Tough Love and Vampires

When Your Heart Breaks, the Whole World Looks Like You Are Seeing it from the Sweaty Seat of a Tilt-o-Whirl. It's ok to puke.

On Friday, John Doe called to ask for love advice. I guess becoming a real published columnist with a dating column in The Branford Patch does wonders for your credibility as a advisor in matters of le heart. Don’t worry it’s not going to my head. Who am I kidding? Totallygoing to my head. I barely want to be friends with my conceited self anymore!

Either that or, since the guy has this knack for almost always saying the perfectly wrong thing, he doesn’t have any other girl friends that are still taking his calls. I like to think the former. Obviously.

You know that saying, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” well, it hurts me, but I know not as much as it hurts you.

I’ll spare you the gory details of the 2+ hour conversation. This was the tough love gist of it:

Hey, John Doe, what I’m about to tell you is the suckiest thing in the world. Truly. There is no nice way to say it, and there is nothing about it that will make you feel an ounce better. Now that you’ve been disclaimed, here’s the deal:

You can’t make anyone love you. You can’t change their feelings about you. You can’t make them want to come back to you. You’ll know if they want to come back – God, they’ll beg for it! People grovel. They make fools out of themselves. They stand out on your porch in the rain. They break into your house. They call – at least. They write. They don’t leave you alone! They bring gifts and lay them on the alter of your forgiving heart, begging for their sacrifice to be worthy of your grace.

A broken heart sucks. It hurts. It feels like you might die from it. But you don’t. You just have to live through it.  And I’m sorry it just happened to you. I wish I had something magical to give you that would help with the pain. No magic beans here man. Sorry.

Living on the hope of finding someone better down the line is shallow and like the bare minimum life support you need to keep blood flowing to your brain so that one day you can wake up and use it again. Keep that hope in your back pocket, some days it’s all you’re going to have. It’s barely enough.

I felt cliched when I told him that he was nice, smart, funny, had everything to offer a girl and that he deserved better. It sounded cliched. But it wasn’t. Every word was true.  He deserves to be appreciated.

I should have just forwarded the call to Audrey Hepburn. She got it right when she said, “Your heart just breaks, that’s all. but you can’t judge or point fingers. You just have to be lucky enough to find someone who appreciates you.”

After we hung up, I realized that I might as well have just kept my mouth shut and listened. Sure, he ASKED for my opinion. He said he wanted to hear my thoughts. But, was there anything I could say that would have changed how he was feeling? Um, no.

I think love advice is about as useful as the garlic I keep by the front door to keep vampires away – not at all. (Even if there were vampires, they’d probably just come in through the window, I doubt bloodsucking vermin are civilized enough to use the front door).

We give it because we know that love bites (sometimes) and we think we can spare our friends the shame of our mistakes. But no one learns how hot love is until they get burned.

Still, I never shut up. I keep trying. My number once piece of advice that I stand up and preach to the other black pots and kettles is: Don’t contact them no matter what. Ignore! Don’t call! Don’t e-mail! Don’t text! Pretend like they are dead! You can’t text message dead people!

Can you guess what I regret about my last breakup?

Why? Because, I didn’t listen to my best friend when she told me to put my damn phone in the freezer so I wouldn’t call him. I kept it under my pillow instead.

Why? Because, no one listens to love advice.

Why? Because, how boring would it be to have everything figured out?