Love Shouldn't Hurt

Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. 

Love makes you vulnerable to hurt. But love doesn’t hurt.

Everyone gets these things confused with love. 

Love is joy. Love is not a feeling of being happy all the time. Love is about choosing to find joy in each other and create joy for each other. Love is not inflicting pain. Pain is caused by unresolved issues that need to be worked out by you. Love is not pain so don’t mistake pain for love. 

In fact, love is the only thing in this world that can gently edge out pain, when the flicker of love takes over the space and lights up the darkness.

Sometimes, we push others away because we are afraid of getting hurt. Sometimes, we push others away because we got hurt and are now afraid of getting hurt again. Either way, being afraid of love means our trust in a person has been broken. Our trust in that person’s love has been broken. Giving someone your heart and having it returned in pieces means the relationship has been broken. Sometimes, you become so damaged that when someone comes along and wants to give you what you deserve, you have no idea how to respond. But it doesn’t mean love itself is broken. Love is pure and makes you whole.

Sometimes we push others away simply because we are mad at them. Sometimes, we push others away because we are hurting for other reasons and end up hurting them because we take our frustrations out on them like a punching bag, or take their love for granted. Sometimes, we push others away because we don’t realise that is what we are doing, not because we do not love them. 

Of course, all relationships have times where you will conflict, not see eye to eye, or butt heads. With your parents, with your brothers and sisters, with your friends, with your partners, with your kids. Of course, all couples fight. Of course, we all have our moments. But overall, your relationship should erase your tears. Not your smile. You relationships should have healthy patterns of behaviour and communication, not be toxic.

Love doesn’t hurt you. A person who doesn’t know how to love hurts you. Either they don’t know what love is or they don’t know how to do so in your love language.

In fact, some of the most poisonous people can come disguised as your friends and family, and bring you toxic relationships. Even so, Love doesn’t hurt you. Loving the wrong person for you does. Especially if they lie, cheat, or screw with your emotions, that hurts. Cheating is easy. Faithfulness, that’s more challenging. 

And just when you think it can’t get any harder, Here is where it gets a bit tricky. You don't have to cheat to lose a relationship.

You can lose someone from a lack of communication, attention or respect. It’s not all about what you do. Sometimes, it’s about what you don’t do. 

Without communication there is no real relationship. Without respect, there is no real love. Without trust, there is no real reason to continue. 

When love is real, it doesn’t lie, cheat, or pretend, make you feel unwanted, or hurt you. It will make you feel special in a ‘I don’t need the whole world to love me, just you’ kinda way.

Don’t let someone put you though hell, then call it love.

Being hurt by someone you love doesn’t mean you have to stop loving. Your value does not become less based on someone’s inability to see your worth. Because you are worth loving. Don’t give up, keep on loving when you feel ready to do so again. 

Another thing that screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it is supposed to be. Thanks to Hollywood movies dressing Desire, Lust and Sex up as love, we get confused and cannot see that love is bigger than our baser instincts.

Love is simple. Love is love, and you just know it. It speaks to your heart, with or without words. 

But it isn’t simplistic, where you can simplify it all into a standard formula. Thanks to Disney fairy tales, and “they lived happily ever after” does nothing to help us cope with the reality and complexity of real love in real life. 

Don’t get me wrong. It is always good to see things with child like wonder. it’s natural to want to experience wonderful. Imagination is a beautiful thing that can work wonders in all areas of our life if we use it to make things magical or get creative. But wishful thinking with hardly any hard work to be mindful in our relationship doesn’t work at all.  

So everyone thinks they have to be a knight in shining armour or a damsel in distress waiting for their prince charming to sweep them off their feet. Everyone expects that problems will magically work themselves out, with the help of a magic genie, magic potions or a fairy god mother swooping in to save the day with a wand, to make all our wishes come true without any effort on our part.

So we expect the people we love in our life to also be at our back and call. We act entitled to this thing we call love. We see people as our possessions to justify our jealousy. And forget we decide to have them in our lives and we should be so lucky they choose us too, but they have a choice to choose not.

We think problems will fix themselves or blame the other person for the problem, rather than figure out the root of the problem and working through the problem together. Rather than seeing love as a choice we make regardless of our temporary feelings, when the euphoric desire is gone, we think love is gone too.

So we fall head over heels in love, and don’t realise it takes a lot more than the heady rush to stay in love. So what we get is an unrealistic fantasy of what love is, rather than how love really works. Love doesn’t hurt. The wrong expectations of love do. What we need is to learn how to create our own magic, to choose to fall in love with the same person over and over again.

For any real relationship, not just a romantic one, what it takes is continuing to stay curious about the other person so we can discover new things about them and grow along with them, and show our love to them each and every day.

Love doesn’t hurt. It’s not supposed to. Because Love is an action, not a feeling. Love is a choice to do something for someone else, regardless of how we are feeling.

If it hurts, it’s hurt that turns into anger, insecurity, jealousy, judgement, selfishness, ego, pride, ignorance, contempt, spite, neglect, a cry for attention, a miscommunication or a mistake. If it hurts, it isn’t love. 

True love doesn’t hurt. True love heals.

Hate is a learned behaviour. But Love is natural.

That is how love really should feel.

It should make you feel well, not love sick.