Neil Young, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”

Once my friend Jeff told me about the time he was engaged to a girl, and they kept breaking up/making up, but at a party they had a final fight, broke up, and never spoke again. The next day Jeff’s friend told him, “Only love can break your heart, bro. Only love can break your heart.”

Actually Jeff told me the story twice, and both times it was clear that this Neil Young allusion was profound, but I confess to not having understood it. Only love can break your heart? Sure. Of course. But what does that mean?

“Only love can break your heart / Try to be sure right from the start”

So Neil is instructing you to be sure it’s love before you get serious? It’s a tautology, no?

Was it profound for Jeff because, yes, love broke his heart, and he had failed to be sure (that it would last) from the start? Dude can’t read the future. Was he indicating that he had an instinct from the start that the relationship wouldn’t work, but he allowed himself to fall in love anyway?

For the song to be meaningful in the aftermath of a relationship, we must affirm that:
(1) Only love can break your heart;
(2) Your heart is broken, so you truly possessed love for this person;
(3) Your judgment that it was a workable relationship was incorrect, which misled you into love; and
(4) If you had realized sooner that it would not work, or if you had felt something just short of love, then your heart wouldn’t have been vulnerable to breaking.

Is that it? That’s really not very helpful. WHAT THE FUCK IS NEIL YOUNG TRYING TO TELL US?

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Now, then: what if love breaks your heart, and you despair, but you do not despair for long?

The appropriate response might be gratefulness, since you have been spared what you thought would be a long period of heartache. But you are unsettled by how quickly the despair passed and find it difficult to be grateful for something you do not understand or trust.

The alternative to gratefulness is suspicion—Neil pops up to suggest, “Maybe it wasn’t love, bro.” You must at least acknowledge the possibility that you miss the person and the relationship less than you miss your feelings that had surrounded the person and the relationship, which is not something you ever believed could be true, and a possibility that brings with it a new raft of worries.