Modern Love Is Breaking

(**author's note**  This piece is for a contest, so your constructive criticism would be most welcome.)



Modern Love Is Breaking


“Lo-o-ove heals,” the cast of the musical Rent croons, singing as though they believe it with everything in them.  When I heard it for the first time, I believed it too.          
         
         But tonight changed that.

         We were perfect.  Well, not perfect, but as perfect as I thought was possible.  He was beautiful.  And I don’t mean that just in a physical way…there were the adorable witticisms, the sweet compliments, the moments of utter silliness that somehow made their way into passion.  To date, he is my longest relationship.  I thought we would last forever. 

         Yet tonight we have suddenly become one of those couples who are too afraid to actually break up, so instead say that they are “taking a break.”

         But a break is a break.  Either way, something, or someone, is falling to pieces, ripping, shattering.  Since when did couples begin this break-taking business?  I’ll admit, it sounds good on paper.  You take time away from each other to reevaluate your relationship, your life, his life, why it bothers you when he doesn’t respond immediately after you ask a question, why it bothers him when you make a mountain out of a paranoid molehill. 

         That’s all well and good.  But what happens when one party decides that they like how the break feels, invigorated by the wildness and independence of the jagged edge that remains, while the other party cries pitifully as that same edge plunges again and again into their heart?

         What happens when a break that is taken becomes a break that is kept…indefinitely?

         This would not happen in a Jane Austen novel.  After they both discovered that they were in love, Mr. Darcy did not say, “Elizabeth, I feel that we would benefit from some time apart.  Quite honestly, I don’t think I can handle the commitment right now, and I don’t want to hurt you.”  Granted, he might still have done something dumb eventually, as his communication was never his best suit, as shown in his first disdainful love proposal.

         But my point is that breaking something doesn’t fix it.  It’s like accidentally dropping your mother’s favorite vase while trying to clean the living room. Even if you arrange the pieces again, and reunite them with super-glue, the vase will still have that wretched scar running down the length of it, ready to fall apart if not handled with extreme care.

         And so I believe that modern love lies in trying to break something in order to fix it.  Wouldn’t that explain why the divorce rate in the U.S. is almost higher than the rate of those who brave the circumstances together?  Could it be the reason more and more people are choosing to live together, rather than get married—after all, it’s easier to tear love to pieces without all the legal hassle, isn’t it?  Then again, some relationships were never in one piece to begin with.

         I sound cynical, maybe.  But that’s not to say that breaking is always wrong.  Staying in a long relationship solely to avoid hurting your partner is a bad idea.  And sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, how much we loved each other, how much I still love him…the break is probably for the best. 

         Once, at a summer collegiate program for high school students in Georgia, I attended a class that dealt with the intermingling of literature and medicine.  The things that stand out most about that class in my memory are the fish-bowl style discussions that I loathed and also a particularly poignant opinion that most of the class shared: that pain assures us of our humanity.  If we can feel pain, then we can ascertain that we are still alive and moving around.  Conversely, emotional pain strengthens our certainty that other emotions have before existed alongside of that hurt…one of those emotions being love.  If we need pain to appreciate painlessness, do we need fracture to appreciate being in one piece?  If so, then modern love is rightfully fraught with breakage, and perhaps it teaches us to enjoy what it feels like to put ourselves back together.

         Perhaps it is even wiser to let things break, rather than force them together in a desperate attempt to salvage the situation.  After all, don’t bones grow back stronger after they have broken?  But while bones grow back stronger and some exes emerge from a break-up both wiser and more experienced, there will always be that lonesome, rainy night when the old wound will ache into the night, and you will lie awake in the echo of forgotten pain.