How To Break Someone’s Heart

If you expect their love to make you believe in your own worthiness and—when it inevitably doesn’t—you blame them for not making you happy, you will break them.

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You will break someone’s heart if you regard them as your own entertainment. If you need them to curb your loneliness or for them to provide you with excitement, you will break someone’s heart. If they are nothing more than a source of lust or happiness or fleeting exhilaration, then that is what they will be: fleeting. You will leave your lover’s heart broken if you see them as someone who is required to provide your joy and happiness, instead of someone who you are building a life with.

You will break someone’s heart if you forget they are a person who has their own desires, needs, and thoughts. If you expect them to be a certain way based off your own needs, desires, and thoughts, and you do not allow yourself to fall in love with who they are, instead of who you want them to be. If you hold them to your standards instead of discovering them and knowing them, you will break their heart. You will fall out of love and drown in the expectations you have unwittingly flung onto them.

You will break someone’s heart if you do not commit to them fully, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. If you constantly compare them to your past or to new people that you meet and you let the absence of newness tell you that there is absence of love, then you will break their heart. If you’d rather pursue the spark of something new, instead of the endurance of committed love and if you’d rather be known superficially instead of known deeply, then their heart will break.

You will break someone’s heart if you stop growing as a person, if you become a victim to your life’s circumstance, if you blame them for every problem. If you put your happiness or your well-being into their hands and forget that humans are fallible and not always the best at holding other people’s hearts gently, then you will break them. You will break someone if you do not take responsibility fully for your own life. If your dependence on them consumes you and you allow yourself to be swayed by the tides of their moods and you make your love all about what you can get out of it, then you will break their heart.

You will break someone’s heart if you do not know how to fight for yourself and how to fight for the love you’ve built together. If every disagreement and misstep results in your giving up, then your love will be given up eventually. If you do not know how to fight for the other person and to forgive and to be grateful for them even when it’s not easy to fight, to forgive, or to be grateful, then you will break their heart. You will break yourself.

You will break someone’s heart if you expect your life to be perfect and complete with them in it. If you expect that you will never be lonely or sad or disappointed or frustrated or angry or hurt or if you expect that you never have to say sorry or humble yourself or be selfless, then you will be disappointed all for the sake of the false expectation you have of love. If your expectations for love are that someone else exists to complete your life, then they will never be able to fulfill that role.

You will break someone’s heart if you think that their love will supplant the love you lack for yourself. If you expect their love to make you believe in your own worthiness and—when it inevitably doesn’t—you blame them for not making you happy, you will break them. If you want their love and affection and lust to give your body value and to heal your wounds, you will break someone’s heart. You will give them an impossible task. You will set them up to fail in your eyes. And you will not understand who they are and what they can offer you outside of the validation you seek. If you do not allow them to show you who they are and you fall in love with how they make you feel, not what you two can do together in the name of love, then you will break their heart. It will be inevitable.

You will break someone’s heart if you forget that love takes tenderness and care and requires the willingness to build it, to cultivate it, and to make it anew. If you think that love does not regenerate, that there is not power in commitment, that two people cannot endure beyond the pettiness and wasted grievances, then hearts will be broken. If you do not believe love is a choice you have to show up to every day and if love starts to become something you have to work at and you resent it for that, then you will break someone’s heart. If you think love should sustain you and your happiness and you put those expectations onto them, you will have no choice but to break their heart.

You will break someone’s heart if you fall in love with someone’s potential and then blame them for not living up to it. You will break someone’s heart if you fall in love with the changed version of them you have in your head, instead of the version they are, right now, in this moment. You will break someone’s heart if you expect them to be anyone other than who they are and you don’t allow them to grow into anyone else except the person you expect them to be. You will break someone’s heart if you fall in love with a cliche, if you fall in love with a romantic comedy, if you base love off the tired tropes of Hollywood.

You will break someone’s heart if you do not let it be what it is meant to be. And, you will break your own heart if you allow yourself to limit what love can do by expecting it to be what you need for it to be.

If you let love grow and change and if you find love in the grand and small moments alike and you build a love together without dependency and because you see something beautiful within the two of your hearts combined, then you will not break a heart. If you keep choosing that love every day and you fight for it and you let it morph into what it needs to be, you will not break a heart. If you let it endure, two hearts will remain unbroken. Thought Catalog Logo Mark