I was just getting out of a very intense and loving relationship during my last round of inpatient/outpatient treatment for treatment-resistant depression and suicidal ideation. When I told my program therapist there, he said “Well, the most important thing about relationships is what you learn from them.” I wanted to punch him in the face and scream, “Haven’t you ever been in love before??!!” Of course, most people think their heartbreak is worse than everyone else’s. That’s why country music was invented.
I was thinking of the recent Director’s Club podcast I guested on about the work of Charlie Kaufman (plug!), where we discussed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (part of which takes place on Valentine’s Day). The bittersweet part of that movie is that you get the feeling star-crossed lovers Joel and Clementine, who have erased the memory of each other from each other’s mind, are going to try their relationship over again, even after listening to what they know are the tapes documenting why it didn’t work out. Is this outcome ultimately hopeful? On the podcast I said I thought it was, largely because we learn and grow from our life experiences, even the painful ones (damn you outpatient therapist, I admit you were right).
Something I forgot to say—inevitable when you are talking live—is that I feel like American culture puts so much pressure on the permanence of relationships in order for them to be meaningful. Not true. As a bipolar cancer (basically a walking bundle of raw nerves) I am very susceptible to emotional flux but some of the relationships that have impacted my life most deeply, didn’t last. Joel and Clementine’s relationship had plenty of bad memories—did the good outweigh the bad? I think my ex-husband once asked me that literal question—we had more good memories than bad, didn’t we? And does it matter?
I’ll end with my one of my favorite quotes from Louise Erdrich:
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
Happy Valentine’s 
