Experience is the best teacher, and there's no debate about that. In love, one has to skulk through the gallows and be beheaded to understand loss, and how to be a proper lover. Some of us learn lessons quicker than others, and many people do not learn much. 

At 26, I've loved and lost many people in my life. I'm fortunate that way, because I've had the chance to be close to a lot of amazing people, and to learn a lot of harsh lessons. I've been cheated on, I've cheated, I've felt the desperation of another and I've been the desperate. I've spent nights holding someone I no longer loved while they cried in my arms, and I've been in their sad shoes too.

I've laughed and cried with lovers and ex-lovers, I've left people at the proverbial altar, and been left at the proverbial altar as well. I've been the one that couldn't let go, and let go of people too easily. Love and loss never get easier, if anything, they seem to be getting harder.

The loneliness grows, it does not rest. I could keep crawling in and out of beds like I used to, but that man is gone. That doesn't fill me up like it used, or like I thought it used to. Neil Gaiman is right about kisses and sex giving a piece of your heart to your partner, and one only has so much heart to give. For someone that loves intensely and with passion, this has always been a fact of warning for me.

At some point the jaded  feeling grows to dangerous levels, and loneliness is cancerous in your mind. What is the great seperator of lovers? How much did they all mean, and how do they compare? They do not compare, because every love is different. Some love dies early after the break-up – if these things can ever be said to die fully – and some smoulder in your heart for years – and maybe for life, although I'm far too young to say.

The pain lessens with time, but that is probably from one's pain tolerance growing as opposed to the pain itself lessening. Or maybe we do stop caring as much, but there is no way to gauge it. Either way the point remains the same: the pain lessens with time. Loneliness has a way of fanning the flames of past lovers in your sad heart, but that's the game of life. Humans are conflict-machines, and even our own heart tries to promote conflicts within us it seems.

The key is lessening conflict. Zen. Trying to live a more peaceful existence is not easy, nor always tolerable. Anger is a very righteous feeling, the primitive push for violence and war can be as strong as sexual desire. Anger does not solve problems. Anger eats love, and does nothing to combat loneliness, sadness or the pain of lovers lost. 

At the end of the day, you can be angry you lost someone, or that they don't appreciate you anymore, but that won't help you sleep away those lonely nights or get your mind right. If anything, anger will corrupt you, and make you toxic. Anger is a cycle that does not end, unless you force it to. The only thing anger understands is a violent, screeching halt, and that is exactly how it must be finished.