The 5 Types of Heartbreak (and Their Emotional Effects)

“Explode, explode me, explode, explode my heart.” This is how the great Raffaella Carrà sang in one of her well-known songs. A few verses later she said “What a disaster if you leave!” and yes, it is a disaster that they left us: how bad heartbreak feels!

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, heartbreak. How many types are there? Well, we cannot expect to find a scientific answer to something as subjective as love. This is more a matter of the tabloids than of powerful scientific research, but something can be extracted.

And what we are going to read below is what we have extracted by researching this matter as complex as (dis)love. Let’s see how many types of heartbreak there are, or at least how many have been described

The main types of heartbreak in personal relationships

Almost everything in love is a mystery, a little joking, a little serious, and it cannot be said that defining just the opposite, heartbreak, is very different. Some will define heartbreak as that emotion we feel when someone we love does not reciprocate. Others will define it as that feeling that arises when a relationship breaks, be it friendship or passionate love.

After an exhaustive search through the curious world of entertainment journalism and the tabloid press, quite far from psychology, we have found several classifications. However, all of them combined give rise to a single system of five types of heartbreak associated with very common social situations

Within these heartbreaks we find both those that occur after a relationship has been established and broken (that is, there was sentimental correspondence between two people) and the type of relationships in which one of the parties involved was in love or felt attracted to another person. , but it was not reciprocated and therefore there was never a relationship of any kind.

1. The first (un)love

They say that the first love is the most intense, or at least the one that we will remember the most even if it comes to an end, which is what usually happens. Who hasn’t thought that true love is only the first? When it comes to an end, the heartbreak is so great, so intense that you don’t even know if you are going to survive. Obviously you survive, but if you are a teenager it seems like the end of the world

You’re not sure if you’re going to love someone else again, that person was your other half. It is normal for this heartbreak to last a long time and, if poorly managed, it can even destroy you. It’s going to hurt, but one day you’ll be okay again.

2. The one with the soul mate

It has happened to all of us that in our adolescence or adulthood we meet someone interesting, someone with whom we can establish an interesting and beautiful friendship. It is nothing associated with love or romance, but rather an intense friendship someone to count on for a Friday night plan.

It could be a college friend, our roommate, or even someone we met at a bar and liked. From the moment you meet you spend time, a lot of time. You invite him to your house, you go out to party and you have a lot of fun together, intensely. Be that as it may, a friendship arises that, although relatively recent and formed when mature, is seen as that of a very important friend, a soul mate.

You see him as a great friend, but he may not see you. As cruel as he sounds, he may see you as just another person to spend time with, someone to have fun with this season until he meets the next one, which will happen. He is a type of person who likes novelty and, after a few months, you are no longer the novelty.

There comes a time when you either have to drag him out to meet up or he doesn’t answer your messages at all. She is ghosting you and you don’t know why. It has happened that you thought he was a friend and he was nothing more than a casual colleague, and you are not going to be able to change his mind. This is where heartbreak happens, your heart breaks a little although it is most likely that you will be sick for a short time, at most a month.

3. The one who didn’t want anything serious

You meet someone in your dance class. You talk, you fool around and, well, you know how the night ends. You go out for a while doing things that are meaningful to you, things that tell you that he or she feels love for you, that he or she loves you. In your mind, love is a serious thing, so the idea that you go out with someone several times without wanting something deep is not in your belief system: It’s a love relationship, or at least you think so.

One day, after doing what we all know is done in bed, you wake up the next morning and surprise! is no longer there. He has been a gentleman/lady, he has left you a message: “I am not looking for anything serious.” Your heart breaks into a thousand pieces, not only because they have just left you but also because of the uncertainty “Have I done something wrong?”, “What happened?” There will be a lot of questions going through your restless mind that will make it very difficult for you to overcome the phases of heartbreak.

4. The one about the friend you see every day

Who hasn’t experienced falling in love with a friend? They say that it is not advisable at all to go out with friends, and there must be a reason. You both imagine the following situation: you go out for a while, you are very much in love, but after a few months the breakup comes and it ends very badly. What are you doing? Who leaves the group of friends? Is there going to be a group schism? Will sides emerge?

Going out with a friend from the main friendship group involves many risks and the danger of provoking a conflict that is difficult to resolve Therefore, even if they both love each other, there is usually an agreement not to go out at all. Problem: no matter how much you have agreed to be nothing, your heart still feels something, something for a person you are going to see every day. This makes heartbreak over something that will never happen even more difficult and longer.

5. Breaking up with your best friend

Couples come and go, but best friends last forever, right? Well, not really. As sad as it may sound, our childhood best friend can stop being our friend for any reason. It is painful because it is a person with whom you probably grew up, you played with him or her in the yard, at your house or at his or hers and also in the park. You shared many moments of your childhood or adolescence, and you will always have him as your reference friend It is irreplaceable.

But despite being irreplaceable, things happen. Maybe you changed cities or you had a fight so bad that you couldn’t reconcile. He may have died. Whatever it is that has put an end to the relationship, the subsequent heartbreak, heartbreak in the sense of losing a great friend, is very intense. A loss so important that it will condition the rest of the friendships we form for the rest of our lives.