“I remember the first time I fell in love and I learned a lot. Before that I never even thought about killing myself.” -Steven Wright

Remember your first heartbreak? How devastating it was? How painful? Do you understand why it was so painful?

There is a reason romantic heartbreak is so difficult.

If you’re like most people in Western society, you didn’t get a whole lot of touch, love, compassion, support, and intimacy growing up. The older you get, especially as a man, the less physical or emotional nurturing is available to you.

Meaning that many of your basic needs were simply not met.

This was how it is in the best of families, though many seem to go out of their way to be much more violent and damaging than simply leaving basic needs unmet.

Feelings indicate needs.

When you express your authentic needs for love and support, they are deflected…

• Someone puts a cookie in your mouth when you are crying out of loneliness
• “I’ll buy you a toy if you stop crying” when you were afraid

…or you were bullied:

• Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about!
• Go to your room until you can learn to calm down!

These are simply ways of invalidating the needs of the child and leaving them unfulfilled.

And they leave a massive gaping hole in the soul.

But, you are taught…there will come a day when you will meet someone and they will fulfill these needs for you. They will fill this space up. Make you whole and happy and fulfill you totally. Like mommy and daddy do for each other.

Who, because of our societal structures are the only people that we have significant intimate contact with and thus information about their relating in our childhood. Them and TV people.

This thing that you are sent to find is called ‘true love’.

Then puberty comes along and you have all of these sexual feelings—needs multiply—and since people have been reading you bedtime stories about princes finding their princesses and living happily ever after to you for quite a long time at this point, as well as TV, Hollywood, and teachings from your parents, this seems to be the optimal way and best exit strategy for you getting your needs met (which would take you out of the miserable hellhole that is your life now).

Since capital-R Relationship seems to be the solution, you try your best to find the prince or the princess, Mrs. or Mr. Right, and everything should be fine after that.

Note that you have also been programmed to believe that only one person will be able to fulfill that role to meet all of your intimate and touch needs. (And, they will be a great financial partner with you, raise kids how you believe, and the rest of the enchilada).

Imagine your elation when you find ‘the one’ for you! Especially if they meet some of your sexual needs which are powerful indeed, your happiness level immediately skyrockets. Needs getting met = good feelings = happiness.

This must be what people mean with ‘falling in love’! All of the sudden your needs for sexual expression, caressing, cuddling, gentleness, kissing, stroking, touch and much more are being met much more effectively than just a few days ago. So now you are blissfully happy!

This is normal. Just as it is normal to be happy to go from starving to full from a nice meal.

So you try it and take a couple steps into this process of opening to this new person. You make them into your ‘main squeeze/so/bf/gf/husband or wife”.

Almost immediately, enormous pressure is placed on them to fulfill a long list of your needs. They almost certainly cannot fulfill them all, all of the time. These are what I call ‘expectations’. You don’t even realize you have them. They are unconscious.

When you find out that this person doesn’t want to or can’t fulfill all of these needs all of the time (in fact, they may be so overwhelmed by trying to do so that sooner or later they cease to want to fulfill any of them for you), the heartbreak you feel isn’t just one rejection from someone who doesn’t want to continue relating with you at the level that you wanted, but instead a devastating loss of need fulfillment.

There are two interpretations you can make at this point. The first is that “of course society has a great system of wonderful, time-tested concepts to meet our needs. Others are happy enough!”

So you must be defective or broken. From this you can infer that you don’t fit in somehow and that there is a very low chance of you getting your needs met ever. From this belief stems all forms of slow or fast suicide: self-damaging behavior, addiction, ‘acting out’, depression, and even the ultimate rejection of life.

The second is to see that society, including your parents and virtually everyone you know and care about, or has ever loved and cared about you, is lying.

Welcome to the Real World, Neo.

The realization that you can’t trust anything you’ve been taught from birth, including everything your parents ever taught you that conflicts with experience of your senses is so traumatic for most people that they can’t even consider it. Which is why most of us instead engage in all the violent self-damaging behaviors that we engage in.

And that’s why heartbreak is so devastating…and so difficult to heal from and trust again after you have experienced it. Not only has this ‘person’ let you down, but the entire world has done so.

A typical nuclear family relationships to succeed requires one person to do something that is almost impossible: Fulfill a giant section of your needs. They (the other person) weren’t designed for that. And a part of you does understand that that is impossible. To trust that it won’t happen again goes against all logic. Which is why so many of us avoid relating romantically from then on.

The problem is that we usually fail to see why that is so, because to do so would mean that a conspiracy involving even your parents has been against you your whole life. If you did look, you would have to question all of society. And what would happen if you question all of society? Where else can you go for happiness if all of society is a lie that won’t meet your needs? Who can you trust if you can’t trust your parents?

So, you are virtually forced to believe that you are the one person for whom the patterns and systems in society don’t work and that there is really no other option for you when in reality, they don’t truly apply to anyone, really. Everyone who claims to be happy and “fine” by following the rules is lying. Either they are not following society’s rules in secret (e.g., affairs) or they are not fine at all (e.g., on meds, whether prescribed or self-administered). It’s true that they might not feel much of what is inside anymore through intense repression and emotionally distracting behavior such as addiction, but they are far from fine. No wonder even suicide seems like a viable option in this situation.

Society is a bunch of lies. If it weren’t, it would require no violence of shame, blame, or other punishment to enforce. But that is a topic for another article.

And that is why heartbreak, especially the first one, is so painful.