Time Heals All Wounds…An Experiment in Schadenfreude

Have you ever heard a woman bitch “it’s not fair; women get worse looking with age, while men only get more ‘distinguished’”?

I would like to take this opportunity to call bullshit. Most of my female friends in their 30s and 40s are utterly smoking hot, while most of the men I know are completely falling apart. I myself, at the ripe old age of 33, am far more attractive than I was in high school.

Then…we all make bad choices in high school. Red hair dye was mine

Now…amazing how much hotter I am when I’m actually happy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But while delightful, that is not what this post is about. Instead, it is about how time, and the complexly karmic nature of the universe, can fix just about any heartbreak.

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘time heals all wounds’ before and thought that it was yet another platitude that people throw out when they don’t know what else to say. But the fact is, most platitudes come into existence because they are true. There are plenty of fish in the sea. What happens really does happen and time does heal all wounds.

Thanks to gravity and a high carb diet.

Let me explain. If you can believe it, I fell in love in high school. Yes, back then, I had a heart, a ticking biological clock and a fully functional sex drive. I fell in love in that desperate, grasping way that teenage girls do, with a guy who wasn’t even remotely interested in me.

At the time, it was soul destroying. I spent most of my time agonizing about him, complaining to my friends and crying.

God, I must have been really fucking annoying back then.

Nothing aside from a few romps in the back seat of a car ever really happened between me and my high school crush but I obsessed all the same. It was painful, it was hopeless and it was depressing.

It was part of being a teenager.

I left my home town about two weeks after I graduated high school and aside from the occasional week long visit, never went back.  Life went on. It changed. I met other men to obsess about and men who actually got obsessed with me (creepy, yet flattering). I joined the military, had a kid, went to college, built a career, destroyed that career, and built another career.

For 16 years, I never thought about that crush. He went from comprising 90% of my conscious thoughts, to absolutely none of them.

Then, about a week ago, that crush popped up in a friend of mine’s timeline on Facebook.

I saw that name, and I’ll be honest; for a second, my heart skipped a beat. I was back to being that obsessed teenage girl. I tried to resist, but I couldn’t. I clicked on his profile, sure that he’d be successful and just as gorgeous as I remembered. I was ready to get obsessed all over again. Then, his current profile picture filled my screen…

And I snorted so hard, beer came out of my nose. After my coughing fit was done, I smirked, closed down the page and said to myself, ‘what the fuck was I thinking?’

Either I was legally blind at the age of 17, or my high school crush had gotten the shit beat out of him by Father Time. No joke, this dude looked like the paper towel guy ‘Brawny’ …if Brawny went on an all bacon diet and stopped trimming his beard.

About 20 years ago, this guy was all I wanted. Today, he would be yet another creepy fat dude that I avoided eye contact with at the store.

“This has to be an anomaly,” I told myself. “Surely karma doesn’t work that fast?”

So I pulled out my legal pad and I made a list. I didn’t make a list of every guy who’d ever broken my heart. In some cases, the breakup was fully warranted, mutual or necessary. For those guys, I expected no karmic justice because they weren’t at fault. Sometimes, we like someone who doesn’t like us (or the other way around) and we just have to accept that.

No, instead, this list was focused on the guys who had used and abused me or who had dumped me horrifically (like the dude that took me to McDonald’s on Valentine’s Day and dumped me after making me pay for his Value Meal).

Then I started Googling. During those Google searches, I learned one thing. Apparently, I am a super hero; my vagina dispatches karmic justice.

 

Every guy who’d ever made me feel utterly destroyed and useless had gone through some horrific metamorphosis. They went from being handsome, ambitious toned young men to harry ‘Jabba the Huts’ living in clapboard houses and working menial jobs.

You know that phrase ‘schadenfreude’? In case you haven’t, it means ‘shameful joy’. Well that night, I schadenfreuded multiple times, in multiple positions, and it was fucking fantastic. After I was done, I smoked half a pack of cigarettes and slept better than I’d slept in years.

To the ladies out there, if you’ve had your heart broken, I urge you to try this experiment. Of course, keep a few things in mind.

All my worst heartbreaks occurred more than 10 years ago. Something turned off inside me in my early 20s and I really haven’t felt a thing since. I think the ‘ripening’ from karmic justice occurs at about the 10 year mark, so I really wouldn’t recommend looking up the guy who dumped you 3 months ago.
Don’t look them up drunk. Nostalgia and alcohol don’t mix. You might start thinking of ‘the good old days’ and forget that you’re talking to a bald fat loser
Be fair in your assessment. I only looked up jerks that treated me like shit. I’m sure if I’d looked up some of the dudes that dumped me for a damn good reason, they would be doing quite well and I would just be jealous.

I strongly recommend trying this at least once in your life. No joke people. It will restore your faith in humanity and the universe in general.