Grief & Growth Are The Prices We Pay For Love

Heartbreaks That Don't Heal (7m read)

ANNOUNCEMENT: I am excited to share that I am leading a Men’s Group with

Aaron Mazel-Gee

. If you are based in SF and interested in learning more, please click here.

I dedicate this piece to the second most important and influential man in my life, Uncle Roy. Thank you for creating a safe childhood for me to fail and flourish in, and for teaching me what it means to be a good man. I love you and will miss you dearly.

Some mornings I wake in tears, the sorrow arriving before the fog has lifted. I don’t know what I’m grieving, only that it lingers. Other mornings, I feel nothing—no ache, no warmth, just silence. I don’t think it’s depression, though I’ve wondered. It feels more like emotional jet lag—like I’ve slipped out of sync with life itself. Most days, I move like a shadow through time, suspended and numb, as if I had become one of Eliot’s The Hollow Men.

A familiar internal voice creeps in, “There’s something… wrong.”

I’ve been hearing that voice for months now. Low and constant, echoing in the void. It reminds me that something in me has shifted, a cancer slowly picking away at my self-esteem. That something deeper is unsettled within me.

Neurotic Grief

Over the weekend, I was listening to Attachment Theory expert Heidi Priebe’s latest video titled What To Do About The Heartbreaks That Won’t Heal (Hint: They Might Be Pointing At Something Deeper) where she talked about neurotic grief, in particular where it relates to heartbreak.

Neurotic grief is a form of grief that is excessive, prolonged, and often accompanied by significant distress and impairment in daily functioning.¹

This wasn’t your typical surface-level breakdown of grief in relationships. Heidi went deeper—into the subconscious narratives that quietly shape how we attach, detach, and stay stuck. One of her reflections struck a chord, and I found myself wondering: Is this why I’ve felt so unlike myself these past few months? Is this why after every relationship where I am fully invested—where I love without bounds—it takes years for me to get over the breakup?

Heartbreak by Clive Barker

Heartbreak remains the most devastating kind of pain I’ve known—raw, unrelenting and all consuming. Each occurrence striking with the same unyielding intensity. Over the years, I’ve weathered more than my share of long, dark nights of the soul, days adrift. But I’ve also learned to let myself feel it, to stay with the pain long enough for healing to take root.

Over the holidays, I felt I had finally healed from the heartbreak of my previous relationship. I let go of the future we had planned —the family, the life we once dreamed about. I released the idea that we would grow old together. I let go of the resentment tied to unfulfilled promises. I let go of the illusion that I had finally cracked love’s secret code and that it would grant me the reward I had fought my entire life to achieve: a transcendent love for all time.

Or so I believed.

The outsized emotional charge wasn’t there when I reflected on her—our shared memories, the places in SF we strolled by hand in hand in the throes of innocent love. I no longer imagined her traveling halfway around the world to apologize, to give me the closure I once so desperately longed for.

But still, something deeper was holding me back from fully reclaiming myself.

I began tracing the thread of my relationship history, going all the way back to grade school, and started to see how neurotic grief had taken root in my subconscious. I examined my post-breakup behaviors, and a troubling pattern slowly came into view—one I had never recognized before.

White Knight Fantasy

Sometimes to process in a way that is true why a relationship ended, we must confront an idea we have about how the world works or about how we wish the world worked that this loss is forcing us to confront that is not true.²

Since childhood, I’ve been captivated by the myth of the white knight—the noble savior, the man who is wholly good. I embraced the timeless virtues of Bushidō and the Code of Chivalry—honor, loyalty, discipline, and the quiet strength to serve something greater than myself. I grew up idolizing heroes who stood for justice, who protected the innocent, who loved fiercely and fathered tenderly. The image of a man as both warrior and poet wrote itself into the foundation of my identity.

Even now, I chase windmills. After every heartbreak, I launch into self-improvement crusades—determined never to be wounded again. I hone my communication, study seduction, build wealth, lead communities, master the intricacies of relationships. I turn myself into a project, believing that perfection will make me worthy… and abandonment impossible.

If I could just be perfect enough, I would never again have to experience grief or loss. In order to keep that worldview alive, I would have had to do some neurotic thing—like focus intensely, for years at a time, on every single thing that I had done wrong that could possibly have driven those people away. And then I would have been trying to get the circumstances of our lives to conform to our worldviews, rather than accepting that sometimes the circumstances of our lives are actually there to change our worldviews—to get us to accept truths about reality that we do not want to accept, but that go on being true whether we accept them or not.³

Don Quixote by Pablo Picasso

The Original Wound

I have finally come to the end of my crusades.

With painful clarity, I can finally admit this to myself: for years, I carried a covert contract—expecting those I loved to love me back forever, to match my devotion, so long as I played the role of their unwavering white knight.

I know now that nothing I do—no amount of growth, success, or preparation—can guarantee that someone I love won’t hurt me or walk away. I’ve maxed out on intentional self-improvement. The chase for invulnerability is over.

I am ready to forgive myself. For staying attached to a self-righteous belief long past its time. For projecting it onto others. And for the ways I’ve hurt people because of it.

The deep grief that resides in my body, that I now wrestle with, is the loss of this ingrained belief system. I am ready to face the hard truth that there are no guarantees in love. That I could do everything right—be perfect—and still be dealt a cruel and painful hand. That I am destined to be denied love. That hope has forsaken me.

And yet, I am grateful. Grateful for the richness the quest has brought me: unforgettable moments, incredible achievements, unique insights, humility, epic experiences, and of course connection—so much connection that I feel each and every day.

Sometimes life just deals you a crap hand, and that truth is part of the human experience. That part of the human experience allows you to connect with other people on this very human thing. And so, the more I was willing to learn the lesson that life had dealt me, and connect with other people on it, the more I found that I was actually able to have deeper relationships on the other side of those losses.⁴

I know I won’t feel like the person I once was—because that quixotic crusader longer exists. So I grant myself the grace to navigate this shift slowly, learning how to live without leaning on the worldview that no longer serves me.

I lay down my armor, toss aside my shield, drop my sword, surrender to my deepest fears, ready for a new adventure. And still, I choose to uphold the virtues of chivalry, to keep my heart open—to all the joy and sorrow yet to come.

Ready to receive life’s ultimate lesson: that grief and growth are the prices we pay for love.

Thank you for reading 🙏

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References

¹Science Direct

²22:43

³25:05

⁴26:19