The Open Matt Project

Love Life

My heart has been broken three times this year. I think that's a record. I'd like to say that I've become wiser or more matured, and perhaps that's true without my saying so, but I can't. Looking back on it, I don't think I would do anything differently. At each point where I made a critical decision, I was fully aware of it and made the best and most decisive moves possible. No one forced me or tricked me, I was not influenced by drugs or hurried by a busy schedule, and there was little information unavailable to me. The choices I made were all the best choices I could have made - and would make again, given the chance.

But these best possible choices I made, and would make again, lead directly to the best possible broken heart I have. Three times, no less. That's a difficult pill to swallow, even for a bigmouth like myself. So what else is there to do but scrutinize, analyze, and pick apart the minutia with the hope of gleaning some idea of how to avoid this recurring tragedy? Not much, it seems, since most of the world is on holiday and I've estranged the rest.

Far from the costliest free time I've had, this time is something of a bargain in comparison with my previous vacations through the abyss. Heartbreak is in some ways old hat, a warm rhubarb pie that screams of time past by you and past you by but is mouth-watering and nose-pleasing in spite of it. If your heart hasn't been broken, you've never loved enough. If it's been broken three times in as many months, perhaps you love too much.

I began writing this with the intention of telling the stories behind the three heartbreaks; there is healing in a eulogy, and I have tired of marveling at my wounds. Writing "love too much" was a parting of the clouds, or so, as I saw that my scrutiny, analysis, and minutia picking were all functions of logic - and the source of my pain is no failing of my mind, but rather my heart.

Failing in love can only follow falling in love, neither of which I would trade for the other any more than I would forget that the strength of ones love is married to the vulnerability of ones heart. And therein is the salve that will put my mind as ease, to know that there was neither a failing of thought, nor foresight, nor feeling, but rather a success of life.