A lot of us have experienced this, but...
Has this happened to you?
You are in a relationship.
You are in love.
The other person breaks up with you, and you never saw it coming.
You feel devastated.
And so, you listen to music, and you drown your sorrows in sad love songs, with lyrics like "my heart is broken" or "how can I go on?"
I have. I bet many of us have.
But it never occurred to me, until recently, to think about those songs and imagine someone listening to them in response to the hurt that I caused her!
I posted here a while ago about an old high school girlfriend finding me on social media, after a 50 year period in which we had not heard from each other. We had started dating toward the end of my senior year of high school. She was a sophomore. But when I came home from college for a break during the fall semester, I broke up with her, as I felt I had outgrown her.
Our recent interactions have been friendly, and we have had some very good conversations and exchanges of email. It has been a good experience for both of us. (No, she has not been carrying a torch for me all these years, and no she certainly is not holding a grudge! She has a full life, with a happy marriage, a wonderful daughter, and a fulfilling career. )
But one thing she told me, that I could not have known at the time, is that while I was dating her, she was being physically and emotionally abused at home. At the age of 16, she had been counting on me, her first boyfriend, to marry her and rescue her from all that.
I had no idea.
Of course, many 16-year-olds naively expect their first boyfriend to be "the one", but in her case the stakes were a lot higher than for many other girls her age.
While I do not feel "guilty" for what I did, learning what her reality was like at the time has gotten me to think more about what effect my actions had had on her. And I thought about the popular songs on the radio at the time (the year was 1970) which were of the type I mentioned at the beginning of this post. She must have listened to them.
They sound different to me now.
You are in a relationship.
You are in love.
The other person breaks up with you, and you never saw it coming.
You feel devastated.
And so, you listen to music, and you drown your sorrows in sad love songs, with lyrics like "my heart is broken" or "how can I go on?"
I have. I bet many of us have.
But it never occurred to me, until recently, to think about those songs and imagine someone listening to them in response to the hurt that I caused her!
I posted here a while ago about an old high school girlfriend finding me on social media, after a 50 year period in which we had not heard from each other. We had started dating toward the end of my senior year of high school. She was a sophomore. But when I came home from college for a break during the fall semester, I broke up with her, as I felt I had outgrown her.
Our recent interactions have been friendly, and we have had some very good conversations and exchanges of email. It has been a good experience for both of us. (No, she has not been carrying a torch for me all these years, and no she certainly is not holding a grudge! She has a full life, with a happy marriage, a wonderful daughter, and a fulfilling career. )
But one thing she told me, that I could not have known at the time, is that while I was dating her, she was being physically and emotionally abused at home. At the age of 16, she had been counting on me, her first boyfriend, to marry her and rescue her from all that.
I had no idea.
Of course, many 16-year-olds naively expect their first boyfriend to be "the one", but in her case the stakes were a lot higher than for many other girls her age.
While I do not feel "guilty" for what I did, learning what her reality was like at the time has gotten me to think more about what effect my actions had had on her. And I thought about the popular songs on the radio at the time (the year was 1970) which were of the type I mentioned at the beginning of this post. She must have listened to them.
They sound different to me now.
