When Love Just Won’t Work

“You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t.”

~Bonnie Raitt,

I Can’t Make You Love Me (1991)

Love is a game that two people play, and one cannot do for the other what the other won’t do. This is incredibly sad news for the infatuated, the lonely, the fatigued, the neglected, and the abused. They are controlled; i.e., from without. Love, in this way, is only good when we are in control.

When love just won’t work there is a shattering reality that we cannot bear, but one that will not go away. It remains there waiting patiently for us to give it more than a fleeting glance. Then there is a process of grieving; of love had but now gone, or perhaps love that once promised but never came. Whatever it is, it is loss we feel.

Within my realm of experience there are few people who haven’t been touched deeply by the scourge of love gone wrong; a love that didn’t work out.

The Corpus Of Emotion In Love

Something that takes us to the zenith of both exhilaration and despair, love, especially as it relates to love gone wrong, leaves us reeling for what to do. It sends us out on a journey, without lunch, and we depart without sight of the destination. It’s a journey we do not want to take. Yet we have no choice—or it seems that way.

The total gamut of emotion in love, especially as it goes wrong, the full compendium, is as big as the stars.

In the early going, where love’s gone wrong, life is hell. Living like we have part of us severed, a part linked with our heart, seems numbing yet just cruel. We have lost, or lost control over, a vital part of our identities. Surely how this feels is worse than death... surely! Surely death couldn’t be any worse. But still, there is too much to live for; the hope, however distant, remains. We are desperate to change our reality, but we dream one hundred times a day about something we can’t have. Little wonder we become depressed.

The Redemptive Qualities In Love Gone Wrong

At such a shocking time we can be forgiven for losing sight of hope.

The reality is we lose sight of hope irregularly but frequently during such a phase. But there are redemptive qualities in love gone wrong, if we can just hold on with some form of brave openness of heart.

The paradox is we may realise a strange comfort within our forlornness. Our sense for jealousy, that entrenches us in bitterness, may compete with the openness required to go a new way. We need to endeavour to get over the negativity, but never forcefully. We just need to perceive hope, however hard that is.

But just like our love went wrong, and beyond our control, we cannot force our hearts to accept something they won’t. All we can do is place the redemptive quality of love ever before the heart, such that it would entertain a new way of feeling.

The heart may feel differently when it’s ready.

Things can and do change regarding love, and the grief process involved in love gone wrong. We do recover, eventually. And when we do, the depths of pain have enriched our sense for love. We are somehow better for the experience.

***

When love has gone wrong we struggle for hope. We enter our dark night of the soul. Yet in those dark nights is contained meaning for future love, if we have the resilience of hope compelling us to endure. And endure we must. We must hope for something better.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.