What do you do with a broken heart?
Do you stay angry?
Do you blame the person who hurt you?
Do you try to forget what happened and move on as quickly as possible?
Or do you look at the heartbreak, really look at it, and ask what it can teach you about yourself?
That question became one of the most powerful moments in my conversation with April Kirkwood.
You may recognize April from The Golden Bachelor or Bachelor in Paradise. She’s also a licensed professional counselor, author and TEDx speaker.
But long before reality television entered the picture, April’s life was shaped by a complicated relationship with one of the most recognizable voices in music.
She was 16.
Frankie Valli was 39.
Their relationship would weave in and out of April’s life for the next 30 years.
Later, she spent 21 years in another significant relationship with a man named Ralph. After his death, April found herself not only grieving him, but looking deeply at the patterns that had followed her through much of her life.
And now, in this chapter, she is asking a very different question.
Not, Why did they do this to me?
But:
What am I going to do with everything that happened?
Her answer is one I haven’t stopped thinking about.
She’s going to turn it into love.
She Was 16. He Was 39.
There is no way to tell April’s story without talking about Frankie Valli.
She was only 16 when their relationship began. He was 39, already famous as the frontman of The Four Seasons.
The relationship continued, on and off, for decades.
When you hear those ages today, it’s impossible not to recognize the enormous imbalance between a 16-year-old girl and a 39-year-old adult man.
But one of the things that made my conversation with April so interesting was her willingness to talk about her life through the lens of who she is today.
She isn’t simply recounting what happened.
She’s examining it.
She’s looking at the girl she was, the woman she became and the patterns that connected the two.
That distinction matters.
Because so often we look back at our younger selves with the wisdom we have now and wonder:
Why did I do that?
Why did I stay?
Why couldn’t I see what I can see so clearly today?
But the woman looking backward has decades of experience that the girl living through it didn’t have.
April’s story is a powerful reminder that healing isn’t about punishing our younger selves for what they didn’t know.
It’s about understanding them.
The Relationships We Choose Don’t Begin With the Relationship
One of the deeper themes in my conversation with April was how much our earliest experiences can shape what we later accept as love.
We don’t arrive in adulthood as blank slates.
We bring our childhoods with us.
We bring our ideas about love, security, abandonment, worthiness and belonging.
We bring the things we saw modeled for us and the things we desperately wanted but didn’t receive.
And sometimes those experiences show up in our romantic relationships decades later.
That doesn’t mean we are doomed to repeat our past forever.
But we can’t change a pattern we refuse to see.
April has spent a great deal of time trying to understand hers.
As a therapist, she has the professional language for trauma, codependency and relationship patterns.
As a woman, she has lived them.
And I think that’s what makes her perspective so interesting.
Knowledge doesn’t necessarily exempt us from pain.
Being able to identify a pattern doesn’t automatically mean we won’t fall into it.
Sometimes we understand something intellectually long before we’re ready to change it emotionally.
Then Came Another Long Love
After Frankie, April eventually entered another significant relationship.
Ralph would be part of her life for 21 years.
April loved him deeply.
But when she talks about that relationship now, she also recognizes echoes of patterns she had experienced before.
That is difficult work.
It’s much easier to put every relationship into a simple category.
Good.
Bad.
Love.
Mistake.
Right person.
Wrong person.
April doesn’t do that.
She can acknowledge that she loved these men while also examining how the relationships affected her.
She can hold love and disappointment at the same time.
She can recognize the good without pretending the painful parts didn’t exist.
That’s an incredibly important distinction, especially as we get older.
Sometimes maturity isn’t finally having a perfectly clean answer about the past.
Sometimes it’s accepting that two things can be true at once.
You loved someone.
And the relationship hurt you.
You experienced beautiful moments.
And you deserved more in other moments.
You can miss someone.
And still recognize that the relationship wasn’t always healthy for you.
Life is complicated.
Love can be too.
Grieving the Person and the Relationship
When Ralph died, April faced another layer of grief.
She wasn’t only mourning the death of someone she had loved for more than two decades.
She also had to process the relationship itself.
That’s a kind of grief we don’t talk about enough.
Loss can force us to revisit everything.
What was beautiful?
What hurt?
What did I accept?
What did I need?
What did I never say?
What did I wish had been different?
And, perhaps hardest of all:
Who am I without this relationship?
For women who have spent decades defining themselves in connection to other people, that last question can be enormous.
Wife.
Partner.
Mother.
Daughter.
Caregiver.
Employee.
Friend.
So much of a woman’s identity can become attached to what she means to everyone else.
Then something changes.
A relationship ends.
A spouse dies.
The children leave home.
A career ends.
And suddenly there’s space where a role used to be.
That space can feel terrifying.
It can also become the place where you finally meet yourself.
“What Are You Going to Do With Your Broken Heart?”
There was a moment in our interview when April said something that stopped me.
She talked about loving Frankie.
She talked about loving Ralph.
And then she asked:
“What are you gonna do with your broken heart?”
That’s the question.
Because eventually, the story stops being about what someone else did.
That doesn’t erase responsibility.
It doesn’t excuse behavior.
And it certainly doesn’t mean pretending something didn’t hurt.
It means recognizing that there comes a point when the next decision belongs to us.
April described sitting with the pain and going through what she calls the “dark night of the soul.”
She asks herself difficult questions.
Where was I too big?
Where was I too small?
Where didn’t the key fit?
And then she remembers something:
“This is my dream. This is my life.”
Those words are so simple, but think about what they mean.
This is your life.
Not your parents’ life.
Not your partner’s life.
Not your children’s life.
Not the life society decided you should want.
Yours.
You Don’t Have to Turn Pain Into Bitterness
April could tell her story entirely through anger.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she talks about taking what happened and turning it into love.
I don’t hear that as pretending everything was wonderful.
I hear it as refusing to let painful experiences have the final word.
There’s a big difference.
We don’t get to rewrite what happened to us.
We do get some say in what happens next.
That’s true whether the heartbreak came from a romantic relationship, a friendship, a family member, a career, a loss or simply a life that didn’t unfold the way we imagined it would.
At some point, we have to decide what we’re going to do with it.
Will it make us smaller?
Will it make us afraid to trust again?
Will we carry anger into every new relationship?
Or can we eventually take what we’ve learned and use it to know ourselves better?
That doesn’t happen overnight.
April certainly doesn’t suggest that it does.
You have to go through the pain.
But going through pain is different from building a home there.
Being a Therapist Doesn’t Mean Having It All Figured Out
One of the things I appreciated about April is that she doesn’t present herself as the therapist who has solved every problem in her own life.
Quite the opposite.
She’s still doing the work.
I think that’s refreshing.
There can be a misconception that people who work in psychology, therapy, coaching or personal development somehow become immune to the very struggles they help others navigate.
They’re not.
We’re all human.
We can give someone else excellent advice and still struggle to apply it to ourselves.
We can understand boundaries and still have difficulty setting them with someone we love.
We can recognize codependency and still find ourselves falling into familiar patterns.
We can know intellectually that we’re worthy and still seek validation from someone else.
Growth isn’t knowing all the answers.
Sometimes growth is finally becoming willing to ask yourself better questions.
What Does It Mean to Choose Yourself?
“Choose yourself” has become one of those phrases we hear everywhere.
But what does it actually mean?
It doesn’t have to mean leaving your marriage, quitting your job or cutting everyone out of your life.
Sometimes choosing yourself is much quieter.
It’s paying attention when something doesn’t feel right.
It’s setting a boundary even though you’re afraid someone won’t like it.
It’s admitting that what worked for you 10 years ago doesn’t work anymore.
It’s allowing yourself to want something different.
It’s understanding that love doesn’t require disappearing inside another person’s life.
And sometimes it’s looking back at the choices you’ve made without hating the woman who made them.
That may be one of the hardest forms of self-love.
We are often far more compassionate toward other people than we are toward ourselves.
We can understand why a friend stayed.
We can see why our daughter didn’t recognize the red flags.
We can empathize with someone else’s loneliness, fear or hope.
Then we look at our own past and say:
How could I have been so stupid?
What if instead we asked:
What was I looking for?
What did I need?
What did I believe about myself then?
And:
What do I believe now?
Those questions lead somewhere very different.
Life After 50 Gives Us a Different Perspective
This is one of the reasons I love having these conversations on Living Ageless & Bold.
By the time we reach our 50s, 60s and beyond, most of us have enough life behind us to see patterns.
We know which decisions changed everything.
We know which relationships shaped us.
We know where we compromised too much.
We know the dreams we abandoned.
We also know we’re still here.
There is enormous power in that.
Getting older gives us something our younger selves couldn’t possibly have had: perspective.
We can look backward and connect dots.
But the goal isn’t to spend the rest of our lives staring backward.
The point is to use what we know now to decide what comes next.
April has had an extraordinary life.
There is celebrity in her story.
There is reality television.
There are relationships that will immediately make people curious.
But those aren’t the reasons I think her story matters.
It matters because underneath all of that is a woman trying to understand herself.
And that’s something many of us recognize.
Your Broken Heart Isn’t the End of Your Story
Maybe you’ve never dated a celebrity.
Maybe you’ve never appeared on The Golden Bachelor.
Maybe your life looks nothing like April Kirkwood’s.
But you’ve probably had your heart broken.
You’ve probably loved someone who disappointed you.
You’ve probably stayed somewhere longer than you should have.
You’ve probably looked back at a younger version of yourself and wished you could tell her what you know now.
The question isn’t whether we can go back and change any of it.
We can’t.
The question is what we’re going to do with it now.
April’s answer is love.
Not denial.
Not pretending.
Not skipping the painful part.
She says she’ll sit with it. Go through the pain. Ask herself the hard questions.
Then she’ll remember:
This is my dream. This is my life.
And she’ll decide what she wants to make of it.
Maybe that’s the real lesson here.
Our heartbreaks can become part of our stories without becoming the definition of our lives.
Our past relationships can teach us without controlling our future ones.
And the things that happened to us can shape us without owning us.
At any age, we can decide that the next chapter will be different.
We can choose better boundaries.
We can choose self-respect.
We can choose forgiveness when we’re ready.
We can choose ourselves.
And perhaps most importantly, we can choose to believe that there is still more love ahead, including the love we finally learn to give ourselves.
Watch her full episode here:
Listen to my full conversation with April Kirkwood on Living Ageless & Bold wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know a woman who has ever wondered what to do with a broken heart, share this episode with her. This may be exactly the conversation she needs to hear.
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