Essential to our health and wellbeing are meaningful relationships, the feeling of belonging and what we interpret as love or being care for. These are essential for not only our health but also for our happiness and longevity. These are the essentials of what we want, need and desire. According to the renowned psychologist, Dr. Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Human Needs, the most frequent areas of conflicted inhuman relationships are our interpersonal connection with others.
The willingness to be vulnerable after things break down and end intimate relationships requires both courage and resilience to navigate the landscape of deep emotional loss. Losing love by breakup or death is one of the most profound and stressful things we as human being can experience. The loss of love can literally “break our hearts” and can cause us to lose our will to live. Sigmund Freud, MD, the well-known father of modern psychoanalysis, many decades ago stated that we "are never as hopelessly unhappy as when we lose love."
Love is what sustains our lives; so much so that modern medical research shows the impact of grief on the development and exacerbation of unresolved conflicts, and how it can result in the develop serious illness or fatal heart disease. The loss of love is something many of us fear and something many of us don’t imagine can happen when, on the surface, things in our relationship seems to be on an even keel.
Yet, for most of us we do, at one time or another, have the experience and the crushing pain of losing love. We often respond with an almost obsessive reaction to either regaining that love or finding a way to end the pain and sense of emptiness that can often accompany such loss. This is the “down side” of love – losing it and feeling the acute emptiness in leaves behind.
If you are not familiar with a small press literary publication, The Sun, you may not have read this poignant essay, published in that magazine, written by Poe Ballantine. He writes about his father’s experience and the necessity of trust within love. Trust is the element of love which provides the safe place necessary to share our lives and hearts with others. Trusting, and dealing with the loss of trust within love, requires great courage to be able to move beyond the loss and love again.
These days we are inundated from many sources with information about wellness and how to prevent illness, exercise, nutrition, meditation and the environmental factors that affect our health. Yet what is often missing and what many of us need is information about how to create more fulfilling and healthy relationships and prevent the heartbreak of losing love.
Ballantine's essay tells a story about his father:
"He kept a close ritual of coffee, then work, dinner, his television shows and his cigarettes. The newspaper stayed on the table open to the personals. He had opened them the first day she had left him, like the reflex of a man covering a wound after being shot. His face was gray from survival. He was a man who could not allow himself to break. The despair stretched out. The music from the stereo could not fill the emptiness. Our conversations were automatic, clock talk. His single guiding hope was that she would return."
"What had happened to my father he never believes would happen. He was fifty years old, settled, comfortable, secure. His children were raised. He had worked hard all his life and now he could relax. I understood why my mother had left him, but I still condemned her for leaving - for taking the easy way out. My father and I played cards and watched private-eye dramas on television. He looked in the personals, called once at something that looked right, but cancelled soon after; it just wasn't in him."
"One Sunday afternoon I heard him crying in the bedroom. I didn't know what to do with a father who cried. He taught me all I knew, the important things: honesty, loyalty, firm handshake, the love beyond self-love, the duty of a man. Trust was his only religion and it was failing him and in turn it was the failure of the world."
"The one thing a human being asks for on this earth is to be loved. Why should it be impossible?"
Trusting, loving and the resilience to come back from the loss of love may be the next "health frontier". Nutrition, one of the more popular health topics, is not just about nourishing our tissues; it includes nourishing our hearts, which are hungry for love and acceptance, is another skill we need to learn. If we should be mindful of what we eat, how mindful should we become about how and who we love?
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