Dr. Hook - Better Love Next Time (The Broken Heart Video) HD

A broken heart (or heartbreak) is a common metaphor used to describe the intense emotional pain or suffering one feels after losing a loved one, whether through death, divorce, breakup, physical separation, or romantic rejection.

Heartbreak is usually associated with losing a family member or spouse, though losing a parent, child, pet, lover or close friend can all "break one's heart", and it is frequently experienced during grief and bereavement. The phrase refers to the physical pain one may feel in the chest as a result of the loss, although it also by extension includes the emotional trauma of loss even where it is not experienced as somatic pain. Although "heartbreak" ordinarily does not imply any physical defect in the heart, there is a condition known as "broken heart syndrome" or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, where a traumatising incident triggers the brain to distribute chemicals that weaken heart tissue.

For many people having a broken heart is something that may not be recognized at first, as it takes time for an emotional or physical loss to be fully acknowledged. As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson states: Human beings are not always aware of what they are feeling. Like animals, they may not be able to put their feelings into words. This does not mean they have no feelings. Sigmund Freud once speculated that a man could be in love with a woman for six years and not know it until many years later. Such a man, with all the goodwill in the world, could not have verbalized what he did not know. He had the feelings, but he did not know about them. It may sound like a paradox — paradoxical because when we think of a feeling, we think of something that we are consciously aware of feeling. As Freud put it in his 1915 article The Unconscious: "It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it. Yet it is beyond question that we can 'know' feelings that we do not know about.