Failed Love: Choosing your Response
Eclipsing, or Striding, or something better
I can’t say I have a lot of experience with failed love. I’ve been married to the same great wife for decades. But we’ve all had some of it. And I like to think I’m fairly observant, at least for a guy.
How do we respond to failed love? Our question is posed by two great songs from 1983: Total Eclipse of the Heart (you know it) and Break My Stride (you might know it). Both are musically brilliant, Eclipse with its raspy vocal and changes of key, and Stride with its unusual emphasis on the ‘and’ beats.
We have the two songs here, with lyrics. This sets up our convo.
Possible response #1 (Hot): Be Eclipsed
Total Eclipse of the Heart is highly dramatic in both music and lyrics. The singer/character is distraught: Once upon a time I was falling in love; Now I’m only falling apart.
If her departed lover were to come back to her, he would seemingly be taking on a lot: Together we can take it to the end of the line; Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time.
(Those familiar with the song will decry my not showing the official video, famous with its vampire vibe. I’m choosing to read the lyrics as being about lost human romance.)
Possible response #2 (Cold): Protect your Stride
In Break My Stride, the singer/character (a male, in case you can’t tell) dreams he travels to China to see his girlfriend. When he gets there she tells him she has laundry to do. Literally, it seems. She doesn’t want to be bothered by him: Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride; Nobody gonna slow me down, Oh no, I got to keep on moving…
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It’s just a dream but it keeps us in the groove of our question, how do we respond to rejection? Well, in his case, by adopting the girlfriend’s approach as his own: Never let another girl like you work me over… He proceeds, over a fittingly bouncy rhythm, to the same Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride chorus she had sung to him. It feels a little defensive and false, but it is his response.
We might have these feelings of refusal when young but most of us can’t live without love. I once said to a friend that if I hadn’t gotten married I’d probably be long since dead in some apartment, an empty gin bottle on the floor. Yeah, I have single friends who have very full lives; I just would not have been good at it.
We’ve looked at two kinds of response to failed love, both ultimately unhappy at least in my view. What’s another?
Possible response #3 (Warm): Striding onto a different kind of path
What is this lonely single track that the guy and his girlfriend are each, separately, expecting to keep their Stride along? Dedication to a career? Work at something less ambitious to enable an introverted lifestyle? I couldn’t have managed either of these by myself. Empty gin bottle on the floor.
Having someone is good but it seems dangerous to put too much on romance. An over-wrought approach can lead to both regular Eclipse of the Heart, and difficulty in making a relationship that is real and lasting.
I’m probably more of a Stride than an Eclipse person, tending to a narrowed, not-too-emotional focus. I need to feel like I’m walking toward something, even if that something is mostly in my head.
Speaking only for myself, what has helped is to consider, adapt, and turn from a mostly academic and career path across open meadow, into more diverse terrain, with woods and a creek, meaning things like faith, marriage, and family, as well as a career. It’s still one path to me, just with more in it.
As the sun rose I might’ve gotten too hot in the meadow. So I walked into the forest, still going somwhere but in a more complex setting.
Sure, there are roots along the trail in the woods, and confusing forks in it, so maybe my Stride gets interrupted now and then. But I am sustained by the varieties of plants, the shade, and the water. And I still feel like I’m on a path, and that matters.
Thanks to you who read, listen, and consider.
