Dear Economist,

All your advice about finding the right person sounds very upbeat. But sometimes things just don’t work out. More often than not, you happen to love a person that doesn’t love you back. Then what?  – I have been wallowing in heartache for a week now and am quite fed up. I have even written a song for my lost love! What can I do?

Yours sincerely, Morris

Dear Morris,

You are absolutely right – until we find the right person, chances are that we go through more than one phase of heartache. We’ve been there.

The good news is – you can make this phase very productive for you! Sounds hard to believe, and in order to explain, I will leave the territory of economics, and enter that of psychology. (But as the psychologists entered our territory, and got a Nobel Prize there to boot, I have no qualms whatsoever.)

The secret is called ‘ego-defenses’. Ego-defenses help us cope with reality when the going gets tough. Anna Freud identified more than twenty defenses. Not all of which are healthy. The unhealthy ones include psychoses (think paranoia), and immature defenses (e.g. projecting one’s feelings into another person). Neurotic defenses, such as intellectualizing the problem (only thinking about it in logical terms) or simply repressing it, are actually quite common in ‘normal’ people. The winner are the ‘mature’ defenses. This is what you want. Mature defenses include: humor – laughing about it, anticipation – planning ahead to deal with future problems.

And the queen of them all: SUBLIMATION, i.e. turning the strong feeling such as sadness or anger into a productive activity. If you are angry, run or go boxing. If you are sad…write a song! Quite right. You are exactly on the right track. Write a song, a poem, or…an entire novel! Some of history’s greatest poets and composers had a string of unlucky loves which they turned into remarkable creativity – think Beethoven, Tchaikovsky or Droste. Even Picasso, not exactly unlucky in love, is said to have used painting “to wipe heavy dust off the soul”.

And the best thing is, ego defenses help you both cope with the current sadness and prepare you for success in the future: the recently revealed 70-year longitudinal GRANT study found out that acquiring mature ego-defenses is the best preparation to form happy relationships.

So savor your melancholic creativity as long as it lasts! It’s good for you.

Best wishes

Dr de Bergerac