YOUR CRYING HEART NEEDS A FIX

It was just before daybreak on the last day of November, and there had been showers the night before. From the balcony of the fifth floor apartment, the taxicab that pulled up on the curb looked exactly like a child’s toy, its lights rippling red and yellow reflections in the puddles on the street below. Perhaps it was the unusual clarity of the hour skewing things ever so slightly toward the surreal. Perhaps it was exhaustion and lack of sleep. A chalky grey light was leaning west from somewhere beneath the horizon, sliding over sea and onto the cinderblock walls and angled hedges along the coast. I reached out a palm, but to my surprise, I felt no rain.

We rode the elevator down in silence. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, her eyes rimmed in liner. We sat two feet apart in the back seat, our hands not touching. Somewhere along the East Coast Parkway expressway, I watched the tiny silhouette of a crow fly across the spreading light.

“Don’t drink,” she said finally as Airport Boulevard hummed beneath the car.

“I won’t.”

Changi Airport was a vast coming and going of people. The departure area was swollen with raw-knuckled, sleepless, leathery skinned journeyers. I was about to head for the boarding area when she stopped me. “There is packet of lozenges in your luggage,” she said. “In case your throat starts to hurt again.” We hugged and said our good-byes. We had lived together for 18 years. Maybe we felt an obligation to comfort each other. Maybe we were both scared.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

Then the automatic doors opened, and sunlight slashed an amber beam between our shoes, and we went our separate ways. I never saw her again after that.

My third marriage ended in spectacular coincidence with the sparklers and carols of the 2017 Christmas holidays, when I relapsed into alcohol addiction, flipped my car over a concrete safety barrier, and spiraled headlong into a 40-foot-deep ditch.

Unlike my previous partners, with whom I had shared no more than two or three years, my third wife was running away from nearly two decades of lies, failure, false starts, and broken promises. There was nothing I could do or say to make her change her mind.

The thing that bewilders most people about divorce is that, even at its most heartrending moment, the separation itself is often not the most agonizing part.

If you have no children together, no shared wealth over which you might initiate a legal squabble, the pain of uncoupling can be protracted and lonely. You pick your way through the smoking wreckage alone.

***

In 2010, the American Physiological Society published a study that detailed how the regions of the brain involved in falling in love are also those that foster cocaine addiction [1]. The research team behind the paper was led by the biological anthropologist, Dr. Helen Fisher.

The word people associate with Fisher’s work today is “love,” but it could just as easily be “heartbreak.” She was a senior research fellow at both The Kinsey Institute and Rutgers University when the paper, “Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love,” was published. She had first gained recognition in the mid-2000s, when her research on the biological basis of love began to receive serious attention from the scientific community.

For this study, Fisher and her team had set out to examine the brain activity of people who hadn’t moved on from recent breakups. The study methodology was fairly straightforward. The researchers would take fMRI images of each subject’s brain as the person viewed a photo of their rejecter. They would then take another image while the subject viewed a photo of a neutral acquaintance.

Fifteen college students, ten women and five men, had agreed to participate as subjects. The researchers began taking the images in 2001. By the time the scans were completed, they had taken a total of 2,500 fMRI images.

The results of the team’s evaluations supported Fisher’s long-held assumptions about the survival-oriented premise of love. “Romantic love appears to be a drive as powerful as hunger,” Fisher wrote in an essay for The New Scientist in 2004, while the study was in progress [2]. “No wonder people around the world live – and die – for love.”

Human beings have an innate need for acceptance. We physically crave it, according to Fisher. The neural circuits that drive our desire to be loved are the same as those that propel our other survival behaviors.

“Activation of areas [of the brain] involved in cocaine addiction may help explain the obsessive behaviors associated with rejection in love,” the research team wrote [1, p. 51].

Love may be universal, but as far as addictions go, it’s strictly niche. Fisher says many psychologists even hesitate to call it an addiction because it isn’t a pathological disorder. The brain activity associated with habitual drug use is purely incidental, as it turns out. But because love affects people just like an addiction, the consequences of rejection can be as painful as the physical pangs of drug and alcohol withdrawal.

Heartbreak lights up the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate. These same regions of the brain hum like beehives when you have a bad toothache, according to Fisher. The difference is that you do not have recourse to an extraction. The pain can go on for weeks, months, even years without a moment’s relief.

All the subjects in the study said that they thought about their rejecters practically throughout their waking hours. They also admitted to difficulty controlling their emotions since their breakups.

“One girl hadn’t left her bed for three days,” Fisher told Slate in 2021 [3]. “Other people came in looking very bedraggled. One person even cried so hard in the scanner that we couldn’t use the data.”

***

People who are dumped often find themselves in a disastrous love triangle between the beloved, the old self, and the new, repentant self. There is just one pocket of misery, though, and it is on you.

When someone has wronged you, and you both know you were wronged, you feel shame for wanting that person back. Yet, over time, you may find it harder and harder to resist the impulse to seek a compromise. Parley must still be possible, you tell yourself. Surely, you say, surely, it’s worth one more shot. Begging is what happens next.

“Rejected lovers also relapse the way drug addicts do,” Fisher says. “Long after the romantic relationship has ended, events, people, places, even songs can trigger the lover’s cravings and initiative obsessive thinking.” [4]

There are as many ways to approach to this self-inflicted humiliation as there are roads to the addict’s next high; and very few ways to resist once the urge has taken hold.

In Greek mythology, Echo, a nymph, fell deeply in love with the striking young hunter, Narcissus. The young man, however, was too self-absorbed to notice. Rejected and distraught, Echo willingly withered away, leaving only her voice behind. Narcissus’ fate was no less dreadful: staring at his reflection in the pond, spellbound, he was transformed into a daffodil. Ignoring Echo, he chose instead the impossible love of his own ego, and he wasted away with an unreciprocated passion for himself.

I had first heard the story when I was six. The mental picture of two people fading into shadows of their former selves horrified me. To gradually dissolve into a whisper seemed to me a punishment worse than dying. Love, I thought, must be an evil thing if it causes you to inflict so much grief on yourself.

Yet Fisher insists that loving is the best thing that people do. “We are born to love,” she says. “This feeling of elation that we call romantic love is deeply embroidered into the human brain.” [5]

Of course, it is easy enough to dismiss the whole matter of love and heartbreak as trivial. Most adults have their hearts broken at one point or another during their lives. On the outside, a heartbroken person looks no less healthy than everybody else. But a broken heart can be a lethal injury.

For a long time, genomics researcher, Steve Cole, didn’t think so. He was once among those who had no interest in the tribulations of the heartbroken. Up until the 1990s, he had been more interested in studying viruses than heartbreak.

That changed when Cole joined a group of epidemiologists and psychologists investigating why some HIV-positive gay men were dying at a faster rate than others [6]. He studied blood samples from more than 70 HIV-positive gay men over eight years. He found that closeted men with HIV got sick two to three years earlier than openly gay HIV-positive men.

In his research, Cole found that the nervous systems of closeted gay men were more easily stressed by social situations. That meant these men produced more norepinephrine, a hormone that triggers the fight-or-flight response. This hormone made T cells more vulnerable to HIV, causing the virus to replicate faster.

Today, Cole is a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and biobehavioral sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is also the founder of an emerging field called social genomics. His research investigates how social environments influence gene expression by cancer, viral, and immune cell genomes.

Cole’s views on heartbreak have changed since the 1990s. In a phone interview with the science writer, Florence Williams, he described heartbreak as “one of the hidden landmines” in human relationships.

“Our bodies want what they want, warmth and the feeling of being understood by a partner, and now it’s not there,” Cole said. “Shock and panic set in.” [7]

The most intimate obsession your heart knows is with your brain. The heart and the brain send messages to each other like sweethearts. The carotid artery sends blood from the heart to the brain in continual correspondence. In the sudden, silent mental chaos of heartbreak, the cardiovascular electrical system can go haywire. The electrical malfunction can halt the heart's pumping action, depriving the body of blood. Without immediate intervention, the cessation of life’s most essential rhythm can lead to sudden death.

In late 2004, Japanese doctors noticed an unusual number of women complaining of chest pains in hospital emergency rooms. The doctors had hooked the women up to ECG monitors. They saw the same dangerous physical symptoms they’d seen in heart attacks.

But subsequent tests revealed that, unlike typical cases of cardiac arrest, the women’s coronary arteries were not blocked. Instead, their hearts had changed shape.

The diagnosis was takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome.” The increase in hospital admissions due to takotsubo cardiomyopathy came a month after the Chūetsu earthquake on October 23rd. The 6.6 magnitude tremor had caused significant damage in the Niigata Prefecture. Nearly 5,000 people suffered injuries. Sixty-eight people died during the earthquake. The whole of Japan was in mourning.

Death from takotsubo cardiomyopathy itself is rare, but it happens. Heartbreak weakens the heart. Some studies show that people who are chronically stressed by relationships are more prone to heart attacks and strokes [8]. In another study, researchers reviewed 20 previous cases of broken heart syndrome complicated with cardiac rupture. In 17 of the cases that the researchers reviewed, the patients had died of heart problems associated with the condition [9].

The term "takotsubo" comes from the Japanese word for an octopus trap. To Japanese fishermen, the visual analogy is obvious. The most common physiological abnormality in cases of takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a swelling of the lower left part of the ventricle. During contraction, this bulging ventricle resembles a tako-tsubo, a pot that Japanese fishermen use to trap octopuses. A deeper understanding of this physiological change is leading researchers to take a deeper look into the biological consequences of heartbreak.

***

Kingdom Animalia provides a surplus of laboratory analogs for the human corpus. And scientists have investigated no species in this teeming diversity more extensively than the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

The reason is simple. The fruit fly’s short lifespan and genetic resemblance to humans make them an ideal substratum for studying human diseases and neurobiology. Despite the simplicity of their physiology, fruit flies share about 60 percent of their genes with humans. They have a short life cycle of about 10 days, allowing for rapid generation turnover and quick observation of genetic changes.

Flies are also cheap. As far as laboratory subjects go, Drosophila melanogaster flies require little maintenance. Scientists have thus been able to map the fruit fly’s DNA, chart its development from zygote to fully-grown fly, and even dissect the neurons in its miniscule brain.

There is a veritable canon of scientific studies on this tiny creature. Yet for all their insights into the habits of the common fruit fly, researchers had never bothered to find out how Drosophila handled mate rejection.

A few years ago, a handful of researchers in Bar-Ilan University, in Israel, conducted a study to find out.

“While much research has been devoted to understanding mechanisms underlying the way by which natural rewards are processed by the reward system, less attention has been given to the consequences of failure to obtain a desirable reward,” wrote Dr. Julia Ryvkin, lead author of the study [10, p. 1].

After dropping female flies into vials containing males, the researchers separated the male flies that successfully mated from those that the females had rejected. To gain even deeper insight into the social dynamic involved, the scientists then isolated another sampling of virgin male Drosophilae –a group they labelled “the naïve” -- from females even though these males had not been rejected.

After two days, the researchers denied all the male flies access to food, regardless of their success, failure, or inability to mate. They then subjected the flies to minute doses of the herbicide, paraquat.

Over the next twenty-four hours, the flies that repeatedly failed to mate fared worse than all the other flies in the sample groupings. They began demonstrating startling behavioral and physiological responses. These included a persistent motivation to obtain a mate, reduced social interactions with other males, and increased aggression.

More tellingly, the rejected Drosophilae also developed a decreased ability to cope with stressors like starvation and oxidative stress. They literally died much quicker when exposed to hunger and poison.

“Complete deprivation of both social and sexual interactions did not result in the same effect as active rejection,” Ryvkin wrote [10, p. 4].

The researchers found that the rejected male flies’ inability to cope couldn’t be explained by deficits in their metabolisms. Rather, rejection activated breeding neurons in the flies’ brains, making them focus most of their energies on securing mates.

Their single-minded determination to mate drastically reduced their ability to handle other stressors. Male Drosophila flies, in short, perceive rejection as a more stressful threat to survival than hunger or poison.

***

I am not a terribly romantic person. An ex-girlfriend once described me as “weirdly aloof.” I wondered whether she meant I gave off a serial killer vibe. That hardly sounds romantic. But even something as simple as seeing a photograph of my ex-wife still makes my body fall apart. I suppose that is something else that I share with fruit flies.

If you are lucky, the rarest magic you will find in love isn’t in the fabulous sex—although there is always that. Rather, it is that humans who are in love seem able to create a world outside of the physical apparatus of the body. Some of that world remains long after you part ways.

In books, writers have described the human experience of falling in love as a collage of vignettes – a series of anecdotes. This seems true enough.

You see things differently when you’re in love. You construct the set together: an oasis, clean, quiet, full of lovely cooking smells, there amid the bustling, dirty, traffic-scourged tourist trap of hotels, restaurants, gigantic condominiums and shops.

There is no central plotline to the play, not really, and there are only two characters. Love rules blissfully enough at first. The house is bright and cheerful. The dog is fat and happy. The drapes smell newly washed.

But when the rot starts to show, it appears in precise, sharply wrought scenes that land like a succession of swift punches to the gut and ribcage. There are arguments. There are the money problems. There are the festering jealousies and suspicions. Then, one day, you realize love is dead and you are strangers to each other.

You are distraught, gutted, and you attempt to drink away the groaning enormity of her absence. Your organize your day around the consumption of alcohol, no matter what the time of day. You drink until the whites of your eyes turn yellow. You drink until the cat’s eyes and the coming headlights blind you, and the world withdraws behind a terminal flash of white. "There must be some way out of here …," Hendrix sings as you look down to see the night sky sprouting stars between your toes.

“The real problems come when people are rejected in love,” Fisher said in 2021 [3]. “That’s when they suffer. If I’m going to make any contribution to this planet, it’s going to be understanding rejection and love, not happiness and love.”

Helen Fisher, the anthropologist, human behavior researcher, and writer, died quietly of endometrial cancer at her husband’s home in the Bronx last summer. She was 79.

She did make us understand a little more about rejection and love, as she said she would. But perhaps more than just codifying the horrors of the broken heart, the science of heartbreak – the science Fisher pioneered -- offers all those who weep into their pillows tonight some vague consolation.

Heartbreak leaves you hollow, pondering, and more vulnerable to life’s strange insinuations. The animal pain you feel is not yours alone. Billions of people around the world know exactly how you feel because they have felt it, too. And if, like Orpheus, you can sing your way out of the pit of tangled metal and broken glass into which you fell all those years ago, you may yet come upon some vaguely hopeful fragment as you gasp toward the surface. There is still time, even as the bulb burns out and the darkening terrible expanse closes in, to look up and see what you had not learned to see as the road rises to meet you and the windshield explodes into your eyes: love has changed the shape of your heart, splitting it open for a wider, brighter, golden-eyed, and wistfully smiling world.

References

[1]

H. E. Fisher, L. L. A. A. Brown, M. Strong and D. Mashek, "Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love," Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 104, no. No.1, pp. 51-60, 2010.

[2]

H. E. Fisher, "Dumped!," The New Scientist, p. 41, 2004.

[3]

D. Epstein, "Slate," Slate Studios, 28 February 2021. [Online]. Available: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/02/a-love-expert-falls-in-love-helen-fisher-on-heartbreak-and-getting-married.html. [Accessed 15 November 2024].

[4]

H. Fisher, "Broken Hearts: The Nature and RIsks of Romantic Rejection," in Romance and Sex in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood, Oxfordshire, Routeledge, 2015, p. 16.

[5]

H. E. Fisher, "helenfisher.com," 14 February 2012. [Online]. Available: https://helenfisher.com/romantic-love-can-it-last/. [Accessed 12 November 2024].

[6]

S. W. Cole, M. E. Kemeny and S. E. Taylor, "Social identity and physical health: Accelerated HIV progression in rejection-sensitive gay men," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 257-287, 1997.

[7]

F. Williams, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

[8]

R. De Vogli, T. Chandola and M. G. Marmot, "Negative Aspects of Close Relationships and Heart Disease," JAMA Internal Medicine, vol. 167, no. 18, pp. 1920-2009, 2007.

[9]

T. Dalia, B. Amr, A. Agrawal, A. Gautam, V. Sethapati and J. Kvapil, "A Rare Case of Sudden Death in a Patient with Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy Secondary to Cardiac Rupture," Case Reports in Cardiology, vol. 2019, no. 1, pp. 1-9, 2019.

[10]

J. Ryvkin, L. Omesi, Y.-K. Kim, M. Levi, H. Pozeilov, L. Barak-Buchris, B. Agranovich, I. Abramovich, E. Gottlieb, A. Jacob, D. R. Nässel, U. Heberlein and G. Shohat-Ophi, "Failure to mate enhances investment in behaviors that may promote mating reward and impairs the ability to cope with stressors via a subpopulation of Neuropeptide F receptor neurons," PLOS Genetics, vol. 20, no. 11, pp. 1-22, 2024.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in the Republic of the Philippines. He published poetry and fiction in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.