Love is the most beautiful and most powerful feeling that ever exists for everyone and anything alive with a beating heart. It is something that happens spontaneously and naturally without knowing it will happen. Everything you see, from the time you were a child watching fairy-tale cartoons to a teenager reading about love in books or seeing romance in movies or on TV—these will tell you that love is supposed to be perfect. Growing up, we are often told that love brings eternal joy, warmth, and satisfaction… but that’s not always the case. While love is responsible for some of the most blissful moments in our lives, it can turn these moments dark in a matter of seconds. So why does love hurt so much? Though love makes us see things through rose-coloured glasses, we fail to identify at times that the feelings we have nurtured for so long aren’t healthy anymore. There are times when it can have much pain. Pain is an inevitable part of love. Love can bring immense joy, but it can also be a source of heartbreak and emotional pain, especially when a relationship ends or when there’s a lack of reciprocity.
I feel almost everyone must have gone through the agony of losing someone he/she loves and will still wish against all odds to have that love back again. But sometimes, a love lost is a love gone forever. No amount of hope can bring back to life a relationship that has gone sour for whatever reasons. As humans, we shed our tears because we have loved, and we have loved fiercely. We mourn and grieve over the voice we won’t hear again and the laughter that will no longer bubble out from our hearts. The intensity of your feelings often depends on the love we had for that person. All that you had planned, all the strings attached—everything goes away in a moment. The most painful thing is longing—yearning for someone you care about and love deeply, but you know deep inside he/she won’t come back. Your heart is torn into pieces because you cannot see or be with the person you long for or have loved immensely. Your heart is tortured by overwhelming love, and when it bursts, all the pain and suffering overflow into your soul. It feels like your life won’t matter anymore.
The feeling of being disconnected from a loved one or wanting more love and connection than you are receiving can be a source of significant emotional pain. This can manifest feelings of loneliness, isolation, and a sense of not being valued.
Sometimes, being in an unhealthy, abusive, or unfulfilling relationship can be incredibly damaging to one’s self-esteem and overall well-being. The pain of trying to make a broken relationship work, or the fear of losing yourself in the process, can be particularly intense and immense. Love is NOT about how we feel, but how well we treat the other person.
Loving someone who doesn’t love you back or who you can never be with can be a profound source of pain. Unrequited love hurts because your feelings aren’t reciprocated. The pain stems from the gap between what you feel and what’s returned, leaving you longing for something beyond your reach. The most painful thing in love is unloving someone you love immensely. It’s a weird instinct to hold on with a strange sense of hope that things will get better, and maybe one day, that one person will realize how much you love him/her. Also, the difficult thing in love is to behave normally in front of that one person you love the most. You very well know you don’t stand a chance, but still, you love him/her. It is really painful to control that urge to touch/hug that one person whom you love when he/she is in front of you. You have sincere feelings for him/her, but deep down, only you know it is something more. There is always pressure to not screw things up by doing or saying anything wrong.
Sometimes, we don’t allow ourselves the time to have love in our lives. That can be painful, particularly if there is someone who wants to bring love into our lives, but we’re too overwhelmed and overpowered by responsibilities or emotions, submerged by life’s challenges and circumstances, that we fail to notice it. Here, love hurts—because we turn it away.
Love can hurt in healthy relationships too, but the pain here is usually a result of conflicts, misunderstandings, or the fear of losing the person you care about.
Love pains when there is too much attachment/selfishness in it. Some degree of emotional attachment is, of course, essential in a committed relationship. The difference is that of the degree—how much you love, how much you are attached. That is the main question. It can sometimes be tricky, though, for people to recognize where the line between healthy and unhealthy attachment falls. The majority of people who cross this line don’t realize they have, and hence suffer deep pain when their love turns into an unhealthy attachment. Attachment in love comes from a place of selfishness. Here, everything you do for someone is actually for you in some small way, even if you just do it because you think it will make them stay with you. Attachment is like holding someone tightly. The tighter we hold on to someone, the more we will suffer, but it’s very hard for people to understand that, because they think that the more they hold on to someone, the more it shows that they care about them—but it’s not. In reality, they’re holding and grasping so tightly because they are afraid that they themselves will be hurt. True love is like holding someone very gently, nurturing, but allowing things to flow and grow, to give without expecting anything in return. Whereas attachment is a human-made feeling of possessiveness for someone, where there is always an uncontrolled pain or happiness or both.
Expectations in love can be a double-edged sword, leading to both joy and pain. While having some expectations is natural, unrealistic or uncommunicated expectations can cause disappointment and hurt. The pain of unfulfilled expectations stems from a sense of attachment and control over how a relationship should be, rather than accepting it for what it is. Unspoken expectations are one of the biggest causes of disappointment and resentment in relationships. We often assume our partners will “just know” what we need, but they may not share the same understanding of what love and support look like.
Sometimes, we feel jealous or easily get hurt when we truly love someone—probably because we feel very insecure, threatened by each little thing that shows us, based on our own insecurities, that we could lose the ones we love, or lose their love for us. Similarly, insecurity in love makes one believe that his/her partner does not perceive these aptitudes, and hence, once he/she realizes it, he/she will abandon him/her for someone “better.”
Remember, you may find love and lose it, but “WHEN LOVE DIES, YOU NEVER HAVE TO DIE WITH IT.” Remember, we all fall and make wrong decisions, but our blunders are meant not to bury us deep in misery, but to teach us the valued lessons of life. Loving is always a learning process. With love, we learn how to care and sacrifice. You don’t have to forget someone you love. What you need to learn is how to accept the verdict of reality without being bitter or sorry for yourself. You would be better off giving that dedication and love to someone more deserving.
But personally, I feel our first and last love is self-love. Your relationship with YOU sets the tone for others. Most of us are so busy waiting for someone to love us that we have forgotten about the one person we need to love first—ourselves. The most beautiful love is loving yourself, accepting yourself with all your flaws, all the negative aspects of you, your mistakes, all the wrong turns you ever took, along with all of the bad decisions you ever made, all the things you don’t really like about yourself, understanding and accepting yourself the way you are, showing compassion for the person that you are, being thankful for your body, your mind, your soul, your feelings, your emotions, your unique way of seeing the world, your way of interacting with others, and your way of being in this world. Appreciate the fact that you have a life—you have an individual personality. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love someone else. Because it’s only when we love ourselves that we feel worthy of someone else’s love.
As someone has rightly said, “Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.” It knows your address. Who it is supposed to deliver within your path will come to you unexpectedly. Be sure that your life isn’t cluttered and that your heart is ready enough to welcome it.
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