A broken heart (or heartbreak) is a common metaphor used to describe the intense emotional pain or suffering one feels after losing a loved one, whether through death, divorce, breakup, physical separation, betrayal, or romantic rejection.
Heartbreak is usually associated with losing a family member or spouse, though losing a parent, child, pet, lover or close friend can all "break one's heart", and it is frequently experienced during grief and bereavement. The phrase refers to the physical pain one may feel in the chest as a result of the loss, although it also by extension includes the emotional trauma of loss even where it is not experienced as somatic pain. Although "heartbreak" ordinarily does not imply any physical defect in the heart, there is a condition known as "Takotsubo cardiomyopathy" (broken heart syndrome), where a traumatising incident triggers the brain to distribute chemicals that weaken heart tissue.
Read more about Broken Heart: Philosophical Views, In Classical References, Broken Heart Syndrome, Psychological and Neurological Understanding
Famous quotes containing the words broken and/or heart:
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“In every tyrant’s heart there springs in the end
This poison, that he cannot trust a friend.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 BC)