Do You Choose Passion OR Sanity?

Heidi K. Isern
3 min readOct 13, 2021
photo by Zach Vessels, Unsplash

I’ve been reading through my old writings, you know all the ones about passionate love and passionate love lost . They made me slightly famous, after all, back in the day.

I wrote these and poems as a single woman living in San Francisco, passionately seeking along with all of you. In the past 20 plus years of dating and relationships I’ve had my heart broken a few times as well as broken other people’s hearts. There were multiple Ones, all lost in the winds of change.

Passionate love is beautiful but can also be excruciatingly painful. There have been times where it just doesn’t seem worth the agony. The highs, the lows, the panic. The non stop doodling another’s name in the corner of our post-it note. We go mad with the euphoria and then mad again with the pain. Sometimes multiple times with the same person…

But is it all worth it? Or would a simple, passionless life be better? We’d probably all get more accomplished. And our head would be clear and focused.

A few months ago I had decided that I would need or want ever again. It became to focus elsewhere and maintain my sanity. My daughter, my career, and baking the perfect blueberry muffin were all I cared about. Then I watched this movie…

In the 2006 movie “The Mirror Has Two Faces” the handsome-but-boring Columbia Math Professor Gregory (Jeff Bridges) believes that passion has ruined his life, and marries a woman with absolutely no sex appeal, but with whom he has a strong intellectual bond. Professor Rose (played by Barbabra Streisand) is that woman. The two get along well and their relationship is sex and drama free….until Rose realizes she needs passion to survive and sacrifices everything to unleash it. The movie shows that even if a passionless life is safer, it’s not what (most) human beings need or desire.

“I believe in love and lust and sex and romance. I don’t want everything to add up to some perfect equation. I want mess and chaos. I want someone to go crazy out of his mind for me. I want to feel passion and heat and sweat and madness. I want Valentines and Cupids and all the rest of that crap. I want it all.”

Heidi K. Isern

writer. thinker. whiskey drinker. let me help you tell your story. Published here, there and elsewhere across the world. @hisern / www.heidiisern.com