You know how it goes…girl meets boy, falls in love, falls out, breaks it off and pitches headfirst into frenetically doing stuff to a) prove she didn’t have time for him anyway and b) drown out the sound of her heart gently weeping.
Women are renowned for speeding up when heartbroken. Take Cheryl Cole for example. Her marriage falls apart, again, amidst more controversy surrounding husband Ashley Cole’s penchant for extra-curricular nocturnal acitivies, and what does Cheryl do? Cancel her commitments and hole up at home under the duvet for a month until the edge comes off the pain? No sir.
Cheryl sets out on the busiest work period of her career, trucks out to parties both sides of the Atlantic, flies long-haul for long weekends and wait for it, gets ill. Malaria forces a go-slow, and that’s some price to pay for getting off the crazy train.
But it’s not just women that are guilty. A male friend who shall remain nameless admitted to me recently that he packed his work diary with meetings abroad specifically so he didn’t have time to think about his disintegrating relationship. He was, simply, too heartbroken to go slow.
Arguably, slow living and heartbreak go hand-in-hand only for the brave. It takes a strong spirit to sit in contemplation, mindful and tuned in to the cadence of emotion when painfully aware that you’ll be contemplating loss and sadness.
The problem with speeding up when the love chips are down is that for the vast majority of people heartbreak doesn’t just disappear. Rather, it lurks behind the scenes waiting until a sick bug lays us low or redundancy empties our days, coming back to bite us on the bum when we least need it.
Resolution needs a period of reflection, a time of slowdown. You might be better off sobbing your way through the man-sized Kleenex, the pillow cases and the soft furnishings for a short while, rather than packing it all so far down under an itinery only Barak Obama, the Queen and Cheryl Cole can boast.
What’s your end of the affair style? Do you speed up or take it easy? Tell us here.
