In a current plotline:
Girl 1 and boy date.
They break up.
On break-up, boy has sex with girl 2.
Boy and girl then get back together.
Girl 2, it turns out, is pregnant.
It all comes out.
Girl 1 is devastated.
Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy.
Yet girl 1 is now doubtful about wanting to date boy.
The relationship is on offer. All aspects of it are on offer. He is on offer.
But it is ruined literally because of one physical act he performed with someone else.
Perfectly normal to be devastated?
Most of the world would agree.
Yet this is wholly insane.
What has happened?
Nothing has happened.
Is the substance of the relationship touched?
No.
Why is she devastated?
Because she is not interested in a relationship: she is interested in the abstract principle of fidelity, which, if someone performs it, has significance for her. Her drug is fidelity, and he is her dealer. She's interested in the drug, not the dealer. She's upset with the dealer only because he can no longer offer him the drug. She can have him, but she doesn't want him.
She is effectively using him to construct the non-existent, entirely abstract palace of fidelity, which is her safe home. Without that, she is destroyed. She is literally dependent on an abstract construct for her identity, value, purpose, and survival, and, because he has not performed the requisite faithful actions, she now cannot live in the palace of fidelity, and the foundation of her life has been destroyed.
She does not want a relationship with a human being: she wants her palace. The relationship is the price she is paying for the palace.
This is the insanity of attachment.
Which of us has not been upset at some similar fictitious palace? Popularity, 'love', success, achievement, accomplishment, safety, security: every abstract commodity is as insane and deadly as a material one. The dependencies on such false idols are as pernicious and psychotic as alcoholism, drug addiction, and other more conventional deadly pursuits.
What is heartache? No different than heroin withdrawal.
The false idol is hollow.
The crystal glass contains turnip juice.
The lacquered box contains a dead spider.
The bell has no clapper.
The casino is made of ticky-tacky.
There is nothing there: nothing, nothing, nothing.
Vanitas, vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
But there is a so-called 'full and rich life' propping up all of these abstract nothingness-es.
So much effort goes into spinning the plates that the pointlessness of plate spinning is never discerned.
What are tears? The sign that an idol has fallen.
If you're crying, good: there's hope.
Don't put a sticking plaster on this one.
Don't drug yourself up so you don't feel it.
Don't therapise and spiritualise yourself so you can continue to act it out in a attenuated form.
Feel it. Feel what attachments are doing to you.
And become so disgusted that you are finally, finally willing to drop all of them.