How do you mend a broken heart?

It is odd that mankind hasn’t tried to find a cure for a broken heart after all these years.

ONE minute you’re in a relationship, and the next you’re not. Your soul mate has ditched you in favour of going solo. Or even worse: in favour of someone else.

You slowly recover from the initial shock of an unwanted break- up and muddle through the subsequent period of denial, to find yourself in a world of pain caused by your feelings of loss and rejection. You no longer feel joy. Sadness shrouds your thoughts almost every minute of every day.

When you’re not feeling sad, you succumb to bouts of searing whitehot anger. You pin a picture of your ex to the back of a door and practice throwing darts at it. Or you phone up your closest friend and vent. “What a jerk!” you exclaim for the hundredth time. “I deserve better than this.” Then you go over all the negative stuff: every little detail of every time your ex did you wrong. It’s a vain attempt to convince yourself that your life is better without the relationship.

Two minutes later, you’re bawling your eyeballs out and fighting the urge to send a text message to the jerk asking to be taken back. “How can I possibly live without the only person I truly love?” you ask yourself. “I will never love again. EVER!”

The only time you feel relief is when you’re asleep eep – if you’re lucky. Sometimes, s, your dreams betray you by taunting you with images of your exx laughing and joking and having ng the best time ever, with someone one else.

The pain arisingng from your break- up is so excruciating that you feel it as acutely tely as any physical pain. It’s s as if someone has ripped open your chest cavity, savagely wrenched out your heart, thrown it onto the ground and stomped on it with all the fervour of a River Dance enthusiast. Bruised and bleeding, ding, it’s somehow stuffed back into your body, and you’re expected to function as if nothing ever happened.

Some days, youu find it difficult just trying to breath, ath, never mind getting out of bed d and getting dressed. Life as you know it is over and you don’t give ve a &@#$ about personal hygiene.e Your teeth feel furry, your armpits smell funky and your hair looks as if it could house a bird’s nest. In fact, it probably is a bird’s nest.

Nonetheless, you still have to show up for work. You can’t go to your GP and request a sick note. You can’t tell your boss your body feels as if it’s made of lead and your brain doesn’t function as it used to. You can’t tell your colleague that you don’t want to listen to his story about the ingrown toenail that’s been bothering him for two days, because you’d love to be in a situation where that’s all that’s troubling you. “I’ll gladly have 10 ingrown toenails,” you want to shout. “Anything! Please just make this pain go away!”

You find yourself listening to break- up songs and identifying with the lyrics. Songs like Un- break MyM Heart sound as if they’ve been specially written for you.you You listen to them endlessly, allowing yourself to be drawn into a vortex of absolute misery.miser

Or you watch break- up movies like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Min Mind and wish you could erase all memory of your relationship with your ex, as the two centralcent characters in this flick did.did You imagine what it would feelf like to walk outdoors and smell the perfume from the flowers in your garden, and feel a warm breeze caressing your face, without once thinking about your ex.ex As it is, the break- up has rendered you incapable of living in the moment.

Other than songs and movies, heartbreak has been the driving force behind many other types of artistic endeavour: novels, poetry, paintings, sculptures, plays, operas, ballet. Indeed, our primitive ancestors probably depicted heartbreak in their cave drawings but we just haven’t cottoned on yet. Those simple pictures that show someone being attacked by, say, a sabretoothed tiger, might not be telling the story of a hunting trip gone wrong, after all. They could all be metaphors for heartache.

I find it odd that mankind hasn’t tried to find a cure for a broken heart. We know what the surface of Mars looks like, have successfully sequenced the human genome, and are on the brink of being able to grow human livers in a lab, but we have done little to help assuage the pain we experience when a romantic relationship comes to an abrupt end.

A few years back, scientists discovered that heartache really does ache. A 2011 study found that those parts of the brain usually associated with physical pain lit up when a person experienced break- up pain.

Their conclusions? A couple of paracetamol.

But please be careful. Popping paracetamol as if they are Smarties can severely damage your liver.

Still, I guess you could always grow a replacement one in a lab.