, and have consequently succumbed to their magic. Who really knows?

HOWEVER, I do know that I found someone that literally said; “I’ve never felt this way about anyone else.” And to be completely honest with you, I felt the exact same. We talked, wrote poems, exchanged love letters and it was established that we were in agreeance that neither of us had ever felt more alive, loved, seen, heard, and sexually attracted to each other than with anyone either of us had ever been with. Sounds phenomenal, right? It definitely was. Now, imagine having found someone that can unlock all those feelings within you, and then they leave (no one did anything wrong, but she felt she needed to live a different life, and because I love and adore her, I respected her decision). 

Is there any guarantee that a love of that magnitude will come again? Maybe this is emotion, but I’m going with an emphatic; NO! And I say this, not as a young, angsty teenager, finding love in anything that looks like a hole, but as someone who has been around for nearly four decades and entered into a relationship with someone who was even older than myself. We both lived HALF our lives before we found one another and shared this wonderful experiment of love. I’m not trying to sound pessimistic, but this is why I don’t really believe that simply saying “someone else will come along,” really offers any consolation because I don’t know if I’ll ever find someone like that again. But at the very least, I know exactly what I’m after.  

I have a list of rules I live my life by, one of them (which was inspired by her) is to “always love like it’s the last time.” I can’t stress this enough because you never know what is going to happen.