Valentine’s Day and Betrayal: Protecting Your Yearning

Valentine’s Day is a minefield when you’re dealing with infidelity and betrayal trauma. Maybe you’ve just discovered the betrayal and your dreams lie in ashes around you. Or you’ve left your relationship and are trying to build a new life. Perhaps you’re in recovery, working to repair and rebuild your relationship.

Wherever you are in this process, Valentine’s Day can feel impossible to navigate. On the surface, this makes sense—it’s a day celebrating romantic love.

But there’s something deeper at work, something that makes Valentine’s Day especially poignant when we’re dealing with betrayal.

Valentine’s Day Touches Our Yearning. 

One of our most significant attachment needs is the need to feel like we matter—to be seen, known, and loved for who we are. To feel significant. To belong. This is a primal need that drives how we operate in relationships with ourselves and others.

When we’ve been betrayed, this longing has been thwarted and attacked. The person who we thought most saw us, knew us, and accepted us turned their attention elsewhere. We feel rejected, discarded, devalued.

Betrayal attacks our most fundamental need to feel that we matter, are accepted, and are loved. It attacks our yearning—that part of us that feels our desire to be connected and held safely in the heart and mind of our lover. This attack creates disappointment, heartache, and grief.

And it can make us start to avoid our own yearning.

Our longings live alongside grief in our bodies. When we want, desire, or long for a dream to come true, we open ourselves to experiencing loss. What if we get the dream and it’s taken from us? What if we try but the dream doesn’t come? What if by allowing ourselves to yearn, we end up experiencing sadness, loss, and heartache?

Betrayed partners know this intimately. They’re watching their dreams shatter and their longings go unmet. And Valentine’s Day—a day celebrating the yearning at the heart of romantic love—can feel like salt in an open, bleeding wound.

But Here’s the Truth

 While all of this is real, Valentine’s Day in the middle of betrayal can also be a call back to yourself. A call to allow yourself to yearn again when the time is right (and it may not be right now if you’re still in the devastation phase). A reminder that your longings for belonging, significance, love, and acceptance come from a good part of you. They are your dignity reaching for sunlight after a dark, stormy night.

Betrayal can make us give up on our longings. Or worse—it can make us believe we wanted too much or asked for too much in the first place. We turn on our own yearning and squash it down, believing it’s the problem. We think if we just stop wanting, desiring, and longing, we can avoid pain, heartbreak, and loss.

This, to me, is one of the true dangers at the heart of betrayal: that the experience will rob us of our ability to dream, to yearn, and to reach for what we truly desire. Protecting this capacity is one of the most important things we must do as we heal.

You may need to move slowly to reclaim your dreams and longings. The bruising has been deep and desolating, and that’s OK. Move at the pace you need, at a pace that doesn’t overwhelm your nervous system, that carefully tends what has been lost.

But while you do this, put a protective guard around your yearning. Hold it with seriousness and gentleness. Know that this flickering flame cannot be allowed to blow out. It may not roar to full fire right now. But the flame is there within you, and when it’s time, you will fan it to life again.

Because our longing to be known, seen, and deeply loved is a good and beautiful part of us.