Love Hurts? It doesn't have to

The argument has been made that you can’t have love without hurt and pain. The opposite of love is not hurt and pain, it’s vulnerability. You can’t love without vulnerability, but vulnerability doesn’t inevitably have to become hurt. And when hurt does occur, healthy love tries to acknowledge and repair it—it doesn’t glorify it as necessary.

We live in a world where songs, movies, and entire books are dedicated to the pain of loving. We experience it in our own lives and then perpetuate it because we have come to mistake emotional intensity for depth of love. This is a falsehood. The pain associated with love is common. It is not normal.

True love is a steady love. It may lack the thrill of the pleasure-and-pain cycles that many people mistake for love, but it is no less potent. Pain can intensify attachment, making what feels like love seem more profound. The drugs of love- serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin- feel so much more effective when they are the antidote to our pain. But if you need pain to feel them, you're missing the full experience. Rollercoaster love can be intoxicating, but we must be careful not to confuse emotional intensity for love.

People often claim that things done in the name of love are a noble endeavor, but really that rational is often an excuse for justifying the pain we inflict on others. Feelings arise without permission; actions occur within commitments, consent, and responsibility. “I acted from love” cannot function as moral immunity. When pain or hurt is defended, or romanticized as love, it becomes a contradiction—not a testament to love. To borrow George Carlin’s logic: Pain in the name of “love” is like fucking for virginity.

In the wise words of Eckart Tolle “True love has no opposite. If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego’s substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation… True love has no opposite because it arises from beyond the mind. Love as a continuous state is as yet very rare — as rare as conscious human beings.”

This passage resonates with me deeply because I feel it to be true. I thought this unicorn love didn’t exist, until I was shown otherwise. My perspective is not intellectual. Its experiential.