Jonny Thomson

Have you ever had your heart broken? It’s really hard to describe or even talk about heartbreak, because there are as many kinds of heartbreak as there are kinds of love. But one of the cruellest parts of it is to do with being alone. It’s that absence that comes where somebody once stood.

The ancient Greeks had a word for a kind of love called storge, and it’s usually translated as parental love. But it’s better understood as the love of the familiar. Storge is what you feel for somebody who was once a near-constant presence in your life. It’s the partner who you always ate your dinner with. It’s the friend you always watch superhero movies with. It’s the parent you always went Christmas shopping with. It’s somebody who was there for years and years, and when they are gone, you cannot picture your life the same. It’s parents and siblings, yes, but it’s also the marriage of 40 years, or a friendship that is older than your career.

At its deepest and most enduring, heartbreak is about storge. Picture a widow sitting alone on a sofa that she once shared with her husband for 20 years. She does not simply miss her husband. She misses a part of her life. And so the heartbreak of storge is a loss not only of another person, but of yourself. Because when you wrench yourself away from somebody who has been a constant in your life, you are left with a hole in your being. You are left reeling, you are disorientated, you are disintegrated. A part of you is gone.

And so heartbreak is the painful process of working out how you are to live your life again, how you are to rebuild yourself with what’s left.