Field Of Broken Hearts
Tonight, my friend said to me:
“I have broken three hearts in the last couple of weeks…”
I really want to look at this. I also really want to briefly give you a glimpse into my views on love and relationships.
So, my first argument is that to have a “broken heart,” you must love. The term broken heart, to me, refers to someone who really loves someone and is denied in some way by an action outside their volitional control. I.e. I would not have a broken heart if my actions were the direct and immediate cause of losing that love. A broken heart is not gained from a frivolous encounter(s) and it is not the feeling of rejection. Sorry, the feeling of rejection is simply the feeling of rejection. Call it by the right name.
Love, however, is not frivolous. It is not simple. It is not quick and immediate. I am going quote Ayn Rand for a good definition of love:
“I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term–as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love–with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul–the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious, and subconscious harmony.”
(Ayn Rand, Romantic Manifesto pg 40)
If you are in a situation where there must be a choice of who to love, then I must refer to another quote:
“The most exclusive form–romantive love–is not an issue of competition. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the “loser” could not have had what the “winner” has earned.”
(Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness pg 65)
And so, why the initial quote bothers me is the way people go about their relationships and they way the feel bad (or get mad at themselves) for other people in an unjustified manner. In the situation I’m specifically talking about, there is no way it could be romantic love. It could be lust, it could be beginning desire, but there is no way an actual heart was broken. To feel pity and sorrow for what has happened is to not appreciate life to it’s fullest, especially your own. If they are hurt and depressed, it is due to rejection, or perhaps even worse, because they could not get the object they so lustfully desired after. In the end, look at what is really going on? Just because you were a catalyst for their emotions, are you going to give up yourself for someone else, even in the act of pity? Feel sorrow and pity for those who deserve it, not because someone is experiencing irrational “love” divorced from any true values. Among people who “love” in this manner, there is really very little meaning to anything they feel.
And, since this has been a quote filled sessions, let me leave you with a famous line from The Fountainhead:
“To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”
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