How To Fix A Broken Heart

By Erin Deborah Waks

Step one: sit in a sort of stunned disbelief in a car park, hands shaking, as you send a simple three-word text to your best friends.

Cry for a moment while running for the tube, swinging into the carriage just as the doors close. Pick up your phone, which started to ring only seconds after you sent the fateful message. Tell them what happened. Then, when the tube gets to your stop, move. Wipe your eyes, apply mascara and bright red lipstick in the work toilets and arrive at your desk for work - perfectly on time. 

Step two: as soon as work ends on Friday evening, surround yourself with people you love. Go home. Talk to your brothers. Have Friday Night Dinner with a weight lifted from your shoulders, because for once, you’re not wondering why yet again you aren’t spending your favourite part of the week with the man you’re supposed to be sharing your life with.

Step three: have the most girly, pink, perfect weekend. Attend a dinner party with your friends that starts with you crying on the sofa but ends with you dancing in the kitchen. Talk about it all with your girlfriends. Let them pay for your coffee, cook you dinner, buy you flowers and bundle you up on the sofa with lots of chocolate and hugs you as you reveal, through messy sobs, that you’re the least lonely you’ve felt in months.

Step four: Go shopping. By yourself. Take the money you’d put aside specially to treat him for his birthday and spend it on you. After all, you’re no longer together. Buy baking supplies, new underwear, new records. Come home and watch Bridget Jones with a tub of ice cream and a bottle of wine, all by yourself. Wonder why you don’t feel a crippling sense of panic, a devastating need to sob, like you thought you would.

Step five: let a week pass. Two weeks. Three. A month. Write everything you feel, but don’t share it yet, don’t share anything while in the raw stage of hurt, anger and betrayal. Paint your nails pink. Talk to your best friend on the phone for hours, oscillating between inspired and heartbroken, happy and sad, calm and livid. Take lots of baths with candles. Read novels. Do yoga, Pilates, meditation. Bake a massive chocolate cake with your little cousins, and beat them in general knowledge games, with the sharpest mind you’ve had in months. 

Do all the things you knew you loved, but lost sight of. The things you wondered why you stopped enjoying. Ponder why you suddenly feel okay on your own, feel guilty for it, guilty for wanting more love than he could give. Examine every inch of the relationship to see where you went wrong, why you felt you needed him so much when your world makes so much more sense without him in it. Blame yourself for pushing him away. Blame him for letting you believe you were overthinking, distrusting, when actually, you were right all along. Unpack why you couldn’t be what each other needed. Why despite supposedly being in love, you felt so sad all of the time. Why you couldn’t trust someone who said he loved you. Why you lost nearly ten kilos without either of you really noticing. 

Step six: go on a really, really long drive. Play Lana Del Rey’s 2012 album Born To Die at full volume, singing along to every messed-up lyric with a fervour you’ve not felt in almost a year.

And, somewhere in a service station off the M4 near Reading, holding a bad coffee and a supermarket croissant, realise you’re actually, really, finally okay.