Cher-ish

March 30, 2020

“Do you believe in life after love?” That’s the main lyric in one of Cher’s most prominent songs, and one that is often misquoted. We often want to express how beautiful life is when you are in love, but we usually never think what comes after love and so, the question remains is it possible to love again?, to live again after heartbreak.

Love is usually defined in the most simple of ways as “an intense feeling of deep affection”, so what is heartbreak. Well starting with this definition we can establish some points, if love is an intense feeling, losing it by reaction should be an intense feeling too. We could define heartbreak as an intense feeling of sadness and grief, it suits losing love, but it also embraces a bigger concept that this feeling is not only about romantic relationships, but about all kinds of love.

We see love often portrayed in literature and media as a basis for a good life, for example in 100 years of solitude, love is described as a thing that gets you like a storm or a sickness and that sweeps you off your feet. And when they lose it, life seems… worthless. Another example is Romeo and Juliet, for them life was clearly over when they couldn’t be together, they were consumed by their pain. But there are millions of examples to quote about this situation, although there are not much material that talks about what happens if you survive heartbreak, how do you live your life after that. 

You can only guess that it depends on perspective, on who you ask this question. If you ask someone in the “honeymoon” phase of a relationship, they probably couldn’t see a future without the object of their affection. On the other hand, if you ask a person with a longer more centered relationship, they are probably more aware that at some point they might lose their loved one. That’s kind of what happened to my grandmother, for her life went on, and as she used to say “Nobody dies of love”, and she must be right. She left her husband and went to live a better life with her children, and she enjoys a happy life to this day. She believed she could, and she did.

At the end, I guess, what everything comes down to, what you believe. Just as the name of the song, that describes empowerment and self-sufficiency after a painful breakup, we must believe in our own hearts, in our feelings and after all maybe there is life after love, as long as we remember that the most important person to love is ourselves.