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That love hurts is one of the assumptions no one likes but we all take for granted. But why does love hurt? Why is the one thing that, poetically speaking, has the power to transcend time and space causing so much pain?
Because it’s not love we are speaking about, it’s attachment.
Some people will probably hate what I write here and let me tell you I was not a fan of this either. It took me a while to truly come to terms with it. What we habitually describe as love is not love at all because if it hurts it stops being love and turns into something else.
Part of the problem is that we’re brought up with the belief that love hurts and that sooner or later everyone you love will hurt you. But it isn’t love that hurts, it’s our attachment to the object of our love.
Let’s look at this closely. Surely, at some point in time, you’ve been in love with someone. And if that person really has fit your shopping list, you might’ve even fallen madly in love with that someone.
Now, how did that feel? Was it a calm and peaceful state of gratitude? Probably not.
Most definitely, it was a strong cocktail of desire and anxiety. Desire to own this person, to make it yours, and the accompanying anxiety about losing this person. And this, most of the time, leads to nasty behavior in the form of trying to control the other person.
Add to this all kinds of paranoid suspicions about your partner and you got yourself a real mess on your hands.
Let me ask you, do you really believe that love should look like the emotional drama most of us are entrenched in with the people we apparently care so much about?
Why Love Hurts
Let’s begin with some simple observations.
Love, as most of us understand it, is affection. Affection always involves another as the object of your affection, whether it is a person, an animal, or a car. Therefore, affection, by definition, cannot be impersonal.
Now, affection is an appearance in consciousness, meaning affection is something we can observe not something we are. Every appearance in consciousness doesn’t just come as one whole concept. For every concept, there is an opposite concept that also manifests as an appearance in consciousness.
Love, or as we have called it affection, obviously has such an opposite as well. Commonly, it’s called hate. But because we have already deviated from the term love, we might call it unaffection or, to choose a less clumsy word, rejection.
For every appearance that manifests, its polar opposite will eventually manifest as well. I doubt that there is any person that has experienced hot but hasn’t experienced cold. Likewise, if you have experienced affection, you have experienced rejection.
When we say ‘love hurts,’ what we are actually talking about is affection having turned to rejection. Consequently, love, as most of us understand it, is actually not just affection but affection-rejection. And when we experience the painful aspect of love we have simply ventured more into the rejection part of the pair of opposites.
The Pain of Love in Action
We tend to romanticize the painful aspect of love, but we have to know that this kind of love aka attachment is a source of individual and collective suffering. This kind of love has been endlessly depicted in novels, plays, and movies. Just pick your favorite romcom and then see this all playing out.
But we don’t need novels, plays, and movies to make our point. All we need to make our point is to look at our own lives.
You’ve most likely been in love with someone and most likely this being in love has led to a lot of pain. Whether you’ve been the ‘bad’ or ‘good’ person in the relationship doesn’t matter because both parties suffer no matter what they did or did not do.
The unfortunate thing is that many of us settle for this kind of romantic relationship. We keep having the same relationships no matter how often we change partners.
Our partners behave in the same way. We react in the same ways. We make commands. They make counter-commands. We offer this so that they can give us that. And with all this complexity eventually the inevitable happens — this convoluted space of non-acceptance self-destructs and the relationship ends.
And instead of asking ourselves what the heck is going on here, we usually conclude that this wasn’t the right person. You’re right. This wasn’t the right person. But that doesn’t mean that the next person is going to be the right person. It also doesn’t mean that the next person is going to be the wrong person.
What if rightness and wrongness don’t lie in the other person but in our perception? Breaking out of this cycle of repetitive unfulfilling and potentially abusive relationships is not an easy task if we’re unwilling to look inside. The first step is always to stop. The next step is to acknowledge that maybe we actually have no clue what is going on here.
We decide that it’s time to break out of this cycle. Then we might go to the web and ask, ‘Why does love hurt?’ (good to have you).
What Love is Not
Here I don’t want to get into nitpicking about what the right definition of love is. By all means, define love the way you want. If you want to call desire and craving and attraction love, have fun with it. If you want to call love a hippopotamus and ride around on it in the African savannah, awesome. But the love that is not affection is not something you can discover through the conditioned human mind.
Love is not dependency, idolization, sentimentality, craving, or physical attraction. You’ve probably had relationships with all these attributes, so you know how fragile a relationship based on these is.
You might have also been in a position where you had a painful craving for someone — an ex-partner, a crush, or someone you’ve idolized from far away. Your next assumption was that you love this someone so much it hurts. Can you see that in that moment you didn’t love that person? In fact, in that state of yearning, it was more like you were keeping love away.
Craving is not based on actual qualities of another person but on an idealized image in your mind. You’re not craving that person; you’re craving a fantasy. That fantasy is based on something you feel like you’re lacking in that moment, perhaps strength, security, confidence, or affection. When you truly see this, you’ll be surprised to see how the image of this ‘ideal’ person has changed. He or she hasn’t changed though, you have.
Most of our relationships are usually based on demands whether obvious and stated or subtle and unstated. Such love is merely a bargain and can never result in a fulfilling relationship.
Why Love is Not Love
If you truly loved someone wouldn’t you want this someone to be free, happy, and fulfilled? If you truly love someone wouldn’t you accept this someone to be the way he or she is without trying to change him or her?
The problem is that we don’t see the person how he or she really is. We have an image of that person in mind and we fall in love or rather become attached to that image. So when that person suddenly acts out of character, our so-called love quickly flies out the window.
No matter how much we claim we love someone, we usually try to change them. We try to change the people around us so they match the images we have created in our minds.
But the problem is we don’t like to be changed by others. So, obviously, we resist the changing forces. After all, why should anyone have the right to tell us what’s wrong with us?
And although we all know that we don’t like our loved ones getting on our case, we do the same thing to others. We are unable to accept them for who they are, so we walk around like, “I love you so much, but if you don’t change into the image I have created about you, I will punish myself with negative emotions.”
Unconditional love is often being thrown around as a spiritual buzzword, but let’s be honest, who really knows what unconditionally means? Unconditional love is perhaps the most radical thing there is. It’s the sun shining down on beggars, murderers, and saints alike.
What Love is
Genuine love isn’t based on emotion. Genuine love begins with clear awareness — a deep understanding of yourself and the other person, which is really the same thing. If you understand yourself, you understand other people.
Emotions that arise from a deep understanding are natural and easy. These emotions are not compulsive, possessive, or fear-based.
The following is often hard for people to grasp because of all the deeply entrenched ideas and emotional attachments that keep us from seeing things clearly. Genuine love is personal, yet unattached. This can sometimes appear cold and blunt and even the opposite of what most of us consider love to be. But beneath the surface, it is warm and understanding and compassionate.
Love can be as gentle and tender as a mother caring for her child, but it can also be surgical and focused like a doctor who hurts you when he relocates your dislocated kneecap (I guess love can hurt after all).
Love is willing to hold anyone gently in one moment and then let them go in the next moment without looking back. Love is not wishy-washy spiritual nonsense. It’s a state of understanding. Therefore, a lack of love is simply a lack of understanding.
When the understanding takes hold of you, you’ll see that relationships can’t give you anything nor take anything away. Often, relationships are just a way to fill the void at the center of our being. But when you’ve recognized yourself as that void, then what is there to fill?
This doesn’t mean that you should avoid relationships. By all means, love as deeply and recklessly as you can but don’t neglect to sharpen your sword of discernment. Actually, a relationship can be a wonderful aid in this because it makes you aware of all the little ways you crave, demand, possess, and fear. It makes you aware that you can’t love in unawareness.
Genuine love is not human love at all. Sure, human love (affection-rejection) is an appearance in genuine love but human love is at best a pleasurable emotional state and at worst a state of deep suffering.
In the end, love is just another word for consciousness-awareness. Love is unconditional acceptance of what is. So, it’s best not to fall into the trap of thinking of love in human terms. Love is not something you possess; love possesses you (as much as there is a you to be possessed, which is not much).
The Way to True Love
All the ideas here might not be new to you and theoretically speaking you might even understand all this. But if you understand it (at least theoretically) why is it not your living reality, you wonder? Good question, and something worth pondering.
Often, I’ve heard people talk about this subject with a witty intellect and come up with all kinds of intelligent reasoning to disprove the existence of this kind of love (which really is the only kind). But this is exactly what is in the way of the brainy folks — their big ass brains. This doesn’t mean that the brain is not needed on the way to true love, it is, but that the brain needs to be used in the right way.
If you use your brain to create concepts (like unconditional love) and then try to chase after those concepts you’ll have a difficult time. Of course, you’ll conclude that it’s not there. And you’re right, it isn’t. You’ve been chasing after a fantasy.
So, for the first step, simply assume you know nothing about love. Only then are you in a position to discover something new. How could you discover something new when you think you already know what this new looks like? That’s not new, that’s repackaging your beliefs and trying to turn them into something they can never be.
It’s important to know that you can’t act as if you love more than you love. You can try to be exterior loving as much as you like but if you don’t develop understanding, you’ll not know true love.
As long as we make our emotional state dependent on the one we love we can never really love them. And as long as we outsource our emotional state to another person, love will hurt.
See it from this perspective. Don’t you think it’s quite unfair, to make the person you love and for whom you want all the best responsible for how you feel?
Just imagine what your relationship would be like if both of you were to accept each other the way you are. Like truly accept, with all the flaws and deviances from the mental representation of the person.
In the end, we’re not even speaking solely about romantic love because that’s one of the many tendrils of love. We’re speaking of something that can’t be spoken of, a kind of underlying field of affection (without an opposite) to all there is.
It’s falling in love with yourself, not in a narcissistic way but in an I-am-is-all-there-is way. When you know yourself to be awareness* and everything else simply an appearance in awareness — aka also awareness — then you’ll taste the love beyond love.
*This doesn’t mean that you are literally a thing called awareness you can know. It’s merely a clumsy way of describing that something that is.
Love is Invisible
I know, it’s quite presumptuous to claim that most humans don’t know true love, but that’s just how it is. It’s not that we’ve never experienced love but that we don’t notice it when it’s staring at us. Most of us live our lives from a place of ideas and concepts, so anything that is not an idea or concept or that we haven’t yet turned into an idea or concept will be like air — invisible.
Granted, everyone has the freedom to define love the way they want, so perhaps I’m the fool here to claim that love is painless and has no preferences. But I also maintain that this love is available to you. It all begins with bringing awareness to all the ways you have conditioned love.
Bring awareness to all the intolerances you have for others. Bring awareness to all your attempts at trying to change someone (including yourself). Bring awareness to all the emotions that are triggered when someone acts differently from how you want them to act.
Don’t try to accept more. Don’t try to convince yourself to be more loving. All of that is simply another form of rejection. Observe how attachment to your mental stories makes you unable to see and accept the human who is right in front of you.
Observation leads to understanding, and understanding leads to love.
The more you dispassionately observe your emotions and reactions the more you will start to understand why love hurts and that the love that hurts is not the real deal. We might say that human love is derived from fear while love isn’t derived from anything and has no opposite — even fear is being held by this love.
True love can’t be objectified because it’s not different from what you are. Therefore, true love is nothing but self-love.
Luka
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Where is the love button for this essay?! 😍
Jazakallah. I completely understand and resonate with the idea that love, as we commonly understand it, is often rooted in attachment and the desire to control. True love, as described here, seems to be about unconditional acceptance and understanding, which can be a profound and transformative way to relate to others and oneself. It’s a beautiful perspective on love. ❤️