Heartbreak has a way of convincing us that what we’re feeling is unlike anything anyone else has ever experienced.

But not all heartbreak is the same.

The pain of losing someone you never really got to have isn’t the same as the pain of losing a long-term relationship. And neither of those feels like the heartbreak of someone walking away without warning.

The truth is, different kinds of heartbreak keep us stuck for different reasons.

That’s why, in this week’s video, I talk about the four kinds of heartbreak I see most often, why each one is so uniquely painful, and what it takes to move through it.

If you’re going through heartbreak right now, or you’re still carrying one from years ago, I hope it gives you a little clarity, a little hope, and reminds you that you’re not alone.

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Matthew Hussey: 

There are four kinds of heartbreak, which all have the ability to create some of the worst pain of your life. The first is the heartbreak of the person that you fell for but never dated. Or at the very least, it never got serious with. Then there’s what I call the one day heartbreak, which is when it ends with someone that you have been on and off with for an extended period of time.

But deep down, you saw yourself ending up with them. The third is the serious relationship heartbreak, which is the result of a genuine, committed and often very long term relationship ending. Lastly, there’s the one you didn’t see coming. This is a very specific brand of heartbreak that can be devastating in ways we must understand if we are to survive it.

In this video, you will come to understand the version of heartbreak you’re in, the unique challenges of that kind of heartbreak and what you must know about your version. If you were to come out the other side of it faster and stronger than ever. So let’s jump in. Our first kind of heartbreak is the person you never dated.

One of the most painful heartbreaks isn’t always the person you spent years with. Sometimes it’s the person you never really got to have. Maybe you dated for a few weeks before they pulled away. Maybe it was someone you work with who you became close to, but then when you tried to advance it, they didn’t want anything more. We don’t really know this person.

Like I get that. We know them well enough to have fallen for them a little bit, or maybe a lot, but we don’t know everything about them. We don’t know their flaws. We don’t know who they would be in a relationship. We don’t necessarily know who they are in an argument. What we have in front of us is an idealized person.

That person came along and represented something that we were probably starving for, which is hope. An answer to our problem. The problem is loneliness, the problem of anxiety that I’m never going to meet anyone. The the yearning that we have felt for so much of our lives. To want to find love. And in a dating landscape that can feel depressing a lot of the time when someone shows up as hope.

We cling on to it, and when we lose it, it feels like we’re not just losing a person. We’re losing the answer to the great problem of our life. The problem of feeling lonely in the present and anxious about our future. When this person showed up, it got us hopeful again. It got us dreaming again. It got us imagining that our love life might actually happen in the way that we had always imagined.

And then it goes away as quickly as it arrived. The danger is we make the tremendous heartbreak that we feel as a result about that person. The heartbreak we feel has far less to do with the person than it has to do with the fact that we thought we had found the answer. And once again, we have found ourselves disappointed and back where we started.

We need to put the relationship in its proper place. I know the feelings are real. I get that they are. You can be truly heartbroken by a person like this, but we have to remember on a rational level that we did not know them well enough to know whether they were actually right for us. We only know the version of them that existed before real life actually tested the relationship.

So it’s not. I lost the one, it’s that this person never even proved themselves to be the one. So forget the one that got away. This is not the one that got away. This person is a normal stepping stone on the path to meeting the right person. The second kind of heartbreak is what I call the one day heartbreak.

You get together, you break up, you come back together. You break up again. And over time, it kind of gets turned into your own personal will. They won’t they story. I call these situations, by the way, one day wages. One day this person will turn out to be what I’ve always wanted them to be. And the wager I make is my time, my emotions, my energy, my intimacy.

Every part of me I’m going to give you in the hope that one day you’ll have the qualities I want you to have. You’ll be generous, not selfish. You’ll want kids instead of what you’re saying now, which is you don’t. You’ll commit on a serious level instead of just stringing me along. One day you’ll become that. And the one day wager is the greatest gamble you can make for your life.

Because it wastes years. Because that’s how these things stay alive. We have this romantic idea that we hold on to of how important this relationship is, how special this person is, and we keep reinforcing that story by talking about it with friends and dissecting it over time, and looking at those moments that they come back as some kind of symbol or meaning.

It’s not what we keep breaking up. So we must be wrong for each other. It’s we keep finding our way back together no matter what. We wind up mistaking inconsistency for destiny. The second reason they’re hard is that we never fully grieve that person. Every time that person disappeared and reappeared, we learn that they always reappear, so we never really let ourselves break.

So every ending with this person over time has felt like an ellipsis instead of a period. When it does finally end, we have to admit that this story we’ve been telling ourselves is not real, at least in the way that we imagined it. And parting ways with that story can feel like parting ways with a part of ourselves.

So what do we do about heartbreak here? Well, on one hand, it can actually be productive to get angry. Anger can actually help break the spell of the sadness. Sometimes anger is a good antidote to heartbreak. If we feel angry at the time spent with this person because we’re like, you were never serious about me, or you never actually gave me what I wanted.

And I’m finally angry about that instead of hurt that actually can help create the emotional distance we need to walk away. Second is let go of the fantasy. This wasn’t a relationship that never got a chance. It was a relationship that had every possible chance and still didn’t happen. It had too many chances. I always think that when we’re beating ourselves up for how much time we spent in a situation like this, we have to remember that that was a symptom.

It was a symptom of something deeper in us that we felt we weren’t worthy of, more that we felt. This person was the answer to all of our problems, even though they weren’t even showing up for us. There’s a wound that we are operating from and continuing to give this person so much power in our lives. And when we realize that it does two things.

The firstly is it makes us realize it was never really about them. That we had nominated them in this role in our lives. That was far more to do with that wound than anything else. So it suddenly makes them less important. But the second thing it does is it allows us to give compassion to ourselves, to realize that this wasn’t an easy thing for me to change.

So rather than seeing it like I am, I’ve wasted so much time I can’t believe I gave this person this much of my life. I can’t believe I stayed around for so long hoping that that would turn into something. Tell yourself I’m like everyone else on earth who finds it really hard to heal the deeper wounds that are governing all of my behaviors in life.

This behavior in this particular case just happens to involve another person. Whatever form of heartbreak you are experiencing right now. Please know I have had my own version of the place that you are in right now, and so have thousands of people I have sat with in some of the darkest moments of their lives. I see you, you are not alone, and I am so deeply sorry that you are going through this in your life right now.

And sometimes when life feels that dark, that no light can possibly find its way to us, someone reaches into that darkness at exactly the moment we need it the most. And when someone does that, those moments don’t just help us heal. They restore our faith in people and sometimes in life itself. I’d love to offer you one of those moments right now, because starting on July the 20th, I am doing something that I have never done before.

I’m setting aside an entire week of my life to be with anyone in this community who is currently going through heartbreak. I know that this summer is a time when a lot of other people are talking about finding love and getting excited about this summer plans, but when you’re in that darkness, that’s not where you’re at. You just want to feel better.

So for five consecutive days, I am going to go and live in a process. I am calling five days to mend and this is designed to be a complete experience where each day builds on the last day, taking you from that dark, raw place you’re in to a place of greater peace and strength and hope and happiness by the end of five days.

I’m going to be answering questions. I’m going to be working with you. I’m going to be sitting with you and and holding space for the pain that you’re going through. There is no fee to attend this thing. I wanted it to be completely open, completely free for every single person in my community who needs it. So whoever you are.

Come invite your friends. Invite your family, whoever you know needs this. Join us. Go to MendWeek.com and sign up. It’ll take you just a couple of seconds. I believe that sometimes life brings us exactly what we need at exactly the moment we need it. Maybe this is that moment for you. The third kind of heartbreak is the serious relationship.

Heartbreak. This is the committed relationship that has been a huge part of your life. It’s not your life and it ends. It might have been after a few years. It might have been off the decades after spending half your life with this person. And of course, when you lose someone like this, you’re not just grieving a person. You’re grieving an entire life.

Years of shared history, routines, traditions, dreams, plus the future you thought you were going to have with this person. And in the beginning, everyone shows up for you because it’s obvious to them that this is a profound thing that has happened in your life, that you deserve all of the love and the sympathy and the support in the world.

But just like when we lose a family member and people initially show up and then get on with their lives, so too. Do people get on with their lives after we have been heartbroken, even in the longest relationship of our lives. So we find ourselves showing up for work, friends, family, responsibilities we have, all the while still being heartbroken at a time when everyone else feels like we’ve moved on.

Life has moved on. We fracture ourselves, living one life for everybody else and another life privately. And the exhaustion that comes from putting on that mask is profound and often leads to burnout and depression. It’s like the world feels unfairly normal while you’re still going through one of the greatest losses, maybe the greatest loss of your life. It’s like the old song by Skeeter Davis.

Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars glow above? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love. Look, in this situation, the solution is firstly to accept that there is no quick fix. This isn’t a pain that you eliminate. It’s a pain that you gradually move through over time.

And time doesn’t erase it, but it starts to change the intensity of it in the beginning. It’s not about making the pain go away. It’s about not fighting that pain. Instead surrendering to that pain. There is a great moment in Lord of the rings that has stuck with me forever, where Frodo is resisting his story. He’s resisting the pain, he says.

I wish none of this had ever happened. And Gandalf says to him, so do all who see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you. Recognize that this is all part of the human experience. You are living it. You are on an extreme level experiencing what it is to be human.

There’s also something Pete Holmes says that I think is useful for this. I want you to hear this. It just short circuits your brain. If you say yes, thank you. And I mean almost instantly in my in my experience, flight is delayed. Yes. Thank you. It’s so weird. That’s why it works. As if it’s what you wanted. And then you realize you’re in an airport.

You realize you’ll be in an hour later. It can just be a clean breath and a recognition that you’re alive. And maybe you see the sun coming through the window. And maybe you remember that people used to die in covered wagons on the journey you’re about to take in for hours. That’s been one of the most powerful things in my life, for sure.

I’m glad you brought it up because it’s been really, really helpful. A message of hope I want to give you is that we can gradually create a new life alongside the old one. So we have all of this pain and this, like this ball of emotion around all of these things that remind us of that person. But the world is bigger than them.

And over time, we will make new memories. We will have new traditions. We will have new experiences that slowly loosen the grip of the old ones, even places that are inextricably connected to your ex. You may visit them the first time and it’s just all your ex there, the associations. But then you go again with a friend and it creates some new ones.

And then you go a third time, and maybe by the third or fourth time it doesn’t feel like it belongs to your ex anymore. It’s like you’ve reclaimed it. It’s yours again. And that’s true of your life too. We may have this idea that our best experiences are behind us, that the world was our ex and the world without our ex is nothing.

But actually the world beyond your ex is just as big, if not bigger than your world with them. What has happened is deeply painful, but don’t convince yourself that that means that all of your best experiences are behind you. It is essential to remain hopeful and to remain curious about the things that hasn’t happened in your life yet, not just heartbroken about the things that have happened.

The fourth kind of heartbreak that is uniquely devastating is the one you didn’t see coming. Maybe someone you thought was happy and who you were happy with suddenly tells you they haven’t been happy for a long time, and it floors you to find this out. Maybe you even are on the other end of the avoidant discard when somebody just changes overnight and discards you.

And when this happens, we’re not just grieving. We are struggling to comprehend what the hell has happened in our life. Our reality feels shattered. We didn’t see it coming. We feel like we’ve been living some other reality while this person has been living their reality. We don’t even know how to begin to process what they are telling us.

We start racing through questions in our mind like, are they going to come back? Are they going to change their mind? Should I wait around for them? I don’t know what. How is this even happening? And if they don’t come back, what does that mean to. Am I finding a new apartment? Am I moving to a different city?

Do I have to sell my house? Or am I going to tell my friends and family yet it becomes this embarrassing thing that I don’t. How do I talk to people about it? What do I even say to people about this? Did I should I tell people about it now because I don’t even know if it’s real and I don’t want to.

I don’t want to publicly end this relationship, but this person seems to have actually left. The sheer amount of unknowns and overwhelm and the daunting nature of all these things that you haven’t even had a moment to process creates panic. It can create extreme anxiety and emotional paralysis. And to add to that feeling of loneliness we feel in our emotional paralysis.

There’s the fact that often in these situations, the other person becomes unrecognizable. They become someone who was yesterday, our best friend, our confidant, the person we could rely on, the person we loved, the person that our whole life was mapped out with. And today they are like a perfect stranger, cold, emotionless. It’s like their memory has been erased.

It can make us feel like we can never trust what we see or hear or feel in a relationship again. Our future evaporates overnight. In this situation, we have to do a number of things. The first is just slow down. At a time when everything feels sped up. Certainly their process is at lightning speed, incomprehensible speed. We have to slow down.

Okay. Something has happened with them that I don’t understand. There has been such a lack of communication along the way that this has just dropped a bomb on my life unexpectedly. But that doesn’t mean I have to move fast now. I am not going to do anything right now that will make life harder for me. I’m not going to race to try and move on or beg for them back, or do anything that would harm my view of myself, because there’s a temptation to just go and hook up or do something or whatever.

And we know those things are just going to make us feel worse about ourselves. Instead, we can slow down and say, I am not responsible for the way that this person has left. And by the way, the way that they have left in some ways is a very clear indication of one way that this person is a bad partner to be with.

Because in a healthy relationship, someone does communicate. The day of the breakup isn’t the first time you hear about all of the ways that they were unhappy, and know that this won’t always be the headline of your life. This is a headline right now, but in reality you will move on from this. But right now, as a bomb has hit your life, there are going to be all sorts of things that you’re going to need to address.

Practicalities. Uncertainty about what it all means. Surrendering to that. Going slow and taking life. One day, sometimes even one hour at a time, is what is going to get you through. By the way, if this has happened to you, there’s a good chance that you’re going through so much shock and so much pain and grief and disorientation right now that you haven’t even begun to process this, let alone be able to hear any practical advice about what to do next.

In fact, there’s so much more I want to say about each one of these scenarios that I haven’t been able to say in this video. We have already cut this video down from the one hour video. It could have been to the 15 or so minutes that this video actually is. But that is exactly why I’m taking five whole days to spend with anyone in this audience who is heartbroken right now.

Whether you are in acute heartbreak, in other words, it just happened, and it’s at the most extreme levels of pain right now. Or whether you’re in chronic heartbreak, which is the kind of heartbreak we experience when we’re struggling to move on from someone or a situation, even many months or many years after it has happened. If we don’t do the right things, acute heartbreak turns into chronic heartbreak, by the way, which is one of the things I want to save so many of you from.

On five days, two men, so you’ll know if this is right for you. You can sign up at MendWeek.com. I’ll leave a link below. Until then. I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Stay strong. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. Take life 15 minutes at a time if you have to. And I’ll be with you really, really soon.

*This transcript was whipped up with the help of AI. While it does a pretty impressive job, it may have the occasional typo, mix-up, or moment of creative interpretation. If you spot anything that looks a little . . . adventurous . . . thanks for your patience (and your sense of humor).*