Love songs are unbearable since my divorce

Is the romantic in me dead, or simply older and wiser? A Valentine's Day contemplation.

One day in my mid-20s, in between boyfriends and not long after recovering from a heartbreak, my late best friend Faye said to me, “Remember how you used to play those Ella Fitzgerald songs incessantly, just immersed in your sadness?”

“I did? I don’t remember.” By then, my innate romanticism had returned. All I saw ahead of me were sunny days and some unmet boy who would steal my heart again.

Faye laughed. “Don’t ever change, Amy.”

Now, decades later, I know that I have changed. Since I initiated my divorce in September 2022, I cannot listen to love songs. That it was my choice to end my marriage does not make it any easier to hear those strains of requited love, the exquisitely painful sound of longing being returned in equal measure. Blissfully happy love songs are the worst. The naivete of it! The innocence that will inevitably have to be crushed. This is the mind and heart of the skeptic and when I hear my bitterness, I am a stranger to myself.

I have been in love with love since I was twelve years old and dreamt that the boy I had a crush on would ask me out on a rollerskating date. My early diaries are full of longing when a desired boy brushed his hand against mine in class (accidentally, but still, I took it as a sign), lists of boys I liked in huge block letters, and at 14, with a rash of pimples across my face, an anguished cry, “Will any boy love me now?”

At 28, after breakups with two serious boyfriends (who shared the same first name, a warning I should perhaps have heeded) and a brief rebound affair with a sexy carpenter, I was desperate for Romance to deliver the goods: the man I would marry, the lacy bridal dress, the tossing of the bouquet and the beginning of my “real life.”

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

Cupid heard me, and delivered the fairytale wedding the following year. My ex-husband and I had a sweet love story for a long time—until things began to sour. Slowly I began to question whether my love affair with Romance had been misguided all along. Decades into my marriage, I kept returning to its promise. With enough persistence and patience, I believed I could fix what was wrong. Love would come to my rescue and romance would be kindled once more.

Now, at 63, the flames of Romance are barely flickering embers, and I don’t want a love song reminding me of what could have been. My coach has gently suggested that I take it slow, listen for a few minutes to a love song and cry healing tears. But crying terrifies me and I usually run from it, as I’ve written about before.

Friends who have come to know me as a hopeless romantic will no doubt smile at these words, certain it’s only a matter of time before I’m listening to Ella again.

I am not sure I want to return to that old romantic self. I think it’s time to redefine Romance, and perhaps love itself. And here that voice of unconditional love that I have learned to listen to through the daily practice of writing letters from love with

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

speaks to me as I ask Love, What would you have me know today about how I have loved and lost in romantic partnerships?

Darling girl, let me stop you right there. When you say "loved and lost," I want to gently remind you that no matter how sad or wrenching the ending of a romantic relationship might have been, you always gained something in return. No experience of love will ever leave you untouched, dear one.  The love of another leaves its imprint on you and that is a gift, every time, even if it doesn't feel like it, even if you can't recognize it as a gift because the loss is all you feel, all you can see.

I know, little butterfly, my wanderer, my seeker, that you are deeply afraid that you will never experience a romantic relationship again. Let me hold that fear and anguish and worry for you. Give it your Love of Deepest Understanding. You cry out to yourself when you cannot sleep, "What have I done?" when you think about how you chose to leave your marriage and are alone now.

You rowed away from the island you inhabited with him all those years because you felt an absence of love the way you wished it to be. Let me remind you that the most important voice of love—the one within you—was there all along. As loneliness wrapped itself around you, a blanket that gave no comfort, I whispered to to you: "Go. It is enough to want to go. You have my permission if you need it."

I know, sweetheart, that you think you know nothing of romantic love anymore, that you had been so wrong about it. You no longer trust your instincts. You will find the capacity to dare to love again. I know that right now the risks seem too great, the potential for hurt outweighing the promise of joy.

Dragonfly of the brightest hues, you ARE love. You can trust that love is alive for you in ways you might not expect. Your capacity to love another wholly and vulnerably is within you. You have not lost the capacity. It sits nestled within you, this beautiful part of yourself. One day it will unfurl, bringing forth your full radiance. Until that day, you and I will continue to walk the path together, hand in hand, alive to the idea that Love is all around us.

I can also imagine this wise voice telling me that romantic love is but one kind of love and that the love all around me is where I should focus my attention this Valentine’s Day. There are so many layers of love in my life, one big luscious velvet layer cake.

There is the love of family, especially for and from my daughters. My eldest, Marielle, recently reminded me of childhood Valentine Days when she and her younger sister Sara came to the breakfast table to find heart-shaped plates bearing cupcakes with red frosting, bags of candy hearts and a Valentine’s card for each of them. “You taught us that Valentine’s Day was about celebrating family love, that it was about celebrating all kinds of love,” she told me. I learned that tradition from my own mother, who never forgot to give Valentine’s day cards to her children and grandchildren.

There is the love of friends, the most enduring love stories in my life, these women who have seen me through the worst and the happiest of times. It makes me understand Liz Gilbert when she says in this wonderful interview on

Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe

, “The Warm Pudding Hum Of Well Being” “I now have a belief that everything that I was ever looking for in one romantic partner can only be found for me in a group of women. I really need a coven. It doesn't take a village, it takes a coven. Or a convent. All of us together. It's so precious. I think that's just going to deepen as time goes by. I hope so, because it feels right in my heart.”

There is the love of self, where it must all begin and end. Coming home to myself over these past couple of years of deep soul-level work has helped me to appreciate how important it is be anchored in my own compassionate self-regard. That is not always easy. We humans are hard on ourselves, quick to find fault, to declare ourselves unlovable.

David Whyte

captures it perfectly in his poem, “Admit.”

Admit,
your distant love affair is with yourself,
and that no one can play harder to get:
the unwritten letters, the plays for time,
the heartbreak over never being properly answered.
That coy look of false seduction in the mirror,
or that hard look to hide what should not be hidden.

The invitation to undoing, and allowing yourself to want at last

what you feel you never deserved,
the fervent wish to come closer,
and the loving word of understanding you say to yourself
when you finally admit to it all,
the only declaration that counts.

Not least, there is love for the world. It is here that love of self and love of the world must meet. As

Sarah Blondin

has written so beautifully in her book, Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love, “Love of the self is to reach out and take our own hand.”

One of the ways Sarah connects with love for the world is through nature. That is true for me, too, when my bare feet are in the sand, the ocean waves curling around me and I sweep my gaze towards a limitless sky. As Sarah writes: “To the crickets and the birds who sing our world into harmony. To the flowers that wish to sit on my windowsill, the trees that grow to reach the most sunlight. To the grass that sways and soothes. To the webs the spider tirelessly builds overnight only to be torn down in the daylight. To the life that pulses in exaltation below my feet every day that I am alive. To the portal it offers into a remembrance of our wholeness. To our source of unconditional love.”

Mary Oliver, in her poem, “Of Love,” speaks of this love of the world, too:

Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some—now carry my revelation with you—
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world—its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself—I imagine
this is how it began.

I think it was no coincidence that Marielle shared this horoscope with me today as I was writing this essay. In this quiet, nesting phase of My Chrysalis Year, the Aries in me appreciates the reminder: “I am my first audience.”

And so, on this Valentine’s Day, I decide that the Romantic in me isn’t dead. I am in a necessary period of healing, creativity and reinvention, and love is the foundation of all of it. I will, as Miley Cyrus sings, buy myself flowers. I will take myself out on a date this week to listen to the soaring music of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Gershwin’s “American in Paris,” and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” with the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra. And when I emerge from hibernation , I just might be ready to listen to love songs again.

Question for the comments: What are your favorite love songs? And has there ever been a time in your life when they were too painful to listen to?

Three Songs for 3D

Divorce

“The Masquerade is Over,” Nancy Wilson

Dementia

“My Funny Valentine,” Ella Fitzgerald

Destiny

“Love,” John Lennon