Lovesickness: It Is Always the Broken Heart

Lovesickness is not a special case of suffering but its most visible form: a broken heart that, for once, may be called by its name. With almost everything else that throws a person off course, this wound is kept quiet or translated into something presentable. Not with lovesickness. That makes it not the smallest of crises but the most honest — and the best place to understand at all what a broken heart is.

Perhaps you are reading this in a flat where everything still looks like someone who is not coming back. Perhaps you function outwardly and inwardly have the feeling that something has been torn out of you for which there is no language. And perhaps you have already been told that you should get over it, as though the pain were a matter to be wound up properly. Before you follow that instruction, it is worth looking at what has actually broken.

#What is lovesickness really?

Lovesickness is the pain of a broken heart: the response to the tearing of a bond that carried you. It is not oversensitivity and not a weakness of character, but the precise answer to a real loss.

A bond, in Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s thinking, is not something two people agree upon and then dissolve again. It has a life of its own. No one made it, it lives of itself and follows its own laws — and that is why, in a separation, it does not die silently but in pain. What you feel is not the after-echo of a habit. It is the dying of something that really was.

That explains why the pain so often bears no relation to what has changed on the outside. The flat is the same, the work is the same, the calendar runs on. What has been torn is something no one can see: the space in which you were together with another person. Whoever tells you that you ought to be over it by now is confusing that space with an appointment.

And something else changes in a separation. A human being is at core a relational being; the fullness of what a person feels arises from the relation to a Thou, not from dealing with things. When this Thou falls away, it is not only a person who falls away but a part of that in which you experienced yourself. That is why lovesickness does not feel like grief over a loss but like a tremor in your own ground.

#Why does a broken heart lie behind almost every crisis?

A broken heart lies behind almost every crisis because it was there first and everything else came later. This is Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s own thesis, and she states it without qualification — her conversation on the subject carries the title “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, it is always the broken heart. Where she takes it from can be followed through one example. She looked at what plays out between men and women online — the accusations, the contempt, the entrenched fronts — and found the same thing on both sides: someone had been left or had experienced a transgression and had not seen it coming (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 51:03). Only after that does what you see on the surface begin.

“And after that come power games, and after that come opinions.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

This order is the whole thought. What comes first here is not the opinion but the injury it comes from. What stands at the beginning is not the power game but the moment in which a person experienced something they could not absorb, and afterwards never wanted to enter closeness unprotected again. That does not mean every quarrel goes back to an old wound. It means: where a position is conspicuously hard, you are usually hearing a late layer and not the reason.

With lovesickness this is, for once, undisguised. Interpretations, apportionings of blame and strategies settle over it quickly too — but these layers are still thin, and beneath them you can distinctly feel what actually happened. That is precisely where its opportunity lies. What a person can articulate after twenty years only as cynicism about love still lies open here.

Lovesickness is therefore the entrance to a far larger connection: it shows you, in small and acute form, what a broken heart is, before it has turned into mistrust. And mistrust, once it has arisen, has a tendency to produce ever new accusations — even toward people who mean well (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 51:03).

#Is lovesickness a defect or a precise perception?

Lovesickness is not a malfunction but a precise perception. In Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s thinking the heart is not the soft counterpart to clear understanding, but itself an organ of knowledge — a core intelligence on which it is decided how sharply a person sees at all.

She describes this from an everyday observation: whoever crosses boundaries they themselves would not want to have crossed separates themselves subtly from their own heart (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 22:28). And what follows from that she puts without any softening.

“Every movement away from this core intelligence makes you stupid.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

This reverses the familiar reckoning. Usually pain counts as the thing that clouds and distance as the thing that clarifies: only when you no longer feel so much can you think clearly again. Kirchhoff’s observation says the opposite. The distance from your own heart is the clouding. Every movement away from your own feeling takes perception from you, not ballast.

For your lovesickness this means something very concrete: the pain is not the obstacle on the way to clarity, it is what carries it. It knows how deep the bond reached. It knows what you really had in this person and what you only told yourself. It also knows where an older wound resonates that has little to do with this relationship. You learn none of it by shutting the pain down — and how precisely the pain of separation gives information about your own place is a thread of its own in this weave.

#Why does getting rid of it make lovesickness worse?

Getting rid of it makes lovesickness worse, because it does not reach the pain but builds over it. A human being possesses an astonishing capacity to withdraw from unpleasant feelings: to dissociate, to self-sedate, to go numb, to leave the room, to repress (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 30:00). This capacity is no flaw — it has carried people through situations that could not otherwise have been endured.

It becomes a trap only as a permanent solution. For what stands at the beginning is rarely the great act of numbing, but a small turning-away: shame about something one has done, a feeling of guilt, a moment one does not want to look into. And over that a person begins to build layer upon layer — first justifications, then mental structures that encrust the whole sensitive zone (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 27:04).

From the outside this looks like coping. The new contact, barely has the old bond been torn. The anger, which offers more grip than the grief beneath it. The finished story about who was to blame. None of it is healing, all of it is relief — and that is the difference at issue here: self-soothing smooths the surface, healing happens in encounter.

What goes under in this numbing is the information. Unpleasant feelings can contain enormously precise perceptions, if one does not avoid them and does not numb them but lets them come toward oneself (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Werden wir gelebt?”, 32:00). This is why the usual question about the fastest way out leads astray — what actually helps against heartbreak begins with the opposite of getting rid of it. And this is why the familiar phases of heartbreak do describe accurately what you go through, and with reorientation and a new relation to self and world even name the good ending — only not what brings it about. Whether you recognize something in these phases or merely sit them out is decided at a place no phase model describes.

#What heals lovesickness, if advice does not?

What heals lovesickness is not advice but a person. Nothing is thereby said against good advice: whoever can sleep, eats, moves and knows how a bond reacts in loss stands more stably; and where the grief tips into lasting hopelessness, medical or therapeutic help is the right thing and nothing else. Only none of that reaches the place where it hurts. Advice aims at the problem; but the pain does not sit in the problem, it sits in the connection that has been torn. And a connection is not restored by insight, but by another connection.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff proceeds here from something she has rarely stated so plainly: there are not many heart-spaces but a single, shared one — no private inner room per person, but a space with which we are connected or else not (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Sinn und Sinnsuche”, 09:30). When two people are there together, something happens that no explanation replaces.

“I feel immediately what you feel. I am entirely with you.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, «Sinn und Sinnsuche» — a conversation with Aron Morhoff, 2024 (transl.)

That is the experience which has been lost in lovesickness, and for that reason it is at the same time the remedy. What you lack is not information about attachment patterns. What is lacking is someone who is inside it with you. That is why a person sitting silently beside you consoles more than ten correct sentences — that presence restores the space whose collapse the pain is.

Precisely here lies the reason why self-soothing does not dissolve the isolation but hardens it: it takes place in your head, and the wound arose in the space between. What is received in real encounter you cannot give yourself — and in this same direction lies the difference between a processed and a tidied-away separation.

#Why does a neutral counterpart help in lovesickness?

A neutral counterpart helps because it is not entangled in the story at issue. Friends mean well and at the same time have an opinion, an interest and often an old injury of their own in play. What is missing is a place where everything can be said without it having consequences straight away.

“So it takes a relational space, a vessel, as it were, in which everything that is inside can be spoken out.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

A vessel is not an adviser. It holds what is put into it. Kirchhoff considers it entirely normal to turn to someone for this — in most cultures that live a high degree of social peace this person exists as a matter of course, and it would occur to no one that this is something a person must manage alone (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 59:15). The reason for it is sober.

“She is not entangled in the relationship. And because of that, more is sometimes possible there.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

Sometimes this space is enough, and the pain can finally be said in full. Sometimes something else shows itself in it: that the grief is larger than the relationship explains, because it hangs on an older bond. Where such an entanglement becomes visible — a movement you did not begin and yet carry out — a family constellation is the place where it can be shown in the room instead of explained further.

#How do we deal with hearts?

The way we deal with the heart is not a private but a cultural question — and Gwendolin Kirchhoff poses it in exactly that form.

“And that is precisely the question: how do we deal with hearts?”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

Her answer is uncomfortable, because it turns the gaze away from one’s own wound and toward one’s own behaviour. How do we begin and how do we end relationships? Ghosting and wordless breakings-off of contact are not trifles of manners; they generate a great insecurity in the whole of shared life, because afterwards nobody knows any more what can be relied upon. Conversely, everyone who behaves in a way worthy of trust brings that trust back into the social fabric (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 01:06:23).

With that, lovesickness is no longer a private affair. It is the place where it shows whether we have learned to handle the most delicate thing a human being has. And it is the place where each individual can decide something — not about the pain they have suffered, but about the pain they pass on.

#It is always the broken heart

If you stand at a point in your life where nothing holds any more, you will find many explanations for it: the wrong person, the wrong moment, a communication problem, a pattern from childhood. All these explanations can be accurate, and none of them is the first. The first is the plain circumstance that something has broken which was vulnerable for good reason.

Lovesickness is therefore not the childish variant of suffering, to be got over as quickly as possible. It is the form in which the basic human injury appears, for once, without disguise — before the power games, before the opinions, before the cynicism. Whoever takes it seriously is not taking themselves too seriously. They are holding open the only access there is to what really happened.

And this heart is not defective. It has been broken, which is something else entirely: it perceived correctly that something was lost that mattered to it. A heart that no longer registered this would not be healed, but hardened. The way does not lead past it but through it — and it begins on the day you stop taking the pain for a mistake.

If this pain remains although you have long since understood everything, then what you are missing is probably not one more insight but a counterpart: in a philosophical consultation the point is not to repair your broken heart, but to be able to speak it out fully for the first time.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, G. (2026). «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (It is always the broken heart) [Video]. TransitionTV / Manova, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PacfD3S-yyU. (Quotes at approx. 22:28, 51:03, 53:21, 57:29, 59:15; references 27:04, 30:00, 45:00, 01:06:23)
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). «Sinn und Sinnsuche — Ein Gespräch mit Aron Morhoff» (Meaning and the search for meaning) [Video]. Addictive Programming. (Quote at approx. 09:30; channel since deleted, transcript in the archive)
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). «Werden wir gelebt?» (Are we being lived?) – HOPE documentary interview [Video]. HOPE-Doku / apolut. https://odysee.com/@apolut:a