“The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief- but the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” -Hilary Stanton Zunin
To dare to love is the greatest gamble of the heart. As to live without love is to make your own world colder and to love is to gamble with your own heart. And the pain of a broken heart is, for a lot of us, the most suffocating experience to cope with in our lives. Does it sound overly romanticized? Do you find the cynic inside you rolling its eyes, ‘Ugh-ing’ at this kind of stuff? “Just get over it and move on!”, you might find yourself saying.
But what if I told you that heartbreak isn’t just a pretty metaphor but an actual medical condition.
In Denmark a study led by Dr Simon Graff of Aurhus University, conducted from 1995 to 2014, revealed that heart break is actually a very real thing. The study focused on multiple criteria conducted over several control groups in an attempt to discover a link between partner bereavement and atrial fibrillation.
The results were quite interesting, to say the least.
The chance of developing irregular heartbeat was found to be 41% higher among those who had suffered the loss of a partner or a loved one and the likelihood of it was twice as high among those below the age of 60. The chances were found to be 57% higher if the loss was unexpected.
However what really cemented their findings was that the frequency of atrial fibrillation was discovered to be the highest 8-14 days after heartbreak, slowly declining over the period of a year before reaching the same level as a non-bereaved population.
So the next time someones accuses you of being too sentimental, you can link them to this study and tell them to STFU and GTFO.