When love ends: Understanding heartbreak

A few months ago, a young woman sat across from me in my clinic, her eyes red and tired.

- Jared Ng

Just two weeks after her boyfriend of three years had asked for "a break," she discovered he had erased all evidence of their relationship from his Instagram account.

Replacing those pictures were newly posted photographs of him with another woman, smiling in poses that mirrored ones he had once shared with her.

"How could he move on so fast," she asked, her voice breaking. "Did I mean nothing?"

As a psychiatrist who has experienced heartbreak, I recognised that raw pain.

She was not devastated just because she had lost him, but also because she felt erased, as if he had deleted her from his life along with those photographs.

In the years I have been practising psychiatry in Singapore, I have sat with countless patients experiencing heartbreak: the secondary school student sobbing over a first love, the professional mourning a decade-long relationship, the elderly widow facing life without her partner of 50 years.

Their circumstances differ, but their pain speaks the same language.

We often dismiss teenage heartbreak as melodrama, but research confirms what these young people already know: adolescents experience emotions with extraordinary intensity.

Their neurological development literally amplifies feelings, making those first heartbreaks genuinely overwhelming. Many adults can still recall their first heartbreak with startling clarity—that absolute certainty that happiness would never return.

At life's other end, losing a lifelong partner carries profound grief and tangible health risks.

The "widowhood effect" shows that a surviving elderly spouse's mortality risk increases by 66 percent in the three months following their loss.

The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale ranks losing a spouse as life's most stressful event—more stressful than imprisonment or bankruptcy.

Heartbreak knows no age limit. The pain is valid whether you are 16 or 86.