How To Get Your Heart Broken By A Boy For The First Time

Start to worry. He used to do things like bring you a cup of water without asking and rub your back but now he won’t even bring you soup if you’re sick. This is how you know he’s falling out of love with you.

Become frantic and confused. How can you become the person he still loved two weeks ago? Begin to wear the clothes he has said he liked the most on you. Wear his favorite t-shirt, his favorite pair of underwear—things that you know he adores.  He reacts indifferently to your efforts. Your spirit is crushed and you change into sweats when you get home.

Sex is mechanical and loveless. Tell him that you’re tired of screwing and that you want him to make love to you. He makes love to you after school one day and it’s so intense that you almost cry. Afterwards, you’ll know it’s over completely.

He breaks up with you the next day in a café near school.  Start crying and stare at your croissant. Ask him to cry so you can know that he cared about you but he can’t or he won’t. Call him a piece of trash but then want to give him a hug. It’s all very devastating.

Call your friends. They come running to you and share their stories of heartbreak. They try to get you to eat ice cream and watch a romantic comedy but be like, “No thanks, bye.” You grieve best while on your bedroom floor listening to Mazzy Star.

Become insane. Think of transferring schools and entering independent study. Think of going to boarding school in Iowa.  You wish you had the money to just fly away somewhere but you don’t so here you are.

Your thoughts and reactions will scare you and you will have no idea you could be this crazy. Feel betrayed by your mind and wonder how this insanity ever lived inside of you, how these irrational behaviors could’ve been dormant until you got your heart broken for the first time. Now they’ve shown up as if to say, “Oh hey! You thought you were normal and well-adjusted? J/K! Heartbreak: 1. You: 0.”

Become obsessed with your ex-boyfriend and talk about him incessantly like it’s a nervous tic. By mentioning him at least a few times a day, he still exists and your relationship still happened. When you’re with your friends and you see a blue sky, say to them, “My ex-boyfriend used to love blue skies.” You know you sound nuts but you can’t help it. You are sick, you are not well. YOU HAVE A DISEASE.

Hate your ex-boyfriend. Die from happiness if he ever took you back.

Getting over him is a slower process than you imagined. As time goes by, his name starts to mean less and less to you. You figure this is progress.

There’s no heartbreak quite like when you’re seventeen and you’ve realized someone could love you and then not love you. Just like that. No more love for you.

Wonder if it will ever hurt this bad again. Realize that it does but in more subtle ways. Heartbreak becomes a more controlled insanity in your twenties, a manageable illness.

Sometimes you almost miss the way it felt to get your heart broken for the first time by a boy. But not really. Not really at all.

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