Rejection

Maybe love is like an organ transplant. You put your faith in the fact that this new heart will work for you and pray that you don't reject it, but if the match is not perfect, even with the best "immuno-suppressants" out there, it just won't take. Maybe you'll have it for a couple of days, weeks, months, but in the end, you need to find another means of staying alive. You have to find another donor, another heart, and hold out that this time it will work. That the heart will take and beat in your chest for years down the road.

Would love be easier if we thought of it this way? When our body rejects something, we don't blame it. It is not responsible, at least not consciously; it is not a process we have control of. It just is. No matter how perfect the match seems, how close the type, sometimes things just don't take. So why do we blame ourselves when love fails? Why do we search for answers, ways in which we can improve ourselves, make ourselves better when in the end, it just did not take. And there was nothing that could be done because the heart we were given was rejected by us.

Is it because we make the conscious decision to reject love? That we, as humans as social animals, have to decide at what point the heart we have is not meant for us anymore. And our decisions are fallible. Nothing we do is perfect because to be human is to be flawed. So, there is not a simple way of comparing our histories and matching our interests and trying to develop types. Even if we could, we don't fall in love based on some pre-determined formula of best fit. Instead, we just fall. At some point, we begin to love another person and we hope that they love us too. And we pray that that love won't lead us wrong or make us hurt. But if falling in love is involuntary, unconscious, unpredictable, then falling out of it is the opposite: it is willed and knowable and a determined decision. And once made, we can't stop the process. We start to reject the heart that was given to us.

Is this why love hurts so much as it dies? Because we know that somewhere, somehow, we decided that this is not right. That we are to blame in a sense because we had to choose. To be broken hearted is as much about feeling that what was once doubly strong is now singly weak as much as it is about knowing we can only blame ourselves. Even if the decision is right, even if the rejection makes us healthier in the end, it does not make us whole. And we are to blame because at some indeterminate point, we looked inside and decided that the heart we had would not do. Not for the long haul. And we decided to exchange it - for our own lonely one or the thought of something shiny and new - but we decided and put ourselves down on the transplant list again.