Having a broken heart from someone you weren’t serious with is exceedingly possible.

It happens after a while of obsessive behavior in relation to this person, and constant daydreaming and nightly dreams about them.

You are thinking about this person as you do your activities during the day.

When you go to bed at night you have dreams about this person from time to time.

You check them out constantly on social media.

What photos have they posted?

What topics are they talking about?

Who are they talking to?

Slowly, this progresses into your daily routine.

After a while, it feels like you are already dating this person because you feel like you know them.

You keep relating to this person through what you hear or see about them.

At this stage, your brain creates fantasies about this person.

You and this person are together doing something in these fantasies and the fantasies are increasingly vivid as time goes on.

Eventually, you develop legitimate feelings for this person.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what isn’t when it is deluged with sensory overload.

A person who is constantly in your thoughts from day to day, deceives your brain into interpreting those thoughts as memory.

There are three major parts of the brain that consolidate and store memory.

The prefrontal cortex consolidates short term memory.

The hippocampus consolidates short term memories into long term memories.

The cerebral cortex stores the consolidated long term memory.

Remember that the brain doesn’t separate what is real and what isn’t.

This is why our dreams are so vivid.

When you constantly have images of this person in your head over a sustained period of time, the brain attaches meaning to those images, initially consolidating them in your prefrontal cortex as short term memory.

When these images persist, they move on into your hippocampus as a long term memory and then are ultimately stored in your cerebral cortex.

As far as your brain is concerned, these images are real, even though they are fantasies that you have created in your mind from day to day.

Once those images become real in your brain, feelings become a lot easier to experience due to them.

It’s like the feeling you get when you think about an actual memory that was real.

It is a memory of a time you spent with a friend or a place you visited in the past.

That memory comes up in your head and it elicits a feeling.

When it is a good memory, you smile and feel good.

When it is a bad memory, you frown or are unhappy.

This is the same sensory connection that you have with this person that you weren’t serious with.

Those thoughts about this person have been so consistent in your brain that your brain doesn’t separate what’s real and what isn’t.

You now have feelings for this person and these feelings open you up to having a broken heart.