Last year, I experienced loss – and a lot of it – for some of the first times in my life. The deaths of my grandfather and my treasured childhood pet and the end of a long-time friendship sent my world spinning. This Valentine’s Day, I can’t help but think about the love I am going without.  

But love and loss are two sides of the same coin. So, in order to honor Valentine’s Day for what it is – a celebration of love – we need to treasure all the stages of love, both beautiful and painful. In order to celebrate real love, we have to summon all our courage and invite heartbreak to pull up a chair. 

Each of my losses last year came with its own grieving process, but all of them brought me indescribable pain. The force of the blow was unexpected. I was completely unprepared to transition from feeling secure and loved, to hurt and lost. Each time, I felt as if I was moving through a fog; my mind could not comprehend day-to-day activities. Studies show that heartbreak is a real condition and the physical symptoms of grief are serious: sleep loss, stress, anxiety and a compromised immune system. 

These intense feelings of grief give us the opportunity to reach a new level of feeling; to experience a deeper-than-usual range of emotions. Though grief is an unusually deep emotion, it is also a universal one. Rejection and heartbreak come from men, women, friends, enemies, strangers, potential employers and, often, ourselves. Rejection – romantic, professional or otherwise – will hit all of us eventually, and likely at many points in our lives. 

In a world of dating apps, we can create a loveable image of ourselves. We have created a science of attracting love (or at least what looks like love), rather than learning how to love. The appetite for validation is insatiable, and our system is created to reap the rewards of “love”, while avoiding the pain of heartbreak. 

But the art of loving is tied to the art of losing. Heartbreak can be a wonderful and beautiful process. It can teach us about ourselves, facilitate growth and help us to love more bravely in the future. 

We define ourselves by our relationships, and our self-image is shaped by what others show us about ourselves. Grief is a harsh, but necessary teacher, stripping our false realities away and forcing us to reckon with the reality of ourselves: who am I without this person who was so deeply a part of me? 

The tendency after loss is to be careful. A broken heart makes one risk-averse in the realm of love. But uncertainty is where possibility lives. Once we learn how to lose, we can learn how to give without reservation; we can learn to expect rejection and welcome it happily, as a part of the process.  

To all those feeling unloved, left behind and forgotten this Valentine’s Day, accept the challenge to experience deeper emotion and explore yourself. Focus on loving instead of focusing on who isn’t loving you. As the saying goes, “it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”