‘I have found the paradox that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.’– Mother Teresa
There has been a spate of news regarding break-ups of prominent figures in the entertainment world and of celebrity couples that have fed the imagination of many, especially the lovelorn. It may be that people find this a welcome diversion from the many problems besetting our country that they read about all the time. I myself am weary of the economic woes and political bickering that I welcome any other type of news.
Many of us have experienced heartbreak, romantic or otherwise, at one point in our lives.

There are many love stories that ended unhappily involving famous people in history.
The love stories of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais, and Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera are some of these. We know how Anne Boleyn literally lost her head after her far from faithful husband accused her of infidelity and sent her to the guillotine. On the other hand, Napoleon and Josephine’s love appeared to have endured despite multiple affairs, tempestuous fights and divorce. The great love story of our national hero was never fated to be as his sweetheart’s family married her off to an Englishman while Rizal was in Europe for his medical studies. In local tinseltown, just months ago, we read about the break-up of reel and real love teams Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla, and Kim Chiu and Xian Lim.
A heartbreak can adversely affect one’s health. When someone tells you to “take care of your heart,” you have to heed the advice seriously. In the article “How Does Heartbreak Affect Your Overall Health?” https://www.healthline.com/, Courtney Nesbitt, L.C.S.W. wrote: “I believe 100 percent that a broken heart and emotional pain can negatively affect physical health.” He said “heartbreak can lead to appetite changes, lack of motivation, weight loss or weight gain, overeating, headaches, stomach pain, and a general sense of being unwell.”

The Nobel prizewinning novelist Saul Bellow put it more pithily and elegantly when he wrote, “More die of heartbreak than of radiation,” in his comically entertaining study of love in the postmodern age (More Die of Heartbreak, Penguin Modern Classics, 2007). It turns out Bellow was not merely being poetic, he was also eerily accurate. Many scientific studies have been done to investigate the question of whether people can actually die of heartbreak. A recent one, conducted at Johns Hopkins University and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that a person’s risk of death from heart attack significantly increases following a loved one’s death. They even have a name for it — broken heart syndrome.
The linkage between heartbreak and death appears to hinge on a flood of stress hormones that hampers the heart’s ability to pump. And high levels of stress leads to a host of other ills — gastrointestinal problems, lowered immune response, anxiety disorders and depression.
We are driven to seek relationships as a panacea to anxiety but ironically may create the very complications they were intended to remedy. Such is the irrationality of love.
For those who have suffered heartbreak, the choice is either to wallow in one’s misery or to channel one’s energy to activities that would improve one’s self. The reality is that even after we experience the loss of a loved one, whether by death or break-up, the odds are we will eventually recover because we are such resilient creatures.
I believe that a breakup is just one of the many disappointments that we all face. Many times it teaches us a lesson in choosing a partner, in knowing a person well enough before committing to make him your “one and only.” This is also a lesson in trust. It takes time to really fathom one’s feelings about trusting another person so we must not really hurry things. When you are young, you immediately follow what you feel which changes many times like a flick of a finger.
I would guess these movie couples only went into a relationship just to satisfy viewers or their fans or to ramp up their ratings in the ticket world. Then when reality bites, they decide to break up regardless of what effect it would have on their popularity.
In the end, one chooses whoever one likes, come what may. Then you go to the next phase: mend your broken heart or move on to a new love perhaps for a new break-up or for a “till death do us part” episode.
Such is life for after all. Life is a Spiral!!
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(Email: nenyregino@yahoo.com)