The Forgetful Heart

A Forgetful Heart: Valentine’s Day Blues

Valentine's Day means different things to different people. For some, it’s filled with romantic gestures and sweet moments shared with a significant other. For others, it’s a celebration of friendships and camaraderie. And for some, it’s a reminder of love lost, a day marked by painful memories. No matter how we experience it, heartbreak is something we all encounter, in one form or another, throughout our lives.

This Valentine’s Day, instead of celebrating what would have been my third year anniversary, I found myself sinking into a pit of sadness and fatigue searching for an answer to a question that had been lingering: Why does the heart still yearn for what the mind has already reconciled? It felt like my mind was making sense of the split, but my heart was struggling to catch up. 

We often forget that we are creatures of experience, emotion, and desire. At our core, we all long for love, whether in the form of  mutual understanding, loyalty, kindness, or commitment. When we find love and then lose it, the heart struggles to accept reality. This struggle is universal. But in my case, I wondered: Why was my heart forgetting the bad stuff—the very reasons I ended the relationship?

In the midst of my heartache, I made a pros-and-cons list about the relationship I was mourning. The cons far outweighed the pros; yet my heart could not seem to align with the reality that my mind had already accepted. The absence of closure, coupled with the power of memory, made moving on feel impossible. 

I realized that my heart’s selective memory was its attempt at self-preservation. It’s normal for the heart to cling to the beauty of what was, even when it knows the relationship was ultimately damaging. In its “forgetfulness,” the heart holds on to the good memories, blocking out the bad in an effort to protect itself from the trauma.

So, to those who find themselves caught between love and heartbreak: keep going. Keep loving, even through the pain. One day, you will meet someone who will not trigger your heart to forget. Until then, allow yourself the grace to heal.