Heart break is a trauma peculiar to the modern age. While in the past one generally had a guarantee that their romantic partner would live and die with them, the breaking up of relationships is now the norm. The effect of this is neither inconsequential nor non-negligible, yet we rarely analyze it as a social ill, practically discounting heartbreak as not a real problem deserving of a solution. Yet the costs of heartbreak are tangible and for a majority of people heartbreak plays a role in the onset of mental disorders, a decreased pleasure from love and romance, and an eternal fear of ever becoming attached and letting someone else have power over your emotional state. As such, we withdraw from each other, pursuing sexual relations as though the emotional element might be sanitized. Recovery from heartbreak changes a person, and while they might come out better for it in certain material ways, there will always linger that unease at being asked to trust someone.

We avoid bringing up our own heartbreak for the simple fact that we don’t want to appear weak, and it’s true that we find people who go on about how girls have done them wrong to be annoying. Yet it occurs frequently enough that most of our music is guys singing about how girls have hurt them and girls singing about how that guy didn’t break her heart (and honey, everyone can tell you’re just putting on a front of being tough). We’ve all drunk dialed a past partner in a moment of weakness and the futile hope it will inspire them to come back. The ultimate effect is an estrangement of the sexes. Neither wants to let the other too close, lest they become attached. Game theoretically, we have defined the victory conditions of our romantic relationships as “Didn’t get hurt” which usually translates to “Hurt them before they could hurt me.” We have been conditioned and incentivized to act with callous disregard towards the hurt feelings of our partners, to shrug them off and pursue someone new as though it were just like trying a new look.

Each sex is suspicious of the other, and the assumption that the relationship will end, while simultaneously continuing it as though it might end in a lifelong marriage, alienates the self from his most primal urges to belong to another, to have another to protect and call his own. Heartbreak is an epidemic and it has a substantial effect on intersexual relations which are decidedly negative. We meet at the club and go home with each other in order to gain the sense that someone loves us, but it is only a kind of temporary exchange of concern, since the notion of building a life together is precluded by the atomizing conditions by which we are socialized. Everything is designed to break up young lovers, high school sweethearts. In order to get a job you need a degree, and this will usually require moving away from each other which means the end of the relationship. As college finishes and graduate studies or a career calls, the likelihood of being able to find jobs which allow for the compatibility of the relationship over that time is practically nil. By the time a person is ready to marry, having obtained a degree and a steady form of employment which can fit a marriage, we are in our upper 20’s and lower 30’s, a full decade past the prime point for marrying someone and building a life together. Instead, we are sold a quest of self-actualization that is supposed to be achieved through travel and drunken, half-remembered sexual encounters with girls we can’t remember the name of.

And it’s only rational to act this way, after all. Why become emotionally invested in a person who is destined to be a fleeting memory from a past self whom we can no longer identify with? As the person recovers from their heartbreak, a lot in them changes. He becomes wiser but colder, more compassionate but crueler, more aware but more indifferent. If he has any latent psychological irregularities, they may be born or exacerbated in the harrowing post-breakup weeks in which She dominates his every thought. She remains ever after as a ghost, yet unreal; alienated from our past self that loved this person, we can no longer empathize with our past love of that person, and so She becomes a simulacrum in our memories. She was, in the end, only a figment of our imagination, a signified whose sign we no longer trust. The individual, dissociated from his past self and his past love, senses in love not a release but a fundamental unreality.

Does not heartbreak count as a real cost of our system? And if so, how does that reflect on the system’s penchant for extending adolescence to our late 20’s? The system of serial monogamy normalized in our society has differing effects on each sex. The time investment by a woman burns up precious sexual capital, as the prime attractiveness of a woman (and, by extension, her best chance at receiving the commitment of a better man) declines precipitously around the age of 30 (some would even argue 25 is  too late for marriageable material). For men, whose sexual value tends to accumulate up to middle age, serial monogamy doesn’t tend to impose such a cost, but it induces a callousness as he comes to understand the dark side of Woman revealed at every breakup, whether initiated by him or her. The result is that women tend to marry around the age of 30 to men who will never be able to initiate the arousal those first half dozen men who withheld commitment, and men either pursue a voracious bachelorhood or retreat from the pretense of sexual relations. More heartbreak, fewer happy families. Is this really a cost worth bearing in the name of sexual equality and liberation? Maybe, maybe not, but that it is a cost is beyond dispute.