For almost the entirety of my university career, the only constant in my love life — aside from proclaiming “I’m never downloading a dating app again!” and then doing exactly that — has been heartbreak.
Heartbreak looked like a failure to launch a relationship (read: I was ghosted). Or finally putting a full-
stop to a situationship where I swallowed too many “I think I love you”s. And most recently, I lost someone I’d loved for a few years, because he chose to invest in something healthier, and I can’t blame him for that.
The thing with heartbreak, is that no matter how much you try to rationalize it, there’s no way to really
pick up the pieces of your heart in any logical manner. It’s kind of like finally putting together a precious broken heirloom... only to drop it and watch it shatter all over again.
Heartbreak first took the shape of a monster who was screaming, “Fuck, I would love to be loved!” I found myself playing the same song over and over again to live a little in those stolen moments of nostalgia, and all my showers involved daydreams about them. Slowly, it morphed into indifference until I eventually bargained and settled for a diluted version of reality where I didn’t feel whole, but was also too numb to really care.
It’s not fun to ruminate over the same person over and over again simply because you entered the elevator and it smelled a little bit like them. The taste of their name grows stale on your tongue and frankly, I just got bored of being sad.
When I first met the man who’s now my partner, I was so deep in this last stage that I almost didn’t give him a real chance. He was only in town for a week, I thought. There’s no way I’m in the space to commit to dealing with US immigration to shoot a shot with someone I met five seconds ago.
...That was until he left to cross the border for the first time since meeting me and I felt my heart wrestle with the uncomfortable feeling that I could choose now to either see him again, or never at all. The latter possibility scared me a little. After months of feeling nothing in the love department, it came as a slight shock to my dopamine receptors.
Coming to terms with my feelings (and the fact that he reciprocated them!) was like relearning a foreign language I’d studied for a few years but slowly forgotten. Intimacy found me cautiously, gradually, but surely. At each step I found myself fearing I’d break the heirloom of my heart, and at each of these points I was confronted by the steadily growing realization that trust takes time to find its roots again.
When we dance now to love songs playing softly on his vinyl player under the moonlight while the rest of the world sleeps, or when we know exactly what the other is saying in our common, familiar Hindi, it feels like trust is also something we build together.
This article is from Reclamation, The Ubyssey's 2023 sex and relationships issue. Read more personal essays and student stories from Reclamation here, and sexual health and education articles here.