From the Memes; the Science of Heart Breaks

Yeah. Another Friday.

It is very hard to come up with another article especially when you are coming from the weekend when one of your most fierce critics said you had written something wise. On the other hand, it is pretty easy to come back from heavy criticism. If you are at the bottom, you can not go any lower so I know I am pretty okay now.

As you have noticed, I have started off from last week’s article. While some of you kept the negative responses to yourselves, some people were free enough to spit it in my face. Others started giving me a list of names of people who they thought the article was targeting. While I realized that those were perfect fits, I hadn’t really thought about them when I was writing. That showed me something; my article was relevant and relatable and that is what Richie Online is for. While on the same, others thought I was so full of negative energy and I was unnecessarily reacting to things a person of my nature shouldn’t be reacting to. Well. First of all, you hardly my nature so… Lets leave it there, anyway. Two good people I will not mention said “ndinatokota”. Well. I do not think my language was that harsh, either. You should have seen another version of the same message that one friend of mine sent me immediately after he had read mine. Plus, someone had to say what I said, especially in this world where people cannot eat a meal or wear shoes without first uploading on Instagram. If the article hit you, just disregard it because it hit me too when I read it the next day. Steam blown.

To the business of the day…

I should mention right at the start that this article has been fueled by memes. For some reason, people have been posting a lot about heart breaks this week. One human posted about how heart breaks are good for one’s career. Another one posted about how people need to realize that if they are not dating for marriage then they are dating for a heart break and another went on to post about pieces of a broken heart. I got fascinated by another who posted about how a heart break sensitizes and prepares one for the next of its kind. All of these but one was posted in the form of memes on a WhatsApp status. You probably have seen that and you probably know where I am going with this.

Pieces of a broken heart. One meme that I saw was a quote from a player who was wondering whether is was just that his heart got broken into so many pieces and each piece started loving a different person, earning him the player name. Now I know that some of you may take this as something funny as I did, but I am sure that there is a whole fraction of humanity that would say that with seriousness. Two reasons. For some, it may just be an excuse for promiscuity. For others, however, it might just be an issue of insecurity and paranoia in which case people jump into a relationship with one foot while staying on the outside with the other so that they can pull out easily. You already know what happens in that case. The slightest mistake one or their partner leads to a feeling that things may not work out and so such people end up jumping from one relationship to another, switching at the smallest of threats. The funny thing is that these guys don’t really count these unions as proper relationships in this transient phase to full recovery.

Heart breaks being good for one’s career? Now that is very debatable. I am not too sure as to what the person who authored that might have been driving at but I ca n speculate. You get heart broken, forget everything else and focus on school and career. This might work or might not because there are some people who simply cannot function without a support system in the form of a spouse. Such people would always try to find someone with whom to share their lives with at the closest convenience and should they be the kind that are too careful, the heart break leads to a downward spiral with numerous stops in relationships with different people.

And then to another big one. A heart break prepares you for the next one. Now this was a pure meme which had a funny picture and the words, “Remember how you thought you would die after your first boyfriend left you? Look at how you are all cool now, ready for the next breakup”. Whether this is good or not is subject to debate but this is a reality in the later day. Once someone succumbs to the first breakup, the subsequent ones become very tolerable and almost desirable. Someone gets dumped today and they continue to live their life their own way. The explanation? “Amafuna ndidzilira?” 

That is how we have ended up with a broken generation with people who can’t love fully. On the other hand, it might be good because we need people who can move on, so this goes both ways.

Those were the memes and the possible explanations and implications but there is something about heart breaks that made me dedicate a couple of days to the study of the same. Firstly, we have to understand that not all breakups result into heart breaks and that in this modern-day world (in which people have shifted from sex before marriage to sex before a relationship), heart breaks may come from without a relationship. You can smell the complexity of that.

Some have defined a heart break as a state of intense emotions with a big sense of longing especially in the case of a lost lover. That definition is accurate and in a way it sheds light on what is wrong with this world of dating. In the first place, the idea of having a sense of longing following losing a lover means that we are more prone to accepting them back, thus giving them a chance to hurt us again. On the other hand, we need to move on and that gives a chance for someone to either rebuild us or to break us further. This is why the reminder I posted earlier might just be the wisest thing I have seen this week; if you are not dating for marriage, then you are dating for a heart break. Let me get to that.

The normal demands that our dating ventures end up in marriage of sorts, or so we used to think before things got to their current state. In that case, people need to focus their efforts on getting to know and build each other on the way to marriage. That is something that has to be mutual but the problem is that it is hard to sense whether someone is for real with their intentions and whether they will not flip along the way. What we can do, however, is be sincere and give it our best, ensuring that we have those intentions of dating for marriage (or are otherwise making it clear; things I do not encourage on a normal day). The tricky thing is that once people jump into the dating ship, people tend to enjoy each other’s company and that in turn makes them lose themselves whenever they lose their partner. That is why people who are dating need to end up being a thing after this whole dating business because once they get married chances are that they will stay together.

There we are then. There are so many things we could say about heart breaks and we could write a whole book. As I write, I am looking at a bunch of YouTube videos about how to cope with heart breaks and how to fix broken hearts. Whether those are something to go by is a story for another day, but we know that we have people who are waging wars against heart breaks. Perhaps I should also point out that not all people who claim to be heart broken are in that state. Some of us are just out here abusing other people in the name of having broken hearts and that is not something we should deem normal.  Perhaps there is some sort of universal way of ensuring full recovery from a heart break and we should research it and put it right here on Richie Online. Until then, we will stick with time as a healer and YouTube videos for resolution.

Have a wonderful weekend.

And the other thing... If you want to follow this up with a discussion, call me at 1900 hours CAT.